melissamiranda

This is a total pain in Tumblr. I don't even think it's possible, or at least, haven't figured it out in 3 days of trying. So now I'm weighing whether the community/distribution of Tumblr is worth trading for a little bit of SEO. In our case, a social iPhone app, I think we're keeping Tumblr.

There's two kinds of design: 1) visual design that's about aesthetics. 2) UX design which is how well something works.

A usable site that is a bit ugly will win over a great looking one that confuses the user. Craigslist is the best example of this, it doesn't look great, but millions of people use it. Foursquare wasn't as pretty as Gowalla, but it won because it was a better game - becoming mayor was more engaging than dropping teddy bears.

BCC was well designed in that it delivered exactly what people were looking for. Sure, it may convert better if it looked better, but it was successful nonetheless. But the whole point is that Patrick has learned that visual design also matters, which is why appointment reminder looks better.

It's still a good looking site, and his copy is spot on. No one said design has to be very expensive or custom made, it just has to work. Ask anyone on the street if kalzumeus.com looks professional, and they'll say yes. That's what matters.

Right. Twitter is great for distributing a link, but having your link on twitter.com is not going to help you rank for Google search results.

What does work is people seeing your link on Twitter and posting it around the internet.

No recording that I'm aware of.

Right, but he made that years ago. He clearly invested a lot in design for kalzumeus.com, which he made much later. If anything, this is a case for figuring out that design does matter.

Look at his main site: http://www.kalzumeus.com/. It's quite good looking and well designed.

What struck me is how lonely the video felt. People hardly talked to each other. The only emotion exchanged between people was with the mom and daughter making apple pie, and that was through the screen.

The content should be high quality. This is why I mentioned the story of eHow and what a terrible thing it is, and why Patrick said "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create content in a fashion that scales while simultaneously ensuring that the user experience of consuming your content remains good"

He specifically told us not to create crap content.

I think Patrick was referring to traditional page rank and general search results as opposed to local or news.

He's back in Japan now. He was here about a week ago.

Seriously Patrick, it was awesome to have you here. You were voted as the most helpful speaker at 500 we've had so far in the batch. Thanks!

Awesome. I had no idea I how I felt about poverty (when did I comment on that?)

Looks great. teuxdeux.com is similar in pushing incomplete to-do's from the past into the future. This one is nice, really simple, and fun.

Awesome. I use Unicode symbols as a shortcut/prototype for icons. I always look them up in wikipedia, which is painful. This makes my life easier. Thank you!

Yes. That's the beauty of it. Paul from i/o ventures has them sometimes, that's how I found out about ohours. There are tons of high quality people you can meet with.

Great post, love the short Do/Don't format. I would add "How will you get users." That's the single most important question Hajj had for us in the pre-interview Skype chat.

Take a look at Mappiness: http://www.mappiness.org.uk/ It's a UK university research project to measure happiness across different settings. It would ping you with some quick questions a few times a day.

Functionality is similar; it it may offer learnings.

Would be amazing to have a few sample patterns as a way to show how it works (what to paint). Would help newer designers figure out how to make good-looking patterns and provide a shortcut where others could just change the colors. It's often easier if you avoid beginning with a blank page.

Thanks for making it! I'm generating a pattern for my startup right now.

You could temper the self-promotion with examples from friends or other people you admire. Either way, examples would have made each point much more concrete. Just consider it for the next one you write.

Great points. It be nice if it also included concrete examples of real CEOs doing each of the 13 things each week.

The raindrops are great, but it was the greeting in your source code for aerotwist.com that made me roll off the chair. Love the aerotwist logo in underscores and pipes.

Spoke too early. These slides are incredibly useful to prepare for investor questions. Maybe Facebook and Twitter didn't have everything figured out, but I still need numbers to work out a good story.

Thanks for writing, I knew about the 8 hours in the cockpit, didn't realize there were an extra 8 outside.

You have a point, but no one knew when it was coming (hence why I said you can only see bubbles in hindsight). I should rephrase and specify that no one can tell when a bubble will burst. And as long as a bubble keeps growing, you can still make money buying into it.

No one really knows if there's a bubble before it bursts. They are easier to see in hindsight.

On the one hand everyone in the world is getting a smartphone since the pricing for chips has come down so much this year. That will make the market for mobile computing/commerce/you-name-it huge.

On the other hand, Facebook hasn't really nailed their business model. Yes, it's pulling in a lot of cash, but not enough to justify its valuation. Assume Facebook IPOs in 2012 and because everyone except newborns is on the network, the price gets bid sky-high, but they fail to grow revenue. Investors get scared and pull out and take the rest of the tech market with it. Then Facebook grows credits to the be the biggest payment platform in the world and the whole market goes up again.

Like PG said, market valuations are a sine wave. They are educated guesses, no one knows anything for sure.

Here's more on Facebook's valuation: http://community.nasdaq.com/News/2011-03/how-to-justify-face...

Personally I found Dartmouth GPAs correlated to how often you went to class and how much attention you paid to the lecture. If you didn't go or zoned out, you'd be working all day and all night just to catch up on that 1 hour you missed.

It's peculiar that medical residents are systematically sleep deprived but commercial airline pilots cannot fly/work longer than ~8. Most of the time the plane is on auto-pilot, but there's no such thing for zombie residents doing triage at the ER.

Doesn't seem that Facebook, Twitter, or Hot or Not would emerge from that class, since the business models were not clear from the start (or now for that matter).

"The only thing that’s impossible right now is registering a new .ly domain"

Is www.libyanspider.com not working anymore? It's hanging right now. We got an .ly domain 2 weeks ago.