xelipe

I would hate to have to add a meta tag for each services...

  meta name="googlebot" content="noimageindex"
  meta name="facebook" content="nolike"
  meta name="tumblr" content="noreblog"
  meta name="twitter" content="noretweet"
  ...

It is funny that the author calls Jason Calicanis a bully when he pays him homage with the entire content of the blog, slightly-misleading facts and figures, dragging competitors in a fight of words, catchy headline...

I was thinking the same thing... It is the next Sony, or worse the next Dell of consumer electronics.

Whether G+ is dead or not, or if it will be killed as a product in 1 year or 5 is not entirely clear. What is sure is that Google is adding social to all of their products in the form of +1 buttons. So even if G+ is shut down like Google Buzz, Google is betting on social.

I wouldn't be surprised if some commission tries to standardize the cloud icon much like the power symbol.

What amazes me most about his life is that he revolutionized on so many fronts and his innovations have helped people of all walks of life. Pixar movies have entertained children of all ages, the iPhone market has been a great resource for educational tools to help children with disabilities, and he did so with style. (;_;)

I picked up on that too. Just read the first line of every paragraph... "Your design is clean, elegant, tight, and fast... Ever since Napster I've dreamt of building a product similar to Spotify.... You know what's cool, a billion dollars is cool..."

As patents start to run out on some of the most profitable drugs, big pharma is looking for a new business models and new drugs. In addition to the cocaine vaccine, there are reports that they are working on a vaccine for alzheimer's.

What I also find new about the Cocaine Vaccine is that traditionally vaccines are composed of biological agents that mimic or resemble a decease-causing microorganism. Cocaine addition and alzheimer's are not caused by a microorganism which would indicate that big pharma are cooping the word 'vaccine' for a new class of drugs.

What is this, Google people rank for users' attention span on a given topic?

And it's off again. Google has removed the "send invites" features again. They are controlling the supply so as to create demand.

To me, G+ feels a lot like the launch of Google Buzz. Technologist rushed in, Robert Scoble, Leo Laport, and Jason Calacanis immediately had thousands of followers. Each of there posts received two hundred comments but most non-techie users didn't get sucked in as much. Sure Google Buzz had a botched launched and a slew of privacy issues but those were not the only problems it had in attracting users attention.

Circles is cool but people already have difficulties with private direct messages. Also, people don't want to curate lists.

I thought that same thing... It's a update on buzz' privacy data leak not the service. I would like Google to add Buzz support for Google Apps for Domains and an iPhone app.

I hate to be a nerd, but I thought Arabic was a Semitic language. This has always confused me about the term.

If I were her I would immediately update the website to read I Wanna to Work at Color.

Why doesn't she find a technical co-founder and start her the next Instagram?

I love Tumblr, been using it for nearly 4 years! While I agree that self expression matters, at least for me, there has to be more than that. MySpace also allowed users to change up and remix their profile page with custom CSS/JavaScript code but they still lost users to Facebook's clean design. MySpace became a digital ghetto, made evident by the glitter graffiti-like images posted user's comments. What I like about Tumblr is not only that it allows me to customize my tumblog but that it helps me with a set of great looking templates!

This creates opportunity in the space. There were a lot of happy users of Drop.io that will be apprehensive to move to similar service from Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. Are there any viable competitors in the space?

Mexico has decriminalized possession of drugs for personal use[1]. The most noted country to do so is Portugal. But this alone does not address the drug trade.

Touché in regards to the commend on moonshine. But it is well document that The Netherlands, who have a long standing liberal view on prostitution, are a leading destination of human traffic[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_liberalization [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Netherlands...

I like how everybody is an expert on the drug trade because we've all seen a 60 Minutes piece on violence in Mexico. Violence in Mexico is not a new trend and neither is the hysteria of violence spilling over. The fear of violence spilling in to the United States from Mexico was prominent one other time, during the Mexican Revolution. The current thread of drug related violence in Mexico is often attributed to the presidency of Felipe Calderon but it can actually be traced back to at least 25 years as it is evident in the culture of the narco that is prevalent there.

