DISQUS

Mukund,

I was only half-kidding :p

If only I had any influence :(

I wrote about something similar on my blog although it was more about the credibility gap between personal blogs and corporate blogs:

Speaking as someone who works full-time as a salaried corporate blogger (among my other responsibilities,) I gotta say that most of the things on your list are things that I have yet to run into. I don't have a shortage of things to say on my company's blog. The whitewash / greenwash / astro-turfing stuff usually only happens when you let a sales guy transform every blog entry into a sales pitch. Yes, the company owns the content, but it's not like I can't link to it from my personal blog if I am so inclined. Being a corporate blogger is my work so it does come first, and I have no reservations about injecting my personal opinion into my pieces so long as it doesn't detract from my company's message.

Was a noble effort, but ultimately this is a pretty weak list.

I'll tell you what, Robert. If you can live up the promise that you're implying here (to make an earnest effort to move back to your roots) then maybe I'll start subscribing to your blog again. I'm a marketer, I blog about marketing, and I read tons of blogs about marketing. Watching Apple's PR team string tech bloggers along