joshhepworth

The app is about exploring new information, drawing the user towards connections he or she doesn't yet understand. We wanted a way to encourage ourselves to explore Wikipedia further than we already do, to satisfy our curiosity or simple desire to learn something new.

We also highly valued the reading experience and put just as much effort into making the presentation of the content better as developing the web.

However, that's not going to be for everyone. It's been a joy for us, and we're simply hoping others will find value there as well.

We were thinking about working on a bookmarklet to make the Safari > Wikiweb (or another Wikipedia app that has a url scheme) transition easier.

We rolled our own physics to get the layout in the node view to a point that felt right.

It's definitely a big redesign of the feature, but it was still possible before.

As noted by TC last year, http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/facebook-not-now-follow/, when you request to be someone's friend, you would automatically start following their "Everyone" posts without their approval. It was just following and friend requests in a single button.

There's also a really new one (they just launched their site a week or two ago) in Baltimore.

http://thestartupcity.com/

Ben does a great job of simplifying a host of issues down to just two, but in the end, he seems to end up blaming the user rather than the system for the problems in notification systems (though he does say that the systems aren't as good as people at notifications, which is true to an extent).

The biggest issue I had with the article (besides omitting the "come back to old notifications" problem plaguing some systems) was its overlooking of improvements. Innovation doesn't have to come overnight, and in the mean time, I'd love to have a better system than currently implemented. Even still, there are systems out there that get pretty close to his nirvana. Mobile Notifier for iOS (http://www.flickr.com/photos/piair/5492412910/in/photostream...) still covers up some of the screen (forcing you to take action to access that area of the screen), but it also lets you dismiss a notification with a quick swipe and quickly access all pending notifications.

The biggest praise I can give for the article is it's identification of people as a problem. It's true, we likely want to know more details about more events than in the past. It seems pretty needless all things considered, but why should a system be terrible at meeting our needs? We create the systems to change with our wants, after all.

It's hard to say what exactly is happening right now, but I don't think there's much of a reason to expect an industry wide "pop" soon. As mkr-hn said, the companies are certainly more responsible now than a decade ago, and despite the seemingly outrageous valuations of companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga, there are equally as many reasonable valuations for smaller, still successful, tech companies.

This article really speaks to some of the ideas presented by Paul Graham in his essay about the future of startups[1]. Combining ideas from them paints a particularly optimistic picture for the future of the individual. When a student can create and run a business in his spare time, it sort of marks the potential for a shift in the way value is measured. The emphasis on the utility or engagement of a service over strict monetary value could enable our growth going forward to be in quality of experiences rather than GDP (as Nick Szabo pointed out already isn't growing that much in developed nations anyway).

Going forward we could see applications that make it really easy for individuals without direct knowledge of HTML, CSS and a server scripting language to create valuable tools (they do exist know, but not really in a way that enable the right audience to create the right things). These, along with the existing social tools, are the things that could change the way an economy works by cutting out large corporations and creating an entire market of "externalities."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html

It really is amazing how much making sure the little things are right can help. I think it helps develop a slightly more emotional connection for the user as they find themselves subconsciously enjoying various elements that the designer/developer took the time to polish.

To that effect, http://littlebigdetails.com/, is a great list of 'little things' that can be great for inspiration / a list of innovations. Quora is on this list for a few elements.

I think you're getting at a very interesting conflict here that the author of the article attempted to explain. While user metrics can gauge the success of a web startup, that's often all they can do. Those metrics will (potentially) tell the company if they're improving or declining, and if they should be taking action.

However, it will not tell the company what actions to take. They're nowhere near as useful as a targeted, action specific metric in determining what to do. If my website's # of visitors drops 50% over a week, there might be something wrong, but I don't know what action to take without more information. Figuring out what engages users on the site and what keeps them coming back and measuring those things would be way more useful than simply knowing how many users are visiting.

While I have used this kind of authentication before, I'm not intimately familiar with it. From the way Kincaid described it in the article, it seems the key is unique only to a general moment in time, not each log-in attempt (though it wouldn't be hard to imagine it being invalidated as soon as it was used).

If it is only a moment in time, I assume the phishing script could simply log in at the same time and hope the user has the "once per computer" setting enabled. Though this seems like too big of something to miss. Can anyone offer some clarification?

The ads really were in a terrible place for the email experience. I almost stopped using it as well until I found a setting in the preferences that just said "Disable Ads" and that was that.

Because of that, I assume that they've removed the Ads from the paid version.