We can shut down the drug cartels in Mexico, like we did in Columbia, but the drug trade will be next be passed to another country like a baton. The next country to be promoted as a drug state will be Afghanistan with it's fields of poppies fulling the growing heroin demand.

I'm all for Proposition 19, but legalizing marijuana will not stop drug cartels just like legalizing prostitution does not stop the flow on human traffic.

Thanks for sharing the clip of Joe Ades. I've seen a lot of street performers and people selling odds and ends here and there but few people have made me stop on my tracks, in the middle of the day, and made me an instant customer by buying a product that I didn't even have in mind when I set out. That is powerful.

exhaustedhacker, I feel for you, but since when is TechCrunch to bouncer or doorman to your success? No ones fortunes should be dependent on Michael Arrington. Instead of taking time to craft emails for him and his staff him, spend sometime crafting emails to targeted users. You said that you have had some success from meetups, do more of that, fight for every user. Give out a few free trial accounts to influencers, such as to folks here on YC. Reach out to other disrupters, Mashable, This Week in Startups, etc. If you don't have time to blog about your, you can contract folks for $10-20 a post.

Good luck, and thanks for sharing!

I hate to say this, but this is true of any service. Facebook, Google, Twitter is within their right to change their respective term of service at any time, to enforce those terms of service at any time, and to even revoke the usage of a service to a user. I find that this would be specially true when the doing business with a foreign based company.

Another problem I have not seen anyone bring up, and the main reason I never bought fugg.ly, is Libya's Axis of Evil status. The United States can can potentially put an embargo restricting ownership to .ly domains.

Journalism will continue to evolve, from newspaper to television network news to blogs to Facebook pages to YouTube channels to mobile apps to whatever. We have to make the distinction that newspapers is one form of journalism. It would be sad for some if the newspapers went away, just as it was sad when the stage coach or the floppy disk gave way to better alternatives.

I'm glad Facebook did this. I've wished for a long time that Google had this feature since I care about my Google Mail and Google Docs a lot more than my Facebook Status updates. This is a step in the right direction for people like me that backs up my twitter updates because Twitter is sometimes does not give you access to your entire history. More services should implement similar features, I'm sure that companies like will create import tools for this data.

Now, if only Facebook simplified it's process to delete an account...

Completely agree. I don't imagine anyone here would like to be analysed by a blogger to such degree, especially based on one of hand comment. The article reads like a hit piece and the sort of outing that caused _why to remove all of his projects and writings from the net. The fallacy the author committed was trying to compare apples and oranges to dollars and cents, comparing a salary amount to a life choice, comparing success to revenue.

Anytime someone announces that they will invest X million into a public charity, always ask, over what period and under what conditions? This reminds me of how BP pledged $20 billion to help the Gulf states affected by the oil spill, but they didn't mention the tax break they got out it and how it was actually placed in an escrow account with conditions favorable to them.

I applaud his actions but question his timing and motivations.

The only thing missing from that post was the blinking text and the spinning email image from circa 1999.

Good question. In SV there are cities with a foreign born population that is well above 50%. Another question I would ask, what is the percentage of SV founders that are Native Californians?

In Mother Russia you don't follow public officials on Twitter, public officials follow you.

Does Posterous have a reblog, favorite, follow, follower stream features? It seems that Posterous is trying to emulate some of the marketing mojo from Apple's switch ad campaign. This aggressive switch campaign might indicate that the number of new users to the system might have plateaued. Does Posterous post the active users, monthly impressions, etc?

I agree 100%, the author comes off a bit unprofessional, pushy, and demanding. You can't even begin to imagine how many people send in suggestions, feature requests, ideas, etc. to companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. I know because in middle school I sent such an email to Capcom on killer game ideas. After some time I received a nice letter in the company letterhead from them encouraging me to stay in school and excel in math. Even though I didn't get acquired or got a job, that letter meant so much to me.