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Not really sure why you're getting downvoted. I agree to some extent. I've always had a love-hate thing for Mr. Nielsen. I've come to terms with him in the regards of treating his philosophies as baseline rules. Kind of like overriding laws in the real world we are recommended to abide by. But as in real life, rules are meant to be broken when it makes sense, such as not crossing a street when you have a don't walk sign. That would be a law. But when you don't see a car for miles around, it just doesn't make sense to abide this law. Jakob spells out these simple laws, but there will always be occasions where you say, well in this instance, it doesn't make sense, because of so-and-so. And that's where it will make sense to get creative and deviate.

A great Mixergy interview with Shai Reshef not just but two weeks ago.

http://mixergy.com/shai-reshef/

I'm deeply saddend that he will be leaving Apple in the near future, according to rumors, but if it's to pursue greater causes such as this, then I'm excited to see what he'll do next.

I saw this subject mentioned in Dan Ariely's Ted Talks. Here's his specific blog post about the subject. It would clearly work.

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235

Same site. Same article. More depth. From one year ago. Must be a slow news day for the Business Insider.

http://www.businessinsider.com/can-4chan-turn-300-million-pa...

Even has the same picture!

There's actually quite a good number many more than the site you mentioned. I put them in two basic categories.

1) Overly complex - you arrive at the site and you have a thousand options and don't know what the heck to do. They offer these options hoping to match you to the things you care about, but there's no motivation to sift through it all or click through a system of menus or search results. Examples: change.org, current.com, takepart.com

2) Too basic to expand impact - the barrier to entry is incredibly low so they can have quick impact, but they are hyper-focused and offer no other options than the cause they are working towards. Examples: freerice.com, kiva.org, charitywater.org

I will never fault the motivations of any of these sites, and any new entrant to this arena should be given the benefit of the doubt. I'm very interested considering the impact he and the designer had on Obama's campaign, and think that he could someone find that middle ground between those two categories I described.

I used to be a huge jazz fan. I discovered it around my senior year in high school and just started eating it all up. While other cars were blaring rap music and Guns and Roses, I would be playing John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington.

So I can speak from personal perspective on how I lost interest and give my 2 cents on why it's lost popularity. It's actually pretty simple. There's just nothing new. No innovation. That's it. I enjoy the melodies when I hear them and there are appropriate times when I will put it on, but it is what it is and nothing more these days.

I would actually say that yes, Yelp converts very well for small businesses.

Recently, when I was looking for a printing shop to print my wedding invitations, I was very highly intent on giving someone my business. Out of the 4 printers I researched on Yelp, I picked one and paid for that company's services.

Generally, people browsing Yelp have a very specific goal. They're searching for a business to use and ready to choose and pay.

So does this make it 3 companies so far filing suit? If I do the math (well, do I really need to?), if this were a regular business practice Yelp was involved in, wouldn't you think that there would be wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more businesses chiming in? I actually can't fathom the number of businesses there are in their database. Couldn't even venture a guess.

Even if what these businesses are saying is true, I would regard them as extremely isolated incidents that could have been done by individuals within the company with a vendetta. But again, I would more likely consider the chain of events coincedences.

I'll need to see way more companies accusing Yelp of this before I would even consider Yelp at any fault.

She could also have given him her boyfriend's email address, which would not have been too much harder than making a phone call. Numbers are harder to remember because it's a string of numbers. Email addresses are easier since the letters form actual words and names.

Every user will not see the exact same color, however, every user will see approximately the same relativity and contrast to the color spectrum on their monitor.

Even in real life, our eyes are not calibrated the same. It is the contrast and relativity that makes things stand out and fade away.

Yes. The singularity is near. Resistance is futile. We are the borg.

I have a similar proof that doesn't quite take so long to explain.

1 + 1 = 1

One number plus one number becomes one number.

Is there a website that keeps track of a company's "social" rating, somehow keeping track of all of the positive things they've done for the environment, healthcare, natural disasters and such, while also giving demerits for negative acts?

If not, then I think this would be a fantastic product to create, and given enough popularity, something that could potentially keep companies in check in the public view.

Currently, the model seems to be what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. For example, Firefox, regardless of all the goodwill they built up the past decade, seemed to be ripped to shreds by some people for one single act of utilizing a company's design without permission.

This would go beyond that to show people the bigger picture of how a company is doing on an overall social level.

Do you see a trend of logos becoming less important to a company's success in the past decade, as focus turns online and brand becomes more of a conversation? Consider the logos of Google, Facebook, eBay. Look at that completely generic Y up in the left corner. Is the TechCrunch logo lighting your world on fire? Ustream's? YouTube? I dare you to tell me that YouTube logo is a shining example of design success. They can hardly even make a favicon of it.

I'm not saying that a logo has no importance, but as the lipstick and makeup of brands becomes more transparent and users are intent on knowing companies on a deeper level, I do see the traditional sense of brand styleguides diminishing, and while sites like CraigsList and reddit and TripAdvisor and OpenTable are finding phenomenal success despite amateur logos, I begin to question their importance more and more.

Honestly, I wish this is how it was from the very beginning (minus the huge cost of entry).

If you think about it, what really was the point of .com, .net, .org etc... Does it really make sense that you can have both twitter.com and twitter.net? In both cases, you recognize "twitter" as the name, with .com and .net as fodder. And considering that twitter does not own twitter.net shows how meaningless that .net domain is.

So you currently have twitter.com/yourname, when it could be just yourname.twitter. Or yourname.facebook. And instead of yourname@gmail.com, it would just be yourname@gmail. blahblah@hotmail. whosit@yahoo. mikeymike@doodad. stevejobs@apple. pg@yc.

