jbail

But on the other hand, you did accept VC funding for Posterous (I'm assuming nobody was holding a gun to your head and forced you to do it), and for whatever reason you then left and moved onto other projects.

Now you are saying you will never sell out, will never lose focus and will stick around forever. Isn't that like a politician promising they won't ever raise taxes? "Ever" is just a really strong word. Life happens. Priorities change. Heck, most marriages don't even last forever.

That said...

I believe you. I think you're telling the truth about how you actually feel right now and what your plans for the business are right now. It's just that right now only lasts an instant.

Was Posterous created to not be sustainable? If so, then Posterous's users were duped from the get go into using something that the founders knew wasn't sustainable and would eventually disappear. That's not a good way to treat users and it surely doesn't inspire confidence in the founders' next projects.

Honestly, I find pitching this service on the day of the news that Posterous is shutting down to be kind of tacky. I'm not trolling or trying to be negative...I'm just suspicious of why anyone should trust this.

That might sound obvious, but it works and it's easy to setup. I left Posterous after they launched Spaces and went back to hosting my own Wordpress install. I host about 20 low traffic sites on a single Bluehost.com shared server that costs under $100 per year. Never had any issues. One click Wordpress install via SimpleScripts. It really doesn't get any easier.

They are building a web app. It will require ongoing costs to host, support and enhance. I don't think their $10,000 goal (of which they have raised over 50% more than that) could possibly cover these costs.

What you're doing when you fund an idea like the above, is funding a startup. They will own the technology and can do with it whatever they want. That distinction may or may not matter, but it's important.

Nobody in their right mind would pay $10 for a couple stickers. You are not getting the value from the little token gifts. You are getting value in feeling good about helping someone achieve their dream...and potentially building something you intend to use.

You will not benefit economically from giving your economic assistance in helping get their idea off the ground. For tons of people giving money on Kickstart, that is just fine. The lesson is not everyone is wholly economically motivated. That's pretty cool.

What's curious is buying the company back. Maybe Conrad is returning a favor?

In the end, what About.me brings to the table is pretty boring. You want a personal site? There are 10,000 ways to do that. I don't see the value in it personally...and maybe AOL doesn't either, but the host of VC's lining up for About.me's $5.7 million financing round must.

EDIT: Guess not (which isn't too surprising)

I share your enthusiasm for the upcoming expansions, in particular the line to the Airport. The train is one of the big perks of living in Denver. It's awesome and only getting better.

If low density is why San Jose can't support a decent transit infrastructure, then how can Denver do it with even less density?

This product is either supposed to be a loss leader that brings more customers into the 37Signals fold (to use Basecamp, etc) or there are more features and functionality planned for the Breeze product.

My guess it's the later and its why Breeze wasn't just incorporated into Basecamp.

You'd be surprised.

My experience with Big Companies is that it's done "the wrong way" far more often than at the startups I've worked for.

The reasons for this are many, but none of them have anything to do with being able to afford it. You still have deadlines and managers who want stuff finished yesterday. More crucial than that, in my experience, Big Companies have far less capable talent as well as projects that have been marred by outsourcing adventures.

Again, only my experience, but I thought I'd share since it runs counter to yours.

Your decision to segment your blog onto two URLs is interesting. Won't this degrade your personal blog since you only put short, and by your admission, lower quality posts on it?

In the past, I've gotten paid by IBM to write articles for their developerWorks blog. Long form. High quality stuff. I always felt like they paid me for the privilege of hosting my writings on a website they control, that they make money from...as opposed to me writing something that lives on my personal blog forever, hopefully giving my blog/"personal brand" (yuck, but not sure what else to call it) the traffic.

Clearly my personal blog is not a bastion of high design, but it looks pretty decent on every screen I've viewed it on just by following these small prescriptions and testing it during construction on both high and low density displays. It's really not that hard. http://jeffbail.com if you're interested.

That said, since its my personal site, I can do whatever I want and I appreciate fully that is not usually the case at some/most corporations. These folks usually need more than 6 months to make these types of changes, get approval from higher ups, etc...

I think its very possible to imagine a world where HTML5 can be just as good as native. It comes down to two things:

1) HTML5 needs more JavaScript APIs to access hardware like camera, contacts, etc. It's is not very difficult to imagine HTML6 (if you will) supporting this in much the same way that it supports geolocation today.

2) Improved JavaScript performance. It's common knowledge that the embedded web views on iOS are much less capable than Safari. There's no reason to think this would continue forever. Furthermore, better JavaScript performance makes things like image progressing, music recognition possible.

Right now, you are absolutely correct that HTML5 is not as capable as native. No argument there. But, this gap narrows as time goes on. I firmly believe the opposite of you; we will eventually see a time when web-based applications rival native apps in terms of power and functionality. You can already do some awesome image processing stuff using canvas and JavaScript.

This is only the beginning...

I'm constantly impressed by people that have the ability to share their personal life with the world in an honest way that reveals the vulnerabilities we all share as humans. It is so much more refreshing than the opposite, where we pretend our lives are perfect and we never experience moments of doubt or melancholy.

It is rare to see someone make a post like this. This is precisely what makes it so refreshing and beautiful.

