waxman

Ha. Well, even though this mimics real social groups much more closely than social networking v1.0, I don't think the issue had become readily apparent until recently (as evidenced by the number of products that have appeared in the past 3-6 months including Groupme (betaworks), CollegeOnly (funded by Peter Thiel), Google Me, Frid.ge (YC '10), Diaspora, etc.)

was just talking about this on HN the other day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1691492

it's clear that contextual sharing is the feature of social networking, but I underestimated facebook's ability to implement such a drastic feature so elegantly (and quickly)

I also haven't had any problems (though only after 3 months). I am both aware and a little nervous about the issue, though, so I've run a few benchmarks, and so far, so good. I'll be sure to tell HN if this changes.

Ask HN: Do you think bit.ly should be worried? Do you think they could feasibly switch to a backup url (like j.mp) without totally killing their service?

Very interesting hack.

For me, media files were a killer too, so I simply put my media collection on an external HDD, "cached" my favorite 20GB or so of content on my SSD (the stuff I put on my iPhone, essentially), and started relying more on streaming services like Pandora, Rdio, and Hulu, etc.

I did this in July and I haven't used the external drive even once...

I have a SSD on my Macbook Pro. Totally worth it. Definitely snappier in booting up, starting up apps, and any disk i/o-intensive operations. It's certainly noticeable.

Also, you don't need to sweat the higher price per byte, because more and more of my files (and I would assume yours?) are on the cloud every day anyways, so 256GB or even 128GB is fine for me these days.

Actually, to be blunt, if it's not sales it might as well be a million miles away.

Startups need people who build, who create, who do. Things like "strategy", setting up deals, introductions, "almost sales", etc. are, by themselves, worthless at a young company.

My advice to you would be this:

Learn to code, or, don't do a tech start-up.

I think it's a little bizarre that people without technical skills (or startup skills) feel compelled or even entitled to start a tech company. These are specific, hard skills (not unlike law or medicine), and if you don't have them you need to develop them or find another line of work.

You could still start a "technology-enabled" company, like HuffPo (a media company), or Gilte (a fashion retail company), but you should probably have specific domain expertise in the non-tech vertical that you want to work with.

If you want to "start the next Facebook", though, (I.e. build a scalable, virtual product) then I have news for you: if you can't code it, you can't do it.

The site just went down again, awkwardly enough, only moments after they published their post-mortem on yesterday's outage.

Clearly, as their blog post indicates, they were unable to trace the root problem.

To me, the worst feeling in the world as a developer is when there's a major bug in your production site, and you can't figure out exactly why it happened. Then even after you get the site working there's that pit in your stomach of "what if it strikes again?"

Great post!

Another benefit, I find, of micro opportunities is that they provide momentum or "small wins", which can help to alleviate the frustration that often sets in when building critical path features, which almost always take longer than you think and can sap excitement.

I didn't see the point to begin with.

Social Networks are and have always been interface challenges, not technical ones (at least until you get to massive scale).

The more logical way to address privacy concerns would be through interface (clearer controls, better explanations of who can see what, simpler ways to share with select groups, etc.)

The idea that a buggy, self-hosted, SSL-encrypted node would address any of people's dissatisfaction with Facebook is, I think, silly to begin with.

At a start-up there are at most only two roles:

Can you build it? Or can you sell it?

In tech start-ups, building it means coding, and that might be only role early on.

"Selling it" is broader than pure sales (E.g. Selling it to investors, to non-paying users, to bloggers, etc.), but you need a track record in selling (I.e. Not "analysis" or "marketing").

There's a reason why there is a programming bias: programming is 90% of the work at an early stage consumer web company. So get back to coding, or try something other than start-ups, because there is no job for an 'analyst' at a start-up (or a community manager, or a head of product, or a COO, or any other job that isn't building or selling).

I owned and briefly used a very similar German-made device called the Axbo: http://www.axbo.com/axbo/CMS/CMS.aspx?Language=E

In my experience, it actually didn't work at all.