Furthermore, the ".com" has always been a blemish to branding. You have this beautiful simple brand name (Nike, Apple, Cisco) but then you have to advertise the url (nike.com, apple.com, cisco.com), both decapping your name and sticking the .com on the end.

I know this whole .com, .net, .org, .ly has been ingrained into our structure and psyche, but just consider the above to see how much simpler it could be.

The title should really be renamed "Tokyo: It's Not Funny Anymore". For anyone that hasn't bothered to think about it, Japan is much richer and has more breadth than this single city. It's unfair to critique an entire country based on the experience of one place.

The issue of being "inspired" by other people's designs does not appear to be a relevant case here. When the degree of stealing is a practical copy and paste, it is more in the territory of stealing than inspiration. It might be better understood if you think of it as music. I don't know what they are, but I believe there are legally specific percentages of how much a melody or chain of notes needs to be changed before it is not considered the same song.

No one has yet brought up the idea on reddit that humans are not the only mehtod of companionship. Consider pets. Even nowadays, there are loners and hermits that live happily surrounded by cats or dogs, with no need nor desire of human contact. I think I could do just fine amassing a family of lovable dogs to travel with as well as offer me protection from other dangerous animals.

It seems the author is unaware of the multitude of managed vps and dedicated server options out there that would be a perfect fit for his needs. But I tend to agree with his general point about cloud services not fulfilling promises of performance. The general logic of what it's supposed to be is sound, but it just seems that no one has figured out how to really optimize it.

My 2 cents on why Flash is irrelevant. Content is king. We all agree on this yes? People want that content through RSS, on a browser, on their phone, through email through etc etc... It must be open, sharable, free to see in any way the user wants.

Flash is merely one of these content delivery tools (often delivering it in a frustrating non-standard way). Repeat: a content delivery tool. Flash in itself is not content, aside from some visual senses when used as art or music or performance.

Now of course, the manner the content is delivered is important to some. Important to branding & marketing. That's an entirely nother topic. But to generalize, the manner of content delivery is becoming less and less relevant. A person wants to see a video or read an article. They want to read and write comments. They want to see related material. These are the absolute essentials, and Flash is absolutely unnecessary for this.

I do see one last branch that will save Flash until there is alternative. Streaming video. Live sports and events will be getting much much bigger in the near future. When there is an easier alternative, then Flash will be gone.

Thanks for the input! Yes, there are links back to the site when a user wants to enlarge a photo or see details for anything else. I'll definitely work on the value proposition. I've probably been way too close to this for a long time and need to try to take a step back and view this with fresh eyes.

I do want to make a video screencast walking through the whole simple process. And I'm in complete agreement with all of your other points. Thanks for these quick assessments!

But what also goes far for them is exposure. You know: fame, money, sex. Money is not their only driving motivator.

Look at it this way. There could still be an overall high-score leaderboard. This could simply be a filter applied to that leaderboard. On most leaderboards, I could really care less about who anyone is, as I have no clue who they are, and only care about where I stand in it. But if I could apply this filter to the leaderboard where I would then be able to recognize almost everyone, then I would find it much more interesting to scan. Additional filters could be applied on top of this, such as movie stars, athletes, or like Compete.com, have the ability to compare specific celebrities, on individual games, or on multiple games.

I think there is definitely something to this. In the show Top Gear, we see celebrities competing for the fastest (or maybe most entertaining) lap time in their reasonably priced car. I love seeing how they will compare, even if, as an American, I don't quite know who all of them are.

But what if Top Gear created a service where people could show up and pay to drive this car around the track to see how they would compare with these celebrities? How fun would that be? Look...I've got the exact same time as Mark Wahlberg! I'm as fast as he is!

So, well, this example wouldn't happen. But, as an avid gamer, whether it's Call of Duty, or Desktop Tower Defesne, or any iPhone game, it would be quite fun to see what celebrity I am on par with.

I love this idea and could totally see it work, whether as an independent business idea or folded into Xanga or any game development studio.

One extra note, not a good idea to use the word "vista" in your product, as it recalls the obvious Windows Vista which everyone pretty much ties to "failure".

Honestly, I really really feel for you. It's very clear you've put a ton of hard work into this. I think it's great that DanielStraight spent a lot of time to provide feedback. I honestly don't have as much time to give you the proper technical or user experience type of feedback that you need. I will, however, give you some more overarching feedback. I just don't believe you have enough experience at this point in time to really understand the problem with your product. It's hard to resist trying to "go for it" to make riches on an internet service. But given time and learning, anyone can get that experience. If you can find work in the Advertising industry, that would be the ideal learning place. It's the only industry that marries strategy, branding, interactive, marketing, user experience, and visual design, plus PR to boot, as the lines between what is PR and advertising is becoming non-existent. As a matter of fact, there are blurred lines between all mentioned above. But the greatest thing for you to learn about is how for a web service, the user's experience is essentially your brand. I cannot teach this to you. It's something that will probably take you a while to learn how to implement.

Ah I see that now. However, I was unwilling to even click on the "Try it" button, so I would not have gotten that information anyway. The web is too full of services that do the "try-it-free" and then the "good-luck-trying-to-cancel-the-service" that I would highly recommend they disclose the pricing up front.

I did also notice their FAQ had it after clicking around, but again, that still feels like they are hiding it, as that is a link hidden at the bottom of the page in the footer.

I really really dislike when services do not disclose pricing. I cannot find anything other than "Try it free for 30 days." Clicking "Learn More" gives me no more info. Regardless how much it is, this just gives me an underhanded feeling. I thought it was common knowledge these days that full disclosure of pricing is what works in generating user interaction. Not knowing what the price will be after those 30 days, I simply will not "Try it".