jordank

Two-sided marketplaces are perfect when all actors are reasonable, but upon mainstream adoption many services invite whole range of unreasonable actors. Services that exist in a known niche probably can't scale the way that mass-market services can, but the actors are probably far more predictable.

It's as if anyone can say anything and get published in HBR these days.

It's mostly a journalistic device, but the notion of the next ______ (Google, Scorcese, insert popular thing) is flawed. There won't be a next ______, and that is okay.

See real traffic numbers at http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

A great tool for recipe ideas is to enter two ingredients and see what comes up: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=chickpea+potato

Also, DuckDuckGo just integrated Github into search results. If you search for "email-spec" you'll get a description directly from Github. Your original query works too.

I actually tried to contribute interaction design to to Elgg (referenced in the post). I spent some hours on concepts and got almost no response on the forums. Hindsight is 20/20 but I've found that some open source devs aren't that excited about people who add scope but can't make huge contributions code wise.

Beyond communication and coordination costs - 1000 people at $100,000 = $100MM/yr.

Most people don't have ongoing location discovery needs that would cause them to consistently engage with location based apps and services. People find the things that are compelling to them and then they tend to move on. People who live in cities, often the prime target for LBS, are often well aware of lots of great things to do around them.

Prime candidates for ongoing engagement with LBS are: people who travel a lot, people who are hungry for new and interesting stuff but don't know where it is , and people who are new to city (even here engagement will be limited).