I suspect one main problem was that you could only set the alarm to wake you up within a 30-minute window, which meant there was a fairly high probability that the optimal point in your sleep cycle would occur before or after the alarm (given that the average sleep cycle is 60-120 minutes).

That said, it's one of those ideas that just sounds so compelling (Circadian rhythm!?! Sign me up!) It could work, the Axbo execution just didn't cut it for me.

I actually know the Wakemate guys, and I'm really anxious to try their product. I hope it works! For their sake, and for all those sleep-deprived hackers out there like myself!

One question I have for HN, though, is: given their supply chain troubles and the fact that, for all we know, their product may or may not actually work, what do you think about pre-selling a brand new product? Is it ethical? Is it advisable from a long-term strategic perspective (e.g. does it create the wrong expectations settings for your first users?)

I'd be particularly interested to hear from Wakemate!

Yeah, that is what I meant.

At it's core the plot is about a pretty specific experience (the challenges of founding a tech startup as a young, inexperienced hacker), but the emotions and the drama are universal, which is why I think the movie will enjoy widespread success.

At the end of the day, though, it's about founders and hackers and startups. And that's awesome.

Lots of subcultures have their own movies. I'm just glad that ours is so damn awesome!

Also: I think the screenplay, the directing, and the score (Trent Reznor!) will be nominated for Oscars.

Fair points. Having raised money from angels before, here are some of my thoughts:

1. Advice: This is clearly extremely valuable, even for experienced entrepreneurs. That's probably why a company like Chartbeat (serious revenue, and part of Betaworks) raised a $3 million round from strategic angels, when they probably didn't need the money http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/31/chartbeat-3-million/ . That said, if you're taking on angels for non-monetary reasons, then you still have to think about their value-add in monetary terms (at least, generally). Is this person's advice worth 10% of my company? Also, you could get their advice by asking them to sit on a board of advisors (or directors) for a token sum of equity (<1%) and still get them involved and incentivized without forking over a large chunk of ownership.

2. Networking: This is certainly a huge contribution of the top angels (and frankly, it's probably, more than any other single factor, what separates the Conways/PG's/Dixons of the world from every one else). Again, though, you can potentially gain access to the same networks through less "expensive" means: i.e. connecting with these people in some other way, whether as a friend, or a mentor, or an advisor, etc., but not necessarily as a full-fledged investor. If their network really IS that valuable, though, surrendering a large chunk of equity might absolutely be worth it, provided that they are excited about your start-up. (EDIT: I'm not recommending you "hack networking" in an unethical way. If somebody is providing you value through their network you should certainly reward them for it. At the same time, you shouldn't just surrender a quarter of your company because some says they have a lot of contacts).

3) Money: Agreed. Money makes the world go round. Most hacker/founders, though, only need to cover their living expenses to get projects off the ground. $70k/year for two boot-strapping founders is very different than a million-dollar angel round. Also, people billed as "top-tier" angels are obviously commanding a premium for their investment (a higher % of the company for less money). Just make sure you're getting your money's worth.

I think in certain cases angels are definitely worth it, but I think it's essential to weigh the costs of equity with what they're actually giving you.

I'm not losing sleep over it (too busy hacking), but it's easy for We Pay to say they don't care: they've already raised 3 rounds http://www.crunchbase.com/company/wepay . The essay was edited by PG, himself. Clearly the angels have treated them well.

I think the more pertinent conversation should be around what the hell do some of these angels offer to entrepreneurs, anyways? Money is a commodity these days. Plus, real hackers require very little, if any, to get off the ground in the EC2-era. The very top guys (like PG, Sacca, Ron Conway, Chris Dixon, etc.) are obviously in it for the right reasons AND offer a lot more than money. But the majority of angels, even some of the top ones, I fear take more than they give.

Thanks for writing this detailed postmortem!

