shingen

If the US Citizenship test assumed all Germans from 1933-45 were volitional Nazis, then yes it'd be a jerkwad test.

While it's a perfectly fine choice to ostracize Yahoo for their actions, Yammer's CEO is going to end up looking like little more than a hypocrite at the least, and maybe a dipshit, if he doesn't apply the same rules to all companies equally based on behavior.

The odds the CEO will apply the same rule to all other companies acting with patent belligerence? Approximately zero. They'd need a substantial piece of tracking software just to attempt it, and then it'd be down to subjective whim as to which company employees deserves to be 'punished'.

Lame.

Here's what it's equivalent to intellectually (using an extreme example to frame it): Joseph Stalin was evil, therefore everyone in the USSR was evil; never allow anyone from the USSR to immigrate.

Sometimes it's not so simple as to pack up and leave your job when, say, you have children and a family to look out for or any number of a zillion other considerations in life (which is already hard enough in general). Really makes me think the CEO is a serious jerkwad.

That would of course be the tip of the iceberg.

Since Imgur and Reddit represent a fraction of a fraction of the total reposting / rehosting / et al.

Extrapolated to its natural conclusion, you might as well shut down the Web and all that it was designed for.

The mass of content owners that could pursue Pinterest aren't organized into an effective cartel. So no, it's not likely Pinterest is going to get assaulted the same way Napster did.

That doesn't stop one or two larger content owners from hitting them hard of course. Most likely by the time any of this comes to legal blows Pinterest will have figured out a means to dance around the technicalities of it all. Worst case scenario for Pinterest is that they see a YouTube-like run-in with a media company.

The media monsters (eg WSJ, Murdoch) smell that someone out there might, just maybe, be making some money off something they own somewhere, maybe, kinda sorta, possibly. A hint of it is all those animals need. So they're sending out trial balloons for whether there's anything to sue about to grab some cash with no effort.

You have to understand, the first thing these guys think when they see something new like a Twitter or Facebook or Pinterest or Tumblr is (do I): partner with it, ignore it, sue it, buy it. You're going to fall into one of those categories.

America isn't lacking, in any regard, in financial regulation. There are more laws on the books regarding that industry than any other.

Regulation does not inherently = smart or good.

You know what isn't regulated? How stupid the Fed gets to be with our dollar. How careless they get to be with interest rates and QE programs.

The lesson we apparently didn't spend the last five years learning, is what happens when the Fed intervenes (2001 / 2002) with a massive liquidity pump to falsify a recovery and artificially avoid a worse recession for political points. Oh hey, what does that remind you of?

The chaos of 2008/09 was almost exclusively derived out of trillions in bad real estate bets, which took down other bets when they began to fold in 2006 and 2007.

It was the Fed that spurred the gambling with their crazy rate policies; the government threw gasoline on the fire with bad legislation. The Fed has admitted it has the ability to generate bubbles through rate policy mistakes; and a bubble is exactly what they created. If you inflate a $10 trillion real estate bubble, when it crashes it's going to wipe out your financial system.

Then it was the Fed that bailed out all the institutions they were previously dealing financial smack to. A trillion for Citi, a trillion for Bank of America, a trillion for Fannie/Freddie, and so on. During the recession post 9/11, the Fed 'encouraged' the banks to lend with the spigots wide open, and encouraged hyper risk with low rates.

2007/08 was a sugar crash, the Fed supplied the sugar. They're doing it all over again right now, and nobody gives a shit.

I understand the concern premise, but I disagree.

In the US we already live in an increasingly padded walls nanny state. Personally I've had enough of it. Forbid we be daring and reach for the stars again, and take on the risk that goes with it.

"The company's Caffeine index spans 100 million gigabytes of data ... "

That's a painful number. I wonder what Facebook's image data store is up to these days.

Andy was 28 years old or so when he sold out to Yahoo.

I don't think he was all that young or naive when he sold. It would not have been difficult at his age to understand the nature of Yahoo in the context of what they had just done to Google.

I appreciate that he might be a good guy, it's the excuses that he's making now for his choices then, that isn't deserving of slack.

Several impressive numbers in there.

100 backers at $1,000 a shot.

$38 per pledge.

Oh and exceeding the goal by nearly $3 million.

Great call. The people you're funding are worth a lot more than the money they're being given. Ideas being a dime a dozen, you're obviously funding the people more than anything else.

Yahoo sued Google over GoTo / Overture in 2004, picking up a cool billion dollars in the process.

This guy wasn't already seriously skeptical about their intentions by 2005 when he joined Yahoo? Yeah OK.

And this: "I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it."

Uhm. What? They had just sued Google for a billion dollars. On what planet does that sound like a shield that you're giving them?

This entire article is a lame attempt by the guy to wash off some guilt he's apparently feeling. It's ridiculous.

Own it big boy, you sold, enough with the excuses.

It's based on the crowd's judgement of merit and who is filing the lawsuit and why.

That is to say, Yahoo is viewed as non-innovative, and their action is viewed to be the result of a new CEO intent on aggressively finding pennies through any means including just by lawsuit. Meanwhile, most of Yahoo's team is apparently against this action.

So, it's the context. If you drop the context and equate Apple to Yahoo, then it's easier to arrive at: why is everybody upset when a company files a patent lawsuit.

I bet the same people upset about Yahoo also find Apple's lawsuits to be distasteful. Apple is viewed as a very innovative company, so they're given slack when it comes to suing over issues related to innovation.

If you were going to do the 'review anything' concept you'd need serious marketing cash. You'd also build verticals within the service to target, to benefit from search engines and try to narrow on the big core markets (but still stay open to literally any kind of review someone might want to do). Same way Oracle etc customizes their business software "solutions" for verticals.

