mikejarema

I like the domain hack, good grab. Do you host your email on this domain? Are you launching the blog anytime soon?

I view a personal domain as an asset for life. On one hand some of my web projects may die and I'll subsequently let the domain drop, I view my personal domain in the opposite light.

I'm ready and willing to keep renewing year after year, the yearly cost is worth it, much like I need to renew my drivers license or pay property taxes, its just an annual expense that's a part of being me.

I can't argue with that.

Are the current registrants doing much with the domains? Do you check back every so often to see if the names are expiring?

Sorry, didn't mean to imply that tackiness was along the lines of what you were thinking, the analogy was off the mark.

I like hitchhiker.net, but looks that company has grabbed all the TLD variations unfortunately.

I'm curious, what would you do with hitchhiker.net if you had it today? I ask because a friend of mine was excited to grab InsomniaLabs.com on the drop, but has yet to make much of it as his personal site.

Jim, thanks for the link and insights. I used to interview boatloads of interns for a couple companies here in Toronto, and the personal domain always left me with an improved first impression of an applicant.

But yes, the ratio was quite low, especially considering I was interviewing CS students.

I'll take a look at the link and send you some notes later.

Mine was too - an unflattering picture of some other guy with the same name. As soon as it dropped, I claimed it and will be holding on to it.

If you're interested, there's a bunch of backordering / drop-catching services out there that you only pay upon successful delivery of the domain. I'd register and backorder your name if you're interested. Look for snapnames, pool, namejet.

I hadn't thought of the creativity perspective here & I agree that YourName.tld is an uninspiring, obvious choice.

I've made the analogy to a few people that a cooldude69@hotmail.com email address that you may have setup in high school isn't necessarily what you want to be posting on your resume / linkedin account.

Thanks for the comment!

Good points, I suppose one assumption I'm making is that people do have something they'd like to share with the world at large.

What are your thoughts about the notion of registering YourName.com now basically as an insurance policy to ensure it's available in the future if you'd like to use it?

Personally I think the annual reg fee is worth it, actually my domain went unused for a couple years.

Give this project a quick shot & see who your "best" friends are here in the demo app (bundled with the project):

http://facebook-friend-rank.herokuapp.com/demo/index.html

It asks for & requires the read_stream permission to scan your activity log and see who you most frequently interact with.

The click "Apply Friend Rank" to start the ranking process.

I'm in the process of building out a simple Facebook app and had trouble finding a way to "rank" friends, namely who was closest to the logged-in user.

So, I just built my own web service to do so: Facebook Friend Rank.

I bundled the whole thing as a web service rather than a gem or stand-alone library because I'm sure most people would want something they can just plug-in (or make a call to) without worrying about the complexities of running background jobs, setting up another service on their boxes, etc.

I think Goliath serves as a solid underpinning as this project evolves. The evented nature of the web service should scale well as the ranking algorithm evolves to process multiple API calls in parallel.

All told, I'm happy to launch the project to HN, if only for some initial feedback.

Thanks!

Congrats on the launch.

Quick tangential question: why the rename to Cloudfuji? Also I'm curious if the domain + social media accounts for 'cloudfuji' were available or had to be acquired?

3. Profit!

Cooler, maybe.

But the fact that LDS employs a strategy that consistently results in catchy-sounding, hyphen-free and available domains does differentiate it.

Not to knock domainsbot.com, they do have killer matching algos under the hood (as you mentioned), I don't believe they have false-positives (rarely if at all) and they bring in aftermarket domains to results, but from a starting point like "game", I only get 2 suggestions in the .com namespace (no hyphens, permit related keywords, suffixes and prefixes).

LDS on the other hand brings back 54 domains. I'm not saying all of them are gold, but I would certainly consider "gamegroovy.com" for a gaming related site.

This is likely the case for many other popular / high-value keywords, eg. cloud.

I think that branding is an exercise that requires a lot of creativity supported by a range of tools. LDS is very strong in its techniques.

I've worked in a similar arrangement as the tech founder for a Social Media Marketing Agency. My partner was design and sales focused, with a tremendously string project management background.

I can say without hesitation that the complimentary skillset was key in both landing our projects (both early on and as the company carved out its niche), the variety of perspectives were key in addressing any and all client concerns. Likewise from an operations standpoint it was very clear where the work fell, tech (dev, management, support) on my end, sales & design on his.

I was lucky enough to have a good friend as a business partner and to this day had no issues (eg. friendship troubles due to business). I'm no longer with the agency, but that was totally amicable, it just wasn't for me.

I'm not sure about services for "startup" dating like you've described. But I can suggest you look within your network for the complimentary skillset you think could handle the workload you'd like to shed, box in a few limited scope projects that you could pass on to friends/colleagues, and be realistic about how well those mini-projects go.

My partner subcontracted a few projects this way to me (he made some initial sales before incorporating), and after 2-3 very successful projects, we signed and got started for real.

I'm hoping to get some feedback on the value of this script to the community in general. And hopefully one or two forks of the repo.

As a bit more background: I've used the techniques captured in this script to grab a few decent "brandable" domains over the past few years. Eg. namevine.com, dealreel.com, producteer.com

I've written briefly about this theme on my personal blog as well: http://mikejarema.com/post/19592127057/a-tumblr-theme-built-...

YCList (http://yclist.com/) is an unofficial list, though it seems to be a little out of date.

As the developer behind Namevine I'm really looking forward to hearing feedback from the HN community.

The use-case Namevine is targeting is early in the brand creation / ideation stage of a product or business. I figure the startup types and entrepreneurs in the HN community might have some worthwhile insights that I could bake into v2 of the tool.

Criticism is welcomed too! :)

Help grow this list! Here's a jQuery plugin to add the Konami code to your site in one line: http://www.gethifi.com/blog/konami-code-jquery-plugin-pointl...

Touché.

I'm wondering what the "revenue capacity" is for the the entire farm?

I don't know how they virtualize, but even a conservative calculation on instance capacity (eg. assume each server can support one XL instance on average) means that they can conceivably bring in $288k per hour.

I'm sure I'm way off with this estimate, is there any evidence out there are regarding their typical server configuration or utilization rates? Spot instance prices paint a pretty vague picture about utilization (eg. rates are pretty much flat over the last month).

What's funny is that this is what I find myself doing instinctually when I encounter an outage or high latencies on ANY service or site. Heroku (recent process startup woes), Google Apps (slowdowns, specifically Gmail), Amazon (when its hammered by traffic to big deals), etc etc.

I second the comment above suggesting a "crowdsourced" status app monitoring twitter. Although it's no consolation for service interruptions, it does at least keep you sane knowing the problem is elsewhere.

Or how about finding a new home for the product (eg. another startup, media co., anyone!).

While I understand there is a large amount of effort involved in transacting something like that, certainly there is a legitimate & appropriate organization out there who could foster and grow the community that is Oink.

This action would mildly address the concerns about continuity and trust in product longevity.

I think there is a middle step here that Daniel could tackle.

Building small- to medium scope tools for himself that can be dressed up with affiliate links to serve as lead gen for a 3rd party site/service.

The trifecta of building something he would use, potentially making some profit, and building his portfolio at the same time is very compelling.

Targeting the web, building on open source, and deploying to a free(mium) platform (eg. Heroku, free tier of AWS) addresses some of the cost concerns.

The final piece is effective marketing. Get the tool in front of like-minded users (HN & consistent tweeting/blogging) to build up your user base over time. Refine the tool as needed.

Of course the devil is in the details, but given what I'm seeing about Daniel's case this is the advice I would give.

Agreed. I like that this approach forces you to consciously commit to capturing those (and only those) one or two steps in a product.

I also liked the fact that the author uses existing/established players to complement rather than compete with your product by drawing the end line there -- a solid MVP strategy.