The entire story, though, can really be distilled into one idea: expectation settings.

You always want to under-promise and over-deliver, but it sounds like, in multiple domains, the Newstilt team did just the opposite. They promised a lot to their writers, to their investors, to each other. This happened in both obvious and subtle ways.

What's the problem with the wrong expectation settings?

Where to begin... First of all, it is human nature to raise expectations. You're afraid investors won't invest, developers won't work for you, journalists won't contribute to your site, your co-founder won't carry on: so you raise expectations.

The critical dynamic that screws everything up, though, IMHO, is that inflated expectations attract the wrong types of people. That's the killer.

Paul provided many examples of this. Over-promising to journalists attracted the wrong types of journalists; over-promising to users attracted the wrong types of users; over-promising to potential employees attracted the wrong hire.

If there's one lesson to takeaway from Paul's story it's: under-promise and over-deliver.

Start simply. Don't worry about being too simple. Just be honest, so you attract the right people at the right time.

I feel you.

I think the "drinking photos" example is illustrative because it's extreme, but I think the real, widespread pain points --- I know the ones I have, at least --- are more along the lines you mentioned.

Sure, you can put up certain walls relatively easy (i.e. only these friends can see my pictures).

But I think you hit on the essence of contextual sharing, which is that privacy aside, you simply want to share different things with different people.

I want to share the Paul Graham essay with only my start-up friends, I want to share the new NoSQL db github link with only my hacker friends, I want to talk smack about fantasy football with only those people, I want to post my family vacation pictures to only my family, etc.

I agree with you that people don't want to micromanage (the means) but I do think people want to segment their social sharing (the ends).

I think the trick will be to figure out an interface where you can share this way, without it feeling like a pain/micromanaging, etc., and I think this will require a paradigm shift.

Any solution that is, essentially, a "facebook tweak" (whether it's by facebook themselves or diaspora, or whoever) will always be cumbersome.

I think to solve this problem a new paradigm is required, one that replaces the ultimately inaccurate social metaphors of facebook (friend requests, wall posts, news feed, status updates, private inbox messages), with a totally new approach that comes at these problems in a different way (for instance, a unified feed with messages organized by group, as a replacement to all of the features listed above).

Contextual Sharing (and the new social network that figures it out) will kill Facebook.

I'm convinced that contextual sharing is the next evolution of social networks, and I don't think FB is in a position to pivot towards it.

Contextual sharing is the idea that in real life you have multiple, often separate social circles (work pals, college roommates, siblings, friends, grandparents, frat brothers, etc.), and that social networking 1.0 (i.e. facebook/twitter) doesn't account for this very well. You really want to share stuff only with specific groups, but this is hard to do on existing sites.

This leads to all sorts of real pain points, many of which are becoming unbearable for some users: i.e. you don't want your boss seeing photos of you drinking, or you don't want your grandmother to see that racy link you just posted, so you suspend your FB account.

Even though Facebook has a crude groups feature, this doesn't come close to addressing the fundamentally flawed orientation of the network: one, big pot of 100 to 1000 casual acquaintances, as opposed to dozens of partitioned ~2 to 10-person real social circles.

This idea has been exploding, recently:

- Google Me (Google's soon-to-be-released last shot at social) is almost certainly going to be based around this concept of contextual sharing (as Google UX engineer @padday's recent slide show indicated)

- Diaspora (the OSS project from NYU students that raised $200k this spring) announced on their blog that contextual sharing is their #1 interface priority

- Frid.ge (YC '10) is built around this idea

- College Only (funded by Peter Thiel) is a solution to the problem just for one context (college friends)

- Groupme.com (betaworks) is an SMS-only approach

And ALL of this projects came to life within the past 3 to 6 months!

Next-generation social networks will mirror our offline social experience more closely by shifting the focus from a giant network of "friends" to private, micro-networks that mimic real friend groups.

I think this change is significant enough that Facebook will be unable to pivot without alienating their huge user base.

Also, one of Facebook's main competitive advantages has been the fact that it is a network good with high switching costs (e.g. in order for a new site to be as good as facebook, you need to convince all of your 800 friends to sign up for the new site too).

If the future of social networking really is contextual sharing, though, this barrier becomes much lower (if it continues to exist at all), because if you really just want to share with your 'real' friends, then convincing these small groups whom you know really well (your best buds, or your roommates, or your sibilings, or whatever) to try out a new site is actually pretty trivial.

Thoughts?

Full-disclosure: I'm thinking of building a contextual sharing tool of my own, because I think it's so damn exciting. Would love your feedback.

Definitely go with Heroku for two reasons: time savings (no sysadmin is huge!) and flexibility (you can always migrate later, which is easy since almost all of their stack is open-source).

These guys appear to lack both technical backgrounds and start-up backgrounds. They're backers not hackers. Could be useful for some businesses, but for consumer web startups the YC approach and team seem far more relevant.

37Signals themselves readily admit that charging B2C consumers is hard, which is why they shifted their business to focus almost only on B2B products. I don't think they've ever said charging casual users works. They're whole thing is that the best market for web businesses is the "Fortune 5 million" of small businesses who will actually pay for stuff.

I don't see what the point of your post is. 37s already concedes these facts as part of their philosophy.

Just wrote an API in CoffeeScript, using Node.js and Express.

It was surprisingly enjoyable. I can see this ecosystem giving Rails/Sinatra/Django a real challenge. CoffeeScript makes ssjs a lot easier once you get used to it, Node.js gives you free non-blocking/high concurrency, and Express, which just released 1.0, is quickly maturing into a really solid DSL/web framework.

I'm excited to see how this ssjs scene unfolds.

Congrats, guys!

I have to say, though, while you were busy inching towards 1.0 I've fallen in love with other production-ready NoSQL db's (namely Mongo and Cassandra). I'm excited to play with Couch, just to play with it, but as someone who is already very satisfied with other NoSQL technologies (when I need them), what would be your pitch for why I should give Couch a serious look?

For someone who isn't a serious programmer but is looking to prototype a business idea, I think Ruby/Rails are more user-friendly than Python/Django.

- Rails deployment and hosting are super simple with Heroku (http://heroku.com), which, again, I think is more user-friendly than the Python equivalent (Google App Engine)

- There are some excellent free resources out there (check out http://railscasts.com, http://guides.rubyonrails.org/, and http://railslab.newrelic.com/scaling-rails)

- There is a very vibrant community of plug-ins (gems)

Honestly, I think that getting a book (try this one: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with..., 4th edition), and then simply practicing will get you up and running faster than a course.

Also, now is a good time to get into Rails, as version 3.0 has just came out.

"Facebook is a ponzi scheme... of people and sense." Great line.

One of the longstanding hesitations for cloud computing is "my whole business will depend on someone else's business, what if they go under?"

With $10mm in the bank, 60k apps in the cloud, Amazon's AWS backend, Heroku's rockstar team, and a real revenue model, I think it's safe to say that you can bet your business on Heroku.

My new project sure as hell will...

Isn't that what Google App Engine is?

Heroku is a cloud-based deployment and hosting solution for Ruby apps (and soon to be Node.js javascript apps too). Google App Engine is for Python and Java.

It's in the US, but that's a fascinating law.

Google actually specifies that they cannot disclose the exact location of one's Google Apps data because it is automatically distributed across three different server farms out of several dozen (or more) potential locations. They also are purposefully vague about disclosing the locations of their data farms, in general. Incidentally, one likely reason for this is security.

I agree that there are some genuine privacy and security concerns about the cloud, but I think most criticisms fall into the unforgivable category of "I don't trust it because I can't see it."

And in this sense, academics refusing to accept the cloud are like academics refusing to accept gravity.