I'm terrible about that (the licensing idea), I'd be far more likely to just code it from the ground up, even if that's the stupid monkey approach. I like having a personal relationship with my code (lol), the structure of the site, and knowing how that correlates to projected scaling, and so on.

Good write up. It's always nice when people share that kind of information / data. If I learn one thing from the time spent reading it, it was well worth it.

So, review a web site; review a dating profile (buyer). Why not a 'review anything' service?

It's obviously 30 million monthly pageviews (I said 1 million daily pageviews, I think you misread my text).

100 servers would assume media hosting for images and other files that go with a blog. That could all be kicked out to other services like Amazon, but the costs would obviously go up and I don't think it would be necessary.

At $500k +/- a year in infrastructure costs, I think Posterous could be wildly profitable. You could run a tight ship with five to ten people (throw in $500k to $1m in employee costs). If someone put a gun to your head, it could be maintained with a two or three person team.

Yahoo is currently hitting a $5 billion per year sales rate.

Sales for fiscal 2005 were $5.3 billion.

Yes, they're obviously a rocket ship of growth.

They're rotting. Worse than their 7 years of stagnation (let's not even inflation adjust for the comparison), is that their leadership is completely non-existent; they have no category killers that are banging out the growth and profits; they no longer produce big innovative products; their core as a portal is eroding; their dominance in display advertising has been eclipsed.

It'd be the first time founders were wrong, right?

Obviously once Posterous took the A & B $10 million in venture funding, their clock was seriously ticking. The founders no longer had real control over the company or its future. It wouldn't surprise me if they were diluted down to 10% or less ownership each, which wipes out the incentive to continue with a situation where you're going to see nearly zero payout due to VC terms unless you build an absolute monster company.

No matter what they did, due to the VC they took on, they were unlikely to have a long term time horizon unless they were 'beating' Tumblr. It was get extraordinarily big or go home, because apparently #500 wasn't big enough.

So they bailed, and it probably made perfect sense for their situations.

A monetized Posterous could be run on 100 or less servers. Tumblr runs on perhaps 1,500x according to High Scalability, and it's at least a few hundred times more nasty than Posterous in terms of server thrasing (pageviews and hits on the data via the dash).

Tumblr daily pageviews: 500m; Posterous daily pageviews: 1m

Posterous would never be a billion dollar service, but it could be the type of service that generates $10m+ in annual profit.

100 servers from a competent host + bandwidth via a pooling deal = less than $50,000 per month. It wouldn't be sexy, but it'd hold.

I wouldn't keep the current Posterous business model of chasing Tumblr into a pool of red ink. I'd place a bet that users will pay for a service that will stick around. It would reduce usage, but there's a large base to monetize that would be willing to stick around.

Yep, it had a very real business opportunity.

It really does make me want to take a run at getting the platform from Twitter, if they are in fact going to close it down. I've got the perfect name to rebrand it with, far better than the Posterous name.

Twitter might see serious tax benefits from shutting it down after the acquisition unfortunately. To them it might be worth more dead than alive.

Why would the remainders be lacking funding or customers?

The startups that stick around will have access to more of both all things being equal (ie assuming the same economy).

Posterous is apparently about to create a lot of orphans. Those are customers now available for a lot of other remaining startups etc. If you're a bootstrapped startup in the Posterous space, you should be licking your chops, Christmas is coming early.

Amazing, a top 500 global site (roughly), that appears likely to just close up shop. What the hell is that?

Hey Twitter, how about you give me the platform, we'll split 50/50 anything I make with it, I'll assume all the downside liability.

Posterous can go a lot further. This is a failure of imagination.

It provides that much greater of an opportunity for startups that stick around.

We already treat smells as extremely valuable on earth.

The fragrance industry is worth tens of billions for that reason.

Scarcity (smells on the moon) or lack thereof doesn't alter the principle of value, it varies the scale of value.

The word is: boondoggle

First of all, Microsoft screwed up in removing the start button. It was completely unnecessary to remove it, and they added no value in doing so. They could have just as easily had the start button pop out the appropriate side navigation, and then let users optionally decide which approach to keep.

Second, I'm sure there will be tutorials built into Windows 8 for people that want to learn how to use Metro and any of the other changes. Some of the comments here seem to ignore that. It doesn't excuse the stupidity of removing the start button of course.

Congrats guys, this is very cool.

Comeon, who doesn't trust Sony?

I think it's entirely possible to be both throughout a lifetime. I've been frighteningly ambitious and conservative at different points in my life and with different ideas.

When I was 21 / 22, I decided I was going to take on eBay. The premise, circa 2002, was to wipe out fees and shift the monetization to information and reselling (provide analytics & data to the sellers, and a re-selling channel in which they could contact buyers and attempt to generate repeat business). Basically sell tools and productivity to the sellers, instead of just slapping them with fees; at the time eBay was borderline retarded when it came to analytics and data provided by the marketplace.

I built the service, launched it, got modest early traction, took no venture capital, used guerrilla marketing, and then a really bad event struck my life that was outside my control. Shit happens and all that.

My latest venture is more modest, and I'm older and wiser. The odds of success are radically higher in this venture.

At 30 (no kids yet), I find my threshold for frighteningly ambitious projects is now primarily dependent on my personal finances. At 21 I didn't give a shit, at all. When I add another layer of financial security, I'll chase the dragon again - I really can't wait.

"Fast forward to today, and as a recent insightful post pointed out, even the "non-technical" members of famous founding pairs like Gates/Allen or Jobs/Wozniak have been extremely technical."

So, uhm, when were either Gates or Allen ever considered non-technical? (even relatively speaking) Which of the pair is supposedly the less technical founder? Both were extraordinarily technical. Hey Rao, your ignorance is showing.