maryrosecook

Dump the ads until you get traffic. They're the first thing you see.

a) Why would Chrome, a browser that doesn't come bundled with PCs, save PC users from IE when they already have Firefox as an unbundled IE alternative?

b) Chrome is not a competitor to IE or Firefox or Safari or any other traditional browser. It is a competitor to Windows and OS X and other operating systems that is being snuck in wearing a very unconvicing mask with a picture of a web browser on it.

Get it noticed by techies.

Non-geeks find out about technical stuff via their geeky friends and relatives. Firefox is the perfect example.

The only counter examples I can think of are things like Facebook. However, even here, there is no harm in going after techies, unless your product is one of the few that they won't like.

Um, I think I can put on a shirt that reads 'the perceptron' and save myself $75.

The article headline is correct, but the explanation given in the article is incorrect. Our frame of reference for the successor to the iPod won't be the iPod itself because, like the Walkman, it will be completely different from its predecessor.

No GPS on iPod Touch.

Gladwell is successful because he relays a great anecdote. Anecdotes lend themselves well to re-telling, thus his books are popularised by word of mouth. "Man, I read this great piece by this guy called Gladwell about a policeman who could ready body language so well he held fire when facing off a kid with a gun."

They do have ~700 employees (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook)...

Thank for you the clarification on where the recommendations fell down.

I have resisted letting people upload their record collection because I want to focus on making the site work well when I don't know anything about the user.

Letting users spy on the recommendations of people they admire or feel they are similar to is in the works. Once I get enough users, I plan to have a thing that says, "Hi Jill, your taste is similar to Bill. Would you like to be updated on his recommendations?"

I already pull in the band descriptions from Wikipedia.

Thanks again for the detailed feedback - it's really useful.

Yep, only two recommendations for a quite famous band is not great. I'll put cock/prog-rock on the list of missing under-represented genres.

Thanks.

I see what you mean about the tagline.

Thanks very much for doing those side-by-side comparisons. I am not a fan of any of the bands you entered, but, to my ill-informed eye, the recommendations don't seem too bad. Which ones were off the mark?

And thanks for the heads-up on the XSS exploit. Will need to sanitise my URLs more thoroughly.

Thanks very much for your feedback.

Yep, I do need a designer.

The band descriptions are taken from Wikipedia. My parsing code needs work.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

Yep, I have investigated this. It's lower on the list of priorities because my focus is to make the site work when it knows nothing about the user.

I'll look into these guys. Thanks!

Which band was that?

Yep, album art is a real nice idea.

The UI is something I am thinking really hard about. My skills are in coding, not UI/design, so I'm learning as I go.

Thanks for the feedback.

Niche music is one of my main focuses. For obvious reasons, the site is is good for the sections of music I like. Could you tell me what genres/niches/bands you were trying? I'd love to expand the index to include them if I can.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

Yes, I agree with you. The player does need a loading progress indicator. I also need to be more aggressive about culling tracks that are hosted on slow servers, or have been removed.

I use JavaScript to control a little offscreen flash player.

Thanks so much for your feedback.

Fantastic. Do let me know how you get on with the site.

The "tool" feel was exactly what I was going for. Kind of the Google of music recommendations.

However, I am desperately in need of someone who can work with me to make things both more functional and more attractive.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

Yep, that is a stinker.

I'm trying to skew the site towards unusualness and away from genres. Thus, the ways I link artists can produce some weirdness like the above. However, users can give feedback to help reduce the insanity quotient.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

Excellent! Glad to hear the recommendations are good.

I find links between artists and recommend based upon that. These links include: being recommended by a human, being on the same record label, being mutual admirers, playing gigs together, being posted to the same mp3 blog, being on the same mixtapes and so on.

I wrote a post on my blog that gives a comprehensive account of how the recommendation system works: http://www.maryrosecook.com/post/show/130

And, yes, I know the UI is horrible.

http://theperceptron.com - astute music recommendations

And a site where you create your audio autobiography by uploading mp3s. Hello, RIAA.

[Self link.] I am building an API into the perceptron: http://theperceptron.com/api

This article finally made me understand why I don't always learn from Rands' essays: he's not a detail person.

When he talks about technical stuff - the Free Electron, Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder - I'm nodding along and he's explaining a ton of reasons for phenomena that I had noticed but didn't understand.

When he talks about manager stuff - I'm the boss for now, What to do when screwed - I don't get it. Because I have only just started doing some management, I can't fill in the blanks of most of the situations he's talking about because I haven't experienced them as a manager.

So, he's kind of like one of those automap things in a computer game - you can see the structure and reasoning to your journey and experiences, but only once you've fucking got there.

I wasn't sure if this is appropriate. However, it expresses the loneliness that I, and, I expect, some other hackers, sometimes feel.

Doing business like this is a really good way to make money and scratch one's hacker itch: have fun bashing out a prototype, get the site going, then try and sell it a short while later.

It seems like it's more financially practical than working on open-source full time, and more fun and novel than grinding on a startup for a few years.

I believe http://bit.ly also works on similar lines: http://switchabit.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/bitly/

I'd say forget all the rules/guidelines people have proposed. The only thing that matters is whether your startup idea compels you to work on it. Having to force yourself to work on it guarantees failure.

Or, to put it another way, the only way to work two jobs for an extended period is for one of those jobs to be a hobby.

Wil Shipley says charge for upgrades: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/4/ (He is the dev of the OS X app, Delicious Library.)

I would say that not charging for major upgrades impairs developer-customer relations. Without upgrades, the dev has an incentive to stop working on their app and write a new one (and thus get a bunch more money).

I can't think of any well-known piece of Mac shareware that doesn't charge for x.0.0 upgrades.