The one underhandedly fills in information that the user hasn't explicitly given a site. That's abhorrent.

Another offers a solution for incorporating multiple analytics services into a website a sane way. That's worthy of applause.

They are completely different products/services serving completely different needs.

San Francisco is just one city among many in the world. It may or may not be right for you. Believing the hype that "NYC is the greatest city on earth" or "San Fran is the only place where smart developers go" is a surefire recipe for disappointment.

It's your life and it's up to you to find the balance that makes you happy. Congrats on realizing this and having the courage to do a 180.

That's an important point to digest. Just because something looks nice doesn't mean it's effective. It may be the opposite.

Sure, the website looks "nice", I guess, but is that the goal? Or is the goal of the site to get sign ups, generate referrals, make money, etc?

When you're done plugging in Bootstrap, does the design serve your goals? Or does it just look nice? Have you saved time or merely punted the design farther down the road?

Again, I'm playing Devil's advocate because I do see the value in Bootstrap. I just rarely hear any contrary opinions on Bootstrap and it's important to understand (or at least discuss) the trade offs in using a canned design.

At this point in its adoption curve, using Bootstrap is amateur. It says I have no idea how to style a webpage. Yes, it makes things look "attractive", but because it so popular, using Bootstrap on a website creates a site with no identity because it looks identical to the 100,000 other sites that use it.

Aside from creating designs with no soul, Bootstrap enforces a model where people without design expertise are supposed to be somehow be good enough at design to utilize these UI components effectively.

If you are not good enough to design a website, what makes you good enough to understand the appropriate time to use a component or when not to?

Hacker News itself has a very hand rolled UI and it works great. If it got Bootstrapped it would be a drastic step backwards. It just isn't the right solution for a lot of sites. It's design overkill.

Again, I think Bootstrap is cool, but I would never use it. I don't consider myself a designer, but I'm not okay with working on things that look like everyone else. Simple + handrolled > Bootstrap.

http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_20981965/denver-get-u-...

Developers are pissed off at Twitter for two main reasons:

1) Developers helped build Twitter as it exists today. With their hard work, sleepless nights and toil, they created the ecosystem that allowed Twitter to grow into the giant they are today. Now that Twitter is big, they are saying thank you by more or less shutting down their API for any serious Twitter integrations.

2) Twitter said, "we'll work with you" regarding API limits, but they didn't mean it. People that built things in good faith are now realizing that Twitter didn't act as such. If you put a lot of effort into building an app that utilizes Twitter's API, you'd be rightly pissed about this too.

I agree that it may have taken a long time for "the obvious" to set in with regards to Twitter not caring about their 3rd party developer ecosystem. Hopefully, as the OP points out, its pretty obvious you'd be a fool to build anything on Twitter anymore.

Without the ability to style them, this will not get widespread adoption. I am all for consistency in browser inputs, but unfortunately, that isn't what designers and clients demand. That specific look and feel of the datepicker, with those blue colors, blacks and sharp corners just isn't going to cut it for a lot of people.

I think we will eventually see full styling support for these datepickers. Until then, this is cool, but something I won't be able to use except maybe on a personal project. I know that if I slid this into a project, the first question I would get is, "Can we change the way it looks?" Maybe I just need to find less demanding clients.

The key point, as Cuban says in this article, is that companies spend real resources in trying to acquire "Likes" on FB. People build entire FB tabs. Curate what content gets posted. Build deep integrations on their websites. I've built a lot of this type of FB integration for clients...and I charge a lot, so I know this isn't cheap.

People do this with the expectation that they can reach the people who like their brand. When FB changes the game, it breaks this assumption and makes it doubly expensive to curate and communicate with your FB following. This is pretty much the gist what Cuban is arguing in the article.

On TV/Radio/Google Adwords/etc, there isn't a first step where a brand spends a lot of time and money sending users to said 3rd party advertising platform. You don't first spend development resources on integrating with the radio station's website, ultimately advertising their website for free and sending them tons of free traffic. You just give the radio or TV station your money, they play your ad, and that's it. That is the extent of your advertising investment. It's very concrete and simple to implement.

This is not the extent of the investments people have made in building up FB pages and followers. Brands have spent and continue to spend a ton of time and money on this and like Cuban, they are justified in being ticked off when FB changes the rules in an effort to squeeze revenue from them.

I have no doubt that money is the reason behind charging to communicate with your followers on FB. The altruistic motives like "fighting spam" would best be done with an algorithm. It surely wouldn't be something you could "opt out of" just by having a fat wallet. By FB allowing brands to pay them to spam people just means FB is fine with spam as long as they get paid. That doesn't seem like a stance that has the well being on their users foremost in mind.

A much better tactic would be to have a site that's up, responsive and presents a simple, joyful order process. That would win evangelists. People could point to the Nexus 4 launch and say, "Look everybody! When Google launches a phone, they do it right. It was a painless, awesome experience."

That is the complete opposite of the Nexus 4 launch we experienced today. Google bungled it big time (and I say that both as a consumer as well as an owner of Google stock).

UPDATE: The store is back up. 16gb appear to be sold out, but I just successfully purchased an 8gb model.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I just bought the 16gb model successfully as well. Both orders show as pending in my Google Wallet account.