wolfrom

I've e-mailed some whom I've already met, but I guess I've always approached it as I would speaking to investors, that cold pitches don't work. And I wonder what would happen if all 1600 applicants did the same.

Thank you for your feedback. There are competitors providing something similar, but not in the way we think developers require. They're also more focused on selling to large corporations rather than working with smaller ventures.

Barring a new remote dining edition of Grubwithus, I'll have to wait for the Winnipeg dinners for YC alumni. :)

But in all seriousness, I'd love it if someone would consider taking a glance at our application. People who should know have been telling us we're on to something, but I worry that we're just not communicating that effectively. I could pledge to eat during the feedback process if that helps.

Everything is just getting started; you haven't missed much yet.

I was wondering about that... do people just show up unannounced?

Great links. I'm a regular no-show for SkullSpace and Secret Handshake, but the other two are new to me.

On a related note, we're looking for a student to help us with our startup on the LAUNCH PAD. The third person we had for our team can't make it to SF and we're hoping to fill her place with someone who wants to be a part of the action.

So if you're just starting out, in school or just learning to program or design on your own, and you'd like to help out the people launching the Windsoc Unified Social API, please let me know (regan@windsoc.co).

We have a ticket for you, and we'd pay for your food and drink and something for the help. We're also hoping that if the event goes well, you might consider helping us again in future.

And Jason, let me know if you have a problem with this type of recruitment. Thanks!

SSL is definitely a huge concern for us. We're not sure we want to launch our product without it, but we certainly don't want to leave App Engine.

Don't forget that Mubarak was just an air force officer who was Sadat's vice president. It's hard not to think of this as a repeat of past successions. I haven't read whether Suleiman would stand for re-election in Sept.

This is very good information for us. This poll is part of our "is this a marketable idea" phase. It will help us decide if we should focus only on these tools for our products, or if we should design it for use by other applications through the API.

I had my reservations about people being willing to rely on an external service for this type of functionality, but it sounds like the bigger concern is more of value and utility. This should help us work towards the right design.

LaunchRock was inspired the initial launch of Rockmelt... I don't know if that's the source of the name. Rockmelt was the first app I know of that successfully allowed users to climb higher on the wait list by performing actions to increase app virality.

The concept we are working from is creating an API and possibly an embedded JavaScript to analyze the data and to provide updates, alerts and reporting. The plan is to make integration for tracking users as simple as possible to implement, while allowing for heavier customization for alerts and feature control if desired.

Where we've started from is that we have a product that we're going to be releasing in the next few weeks, and we felt that not only did we need to develop beta/release functionality, but that we would need it for several successor products that we will be developing. Rather than creating a compiled component, we thought that an API-based tool would give us more flexibility in future platforms and in sharing the features with others.

Like all other delegation, if we can't provide more benefit than you'd be able to develop for an equal or lesser cost, we're not worth it. But from the work we've done so far, we believe that we can make the process more efficient for startups.

That may not be enough specific info for the moment, but we will be fleshing that out more in the coming weeks. Thank you very much for your feedback.

changed to eliminate confusion... thanks

I find that my first two attempts at "startups" floundered (and eventually foundered) due in large part because I was too "young" (i.e., immature). I lacked confidence in what I was doing, and I always felt like I wasn't old enough to bring in real customers.

We'll see if startup #3 does any better (having a strong cofounder has certainly helped), but I think I can already say that there's no way our early-20s selves would have gotten this far (the two of us just weren't ready for it).

"Mark Zuckerberg might have a fit of brilliance and then announce a revolutionary ad platform that somehow actually works on social networks."

I'm not sure it would be altogether brilliant for Facebook to improve their advertising to be action-oriented as opposed to passive. People use Facebook for events and will soon use it more for Q&A and eventually "what ___ should I buy?". I think it would be common sense at that point to have ads targeted to a user's planned action, just as in the past ads have been targeted to very specific demographics.

I don't understand how my data is safeguarded by my home server when it's data I'm sharing with users who aren't on that same server. Once the data is shared, it's no longer under my control. I've wondered if there is a way to protect it, but I've yet to figure it out.

Of course, I'd love to find that there is someone who has a solution. I was unable to determine if buddycloud has figured it out.

