Disqus - Latest Comments for davidmathers

Re: Social Networking: The Present

davidmathers — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 17:25:58 -0000

Scaling was the knockout punch, but the early adopters were already abandoning the site before it slowed to a crawl.

The massive influx of new users would have given them opportunity to learn from their mistakes, change their mindset and recover. Would they have done so, if their engineering dept hadn't delivered the death blow? I don't know. Maybe you do. But hindsight is 20/20.

Re: Social Networking: The Present

davidmathers — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 14:19:43 -0000

Not bad overall, but I think he's wrong about friendster. They did have scaling problems, but what I remember most is Jonathan Abrams actually going to war against his users because he wanted friendster to be a dating service.

And this bit of epic fail:

After a few flashes of what appears to have been a trademark grimace, Abrams took the strongest position of the evening, declaring that Friendster is not a social networking business and observing that "When I started Friendster, I never imagined that it would part of a 'space'".

In fact, Abrams deried the idea that there was any sort of space here at all, perhaps astutely adding that this buzz seemed to him like 'push' or 'web servives' — not just in being areas which ended up overinvested, but in that they were not real 'areas' to begin with, just loosely associated businesses (or pseudo-businesses) grouped around a hot topic. Abrams came away with the nice line "When I hear entrepreneurs and VCs talking about a space, it means there is trouble ahead."

-- http://many.corante.com/arc......

I remember at the time thinking "either the rest of us have succumbed to some sort of groupthink mass delusion and only he can see clearly, or he's an idiot who got lucky by accident and is now making the mistake of the decade."

Re: integrating vim and irb

davidmathers — Wed, 19 May 2010 07:58:59 -0000

There's also sketches: http://sketches.rubyforge.org/

Re: What if You Didn't Have Access to If/Then/Else? — A Single Programmer's Blog

davidmathers — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 14:11:04 -0000