jgilliam

This is the best promo/explanation video for a web app I've ever seen.

new slogan: Only Communists use IE6

The mom actually responded to this completely wrong as it's now become an internet meme. She should have flooded the web with other pictures of him to drown out the embarrassing ones.

Web startups are now rock bands, and YC is the record label.

This needs one more feature. If Starbucks uses your likeness, you should get a free drink.

Wow, I'm an idiot and you might have just saved me a bunch of money, so thank you!

Sendgrid is half as expensive once you get beyond sending a handful of emails. $.005 vs $.01

I am a sendgrid customer, and unless Amazon is cheaper and can solve the deliverability issues, there is no way I'm switching.

Remember when people were paid to appear in a corporation's ads?

We started in 2003 and just kind of stumbled onto this model because we had no other options. It wasn't planned out like I just described, although I 100% believe it is the business model of the future for independent artists. I had to hack together all the tech for it, so my new startup (nationbuilder.com) is about packaging it all up so others can do this model too.

There is some background in this Washington Post article from 2006. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08...

This story makes me so sad, not because people are stealing her work, but because the author doesn't look at those 800 people a week as potential fans who would fund her next book.

Forget about selling the book itself, use the book as a way to find new fans. If half those 800 people each week signed up for her email list or followed her on Twitter, she would have a huge fan base which should could tap to FUND HER NEXT BOOK on Kickstarter.

Sell the making of the content, not the consumption of the content.

The hardcore fans will want her to write the next book, so they will fund it. Some percentage of the random people who download her book will turn into hardcore fans. It's a scalable, repeatable cycle.

400 people a week = 20k in a year. 5% of that giving $15 is $15,000, her entire advance.

EDIT: I did basically this model for documentaries and built an audience of a million members.

The article says they are going to put physical stations in venues that people can "bump." I love that idea. Making it a physical act that other people can see is really smart. The activity isn't just happening on the phone, it's happening in the real world, people are literally bumping into things.

The tweet box doesn't have "What's happening" and the user's name doesn't link to their profile.

The official app does the right thing, IMO, it just shows how silly some of the guidelines are. Particularly requiring "What's happening?" I bet most Twitter apps violate that one.

Twitter's new official app for the Mac violates several of these display guidelines.

There is a Twitter petition to Yahoo getting a lot of action: http://act.ly/2ul

I'm starting to feel conflicted about these YC deals for priority API access. Yodlee is notoriously expensive and not particularly developer friendly. It's great YC is lessening that burden for their companies, but it's starting to create a competitive advantage that undermines core hacker ethics.

What I'd like to see is YC working with the Yodlees of the world to make their APIs more available to all startups.

Don't turn YC into the next Harvard.

It's totally normal for a CFO to get $20 million in stock, but shocking news when an engineer gets $3.5 million. How much longer will that last?

The problem is that if they can't get the service working, then they will never turn into paying customers.

They aren't asking for money, just that the site be up!

People do pay for these "free" sites. Not with their money, but with their time. If people weren't putting time into the sites, the sites would be worthless.

It's not unreasonable for people who are giving companies all this free labor to expect to get benefits for that labor -- like constantly having access.

This is gonna send shockwaves through the email marketing industry.

The reason the results were lousy was due to the sales culture. Sales people needed more pages to put banner ads on, so all our efforts went to building a "portal" -- not to improving search. The last thing Lycos wanted was for people to find something somewhere else on the internet.

Lycos is a perfect example of an internet company that failed because it was run by sales people and not engineers.

I was a software developer there in the late 90's, and we did some of the first eye-tracking studies on how people used the search engine. What we learned was shocking - no one looked at the flashy ads. The more we tried to make them stand out, the more they looked at the boring text in the middle of the page.

Clearly, the solution was non-flashy ads. Except, that's not what advertisers wanted, and Lycos did whatever advertisers wanted.

I'm sure Google did those same studies when they were working on their ads and saw the same thing. Since they were run by engineers, they made their ads text.

The rest is history.

You can get some small amount of information about a person via Facebook publicly, but to really get at all the info, the user needs to authorize their Facebook account to the app. Zynga and Slide have tens of millions of people who've done this for their apps, if not more.

All Google has to do is put an ad on all the Zynga and Slide pages that passes them the Facebook UID of the current user, and it could become part of their ad targeting. Then they can get the actual Facebook data from Zynga and Slide.

Google wants everyone to give this info to them directly, that's what Google.Me, Google Buzz, and all their different social experiments have been about. But that hasn't been working out so well, so these deals are a cheap way to make sure they can still get at the Facebook profile data.

Google actually does. Here's one example http://act.ly/3o, where people in Romania were petitioning to get street level data added to Google Maps. Google responded fairly quickly and about a month later had data, which they then asked all the people who tweeted the petition to beta test.

It's the same reason they partnered with Zynga. It's a backdoor way to get at large chunks of Facebook profile data for ad targeting.

I'd bet it will accelerate it, if it's even possible to accelerate it further.

Google is freaking out over Facebook. This gives them both a chance to build out their own social graph (say as a launch partner for Google Me), and access to a copy of most of Facebook's.

This data is important for search, but critical for ads.

What I've found works well for me, and is gettable, is a designer who can do HTML/CSS/light Javascript. Then I do the rest.

html version is here: http://www.gladwell.com/2010/2010_01_18_a_surething.html

Good teachers aren't motivated by money, so paying them more just attracts bad teachers. Good teachers want autonomy and to have an impact, and more testing is just going to drive them away. So both sides of this are advocating for things that will make the problem worse!