As both a hacker and a hack writer, I follow William Shunn's manuscript format: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html

"In the days of typewriters, the usual practice was to put two spaces after the end of every sentence, and also to put two spaces after every colon. This helped make the separations between sentences more apparent, and helped editors more easily distinguish periods from commas and colons from semicolons. With the dominance of computers, that practice is changing, and it is more common now to see only one space between sentences.

"Ingrained habits die hard, though, so if you're used to hitting the spacebar twice after a period, you shouldn't stress out about it, particularly if you're using a Courier font."

We're working on exactly that issue for our product (Windsoc). We're working on algorithms that attempt to create social circles, while providing an interface that should make manual adjustment and categorization easy. When someone posts using our service, they'll be able to select specific circles of contacts, or even individuals, to Facebook or other services.

I've noticed that people have started to give up on the idea of contact management across services, which is usually a good indication that it's the perfect time to make it happen.

(If anyone is curious, we'll be starting private beta in December.)

I think context is intertwined with occasional mindset. Sometimes I'm in "work mode", and I want to consume data related to that, while other times I'm in more interested in family, or friends, or (rarely) political chatter. I believe that a service that can create context based on specific mindsets coupled with basic group management can be achieved.

I think it depends on the system. Making a system more efficient often depends on bending the rules. We had trouble coming up with examples for our application, because most of the "hacking" we've done isn't anything to brag about. But at the same time, we do need to show that we're willing to ask forgiveness later if we can't get permission now.

That's true. Google would be cheating its shareholders by not returning the most value through legal means. Of course, in Google's case, they probably could choose to pay more tax and get away with it, but why would they?

More info on rare earth elements: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_earth_element

It seems strange that someone with the business acumen to become the world's richest man would not look on the inefficient and broken charity and aid systems as an opportunity to create a better solution. There won't be good new jobs in places where there isn't reliable electricity or clean drinking water.

Like most aging industries, the "making the world better" industry is definitely in need of some disruption. We see newer entrepreneurs talking about this space more and more, so I wonder how long it will be before the richest entrepreneurs start looking at new ways of solving these problems.

While the retweet button is similar to like (my co-founder and I actually discussed this the day before), I do think that a Twitter Like button may come along eventually. In fact, I think it's even possible for an upstart Twitter client to decide (on its own or with some of the other clients) to implement a Like button protocol, in the hopes that Twitter would eventually adopt it.

Like buttons are great for monetization, so I think it could make sense for Twitter.

An excellent set of tips from a YC startup that we've been using for our product. The only thing I didn't see was Aaron's opinion on whether or not comments on Hacker News had helped anyone in his group stand out. I always check the karma score of co-founders to try and figure that one out.

More info available on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/28/twitter-setting-aside-early...

It does seem as thought Early Bird wasn't getting much attention from Twitter. I don't understand why, because daily deals are looking pretty good right now. I wonder if they would have seen far more success if they had localized the offers.

I find it strange that there are no buyers interested in your user base. I'd love to hear more about the monetization efforts that you attempted, as I would have imagined there should be numerous ways to leverage those users. But, of course, if I was an expert, I'd probably have the capital to make an offer.

What I find most interesting about this event is that there is really no consensus on what would have happened had he believed the alert to be genuine. When he received an award at the UN in 2006, Russia felt the need to declare that they would not have launched a counterattack without confirmation from other sources. I think it's a good example of how history is far more subjective that we like to think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

I think it's more of a Your Mileage May Vary situation. Where I work we use MSN, and I imagine they'd prefer Yammer if it were presented to them. We have a call centre that uses social and fun events to lower turnover, and they are looking for a way to allow employees to socialize in a controlled manner during work periods. We also have a sales team that is exploring the idea of social media to communicate with potential clients.

That's three areas that could use some good social software solutions. As opposed to waiting for new social features to be added to Outlook or CRM software, I would think that many enterprises would like to find and use software devoted to social.

(Shameless and obscure plug: that's one reason why our newborn startup is looking at this problem.)

I think "black and white" is a problem here... I see no reason why Arrington can't be right while McClure can honestly believe that there was nothing wrong with the meeting.

Conspiracy theories grow on the basis of black and white, good vs. evil, etc. Outside of programming, aren't we all used to varying shades of gray?