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Matthew comments: "It seems that Microsoft is just trying to compete with other companies rather than find out what the consumer wants. They move into so many areas because they can't stand someone else being the market leader in a given sector. Apple dominates the mp3 player so Microsoft brings out the Zune and of course it doesn't sell well because it's not what people want. Apple announces the iPhone, Microsoft criticizes it then announces their phone. Now Google Apps. Man, Microsoft needs to grow up and find out what people want before Google takes them to task with Apps."

^ ah, sounds like communism :p

I've joined well over 50 social networks and what I've noitced is that freedom to choose appeals more to people than the right choices already made for them. More features, more niches, more startups, more choice. Users might complain about features, but fundamentally they like choice.

The more time a user spends making choices on a network, the more loyal he or she becomes. You don't spend 12 hours of your life customizing your profile if you don't plan on sticking to it.

Lastly, too much of anything is bad. The state should have control over medical supplies, education and energy. But beyond that, it should trust the consumer with running the country.

lol! Like you, we rss hoggers don't sleep either :p I think most posts on here are a result of users aggregating through rss feeds to post whatever's hot on the web.

Bury should work fine (perhaps it should only be accessible by top users to avoid abuse). Another possible solution is to survey the user's past behavior to create a collaborative filter. The filtered news could then be displayed in a "Recommended" tab. As yc.news grows to a certain critical level, this might just become a necessity.

lol! Here is a nice dissection of ads I did for another site cluttered with them:

http://shuzak.com/img/Temporary/SpammingUsers.jpg (The ads are highlighted in green)

An excerpt from an article I wrote on user experience that seems relevant here:

"One thing I particularly dislike about Web 2.0 startups is their Web 1.0 approach towards displaying advertisements. It shouldn't take an Einstein to realize where Google ads are appropriate and where they are not...Note that there is nothing wrong with displaying ads as long as it makes sense to do so. If you have no ads on your site, you will not make money off of it. If you have too many ads on your site, nobody is going to click on them.

It is unfortunate that nearly every social network spam's their own users with unwanted ads. The users are less likely to notice advertisements as the frequency of ads increases within a site. Even worse, because the users are so used to seeing ads popup, they might ignore them even when they do make sense [6]. Usability should always be prioritized over revenues. When a user chooses to spend 20 minutes of their life on your website, they could be spending that time anywhere else, but they chose your site. Don't reward their loyalty with spam [7]."

All business is a niche business. Startups must put a conscious focus on segmenting their market to a small but sustainable size. I have emphasized the significance of this in my earlier articles:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_startup_lessons_2007.php http://m4th.com/Articles/Article.php?Article-Title=Anatomy-of-a-Successful-Social-Network

We had a similar problem on our social network where users abstained from giving karma to thoughtful comments. Consequently, we coded an algo to add "+0.1 karma" to every user that gave another person "+1 karma". That was enough to take care of the problem.

Exactly, the user with low-karma is better off posting topics than comments. Comments don't receive nearly as much points as topics do. Even worse, comments require far more thought than blindly submitting links. What is the economic gain the user with low-karma receive from posting comments? Not much.

I know I suggested it, but throttling submission rates based on karma might not be fair to the end users. Once a karma-archy is established, the rich will get richer at the expense of the poor.

Cain, if you're looking for up to date startup news, it is better to simply subscribe to rss blogs. Here are a few good ones: TC, Mashable, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, OnStartups, PaulGraham, Startup Reviews, The Startup Journey, etc.

On YC, it sometimes helps to simply sift through a user's past posts and comments.

Copy-paste from my reply to jwecker: "From a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments." Top users are more active in the discussion because they are already high above the ranks. The top user doesn't have to spam the site to gain karma, we already have enough.

I would abstain from complicating the user experience, though. In my experience, posting a topic has much more potential in gaining points than writing *thoughtful* comments. A good strategy to rise above that ranks is to post a bunch of interesting links; upon achieving high points, the user can then take a defensive stance by defending his or her opinions through posting comments instead.

The point is, from a user's perspective, there is more to gain from posting topics than comments.

Has anyone noticed that submissions tend to receive more points around 4 to 10 am GMT, Eastern Time? Posts that I make after 9 pm usually remain at "1 point" throughout the day. This probably has something to do with the Silicon Valley's working hours.

There is a similar "karma" system on my social network, and one of my users suggested that we limit the amount of karma a user can receive within a give day. On YC, it makes sense to limit the submission volume according to the person's karma level. Someone with high karma is unlikely to be spamming the site.

AskJeeves used to provide users an option to search using AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, and a host of other search engines. Consequently, AskJeeves always felt like the "natural starting point".

Similarly, Michael Arrington builds trust by often mentioning Om Malik (GigaOm) and Richard MacManus (Read/WriteWeb) on his blog. I suppose it leaves the feeling that "He can't possibly promote a rivals blog without having a better one himself!"

Ironically, a few weeks ago, Scoble mentioned that bloggers are geedy when it comes to linking (he mentioned Engadget/Gizmodo as an example, and that sure did piss them off). I think I will go ahead and forward this study to him :)

That said, I would be interested to know how they conducted this study. From the looks of it, it seems they simply compared a site's worth versus # of outgoing links. The fact that we agree with the study might just be a placebo affect.

It is hard to believe that any small startup can compete with Google anymore. Search is Google's domain and it will defend that turf to death. With more than 15 billion webpages indexed, it is no longer about superior technology alone but also the sheer mass of content available.

Good point! But I feel that most businesses attribute much of their fortune simply to coincidences. Randomness is a sign of complexity beyond human comprehension. We like to think we have control over our "destiny" but sometimes that just isn't the case.

Yeah, I read both these books before writing this article. "The Google Story" is history of Google while "The Search" is really a history of search itself. Between the two, I would recommend "The Search" since it covers a larger spectrum, and is written more recently.

"Maybe one of these days, I'll get a pilot-writer and pitch the idea to a network..."

heh, or you could always pitch to YCombinator :D

I can relate to that. In January, without my knowledge, my newly minted startup hit Digg's frontpage. What followed was an entourage of hungry geeks that basically killed my shared hosting account. It took about 3 days for my site to recover with an upgraded VPS server. But every hour of those 3 days left me hysterical and I couldn't sleep at all :(

But it seems funny now that I look back. Whatever made me think a shared hosting account was the way to go? `:D

I could tell from my coversation with him that he is genuinely a nice person. Guy hasn't always been a "suit" btw. He started out as an Apple evangelist, not a venture capitalist. He has an inspiring video that might change your view of him:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/the_art_of_the_.html

That said, his book "The Art of Start" did not live upto my expectations. I felt that it was too practical; consequently, leaving little room for creativity or sparking new ideas.

It has been delayed by one day: http://startupschool.org/index.html

It is true, search was not a business. Back then, most startups depended on DoubleClick banner ads for revenue generation (just as today most startups depend on Adsense). DoubleClick was not a viable business model and Google considered that to be their very last option.

Google was running thin on cash until they finally adopted Bill Gross' GoTo.com advertising model (aka Overture) in 2000. So for the first 2 years, Google was a cash cow with no business model around its search either.

I like Alex, Danielha, and notabel :) Keep up the great posts guys. Feel free to email/call me if any of you guys wish to discuss startups with a fellow entrepreneur. - jawad.exe@gmail.com, 1-416-879-4659

To be honest, I was surprised Google reached out to Friendster. Google struck a similar, but much larger, deal with MySpace, so I imagine that this won't go lightly with NewsCorp. Let's not forget that Google also owns two major MySpace competitors, YouTube and Orkut (see Orkut's astonishing growth: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?q=&url=orkut.com/).

Is Friendster even worth risking a major deal with MySpace?

While I don't use OpenID myself, there are a number of users on my social network asking for its integration. It seems that many users are now beginning to *expect* Web 2.0 startups to provide support for it (just as they did for Firefox). I anticipate that, in the future, when big name startups like Digg and LiveJournal begin supporting OpenID, there will be a huge following by other sites as well. Put simply, crowds follow crowds.

Thank you for posting this. ReadWrite web is reporting that 37Signals has also joined the bandwagon: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_37signals_openid.php

+1 for the explanation. "Priming" is another term that describes this phenomenon. From wikipedia: Priming in psychology refers to activating parts of particular representations or associations in memory just before carrying out an action or task. In a neurological view priming can be seen as the activation of clusters of neurons. An interconnected cluster is surrounded by other clusters that are more or less connected with each other...So when the cluster that represents the concept of "flower" is activated, particular clusters will be more activated then others (i.e. kinds of flowers).

"But, as Paul notes, the easiest way to make something that people want is to make something that you want. Yahoo! started out as a directory of Jerry and Dave's favorite links. Movable Type was born out of Mena's need for a better way to talk about herself. Jonathan started Friendster to find a girlfriend. Zuckerberg started FaceBook to find a girlfriend. Joe and Alon started JDate to find Jewish girlfriends. Ted started Dogster to find his dog a date. If you build something you want, chances are pretty good that someone else will want it as well."

Well said! :)

The article is meant to be taken as a general guide. The author does suggest that we use a pre-programmed crawler rather than code one ourselves. Refer to this passage:

"Crawler. If you don't use an open source crawler, my advice is a super-simple multistep crawler. This is very important advice that will cut months off your development time, so if you ignore everything else, don't ignore this."

One of our startup strategies involved that we target Chinese, Spanish and French startup bloggers before reaching out to Americans. Most western startups overlook the significance of this huge market, and leave the door open for another company to take the spoils.

Far less companies submit review requests to foreign bloggers than they do to Americans. Consequently, our own experience turned out to be great; almost all the foreign blogs we contacted were more than happy to review us. This strategy works great for early stage startups that need that additional media coverage. So if you haven't yet tried this, I suggest you do :) Take care, - Jawad Shuaib

Steve Jobs has the midas touch. I would rather have him as the cofounder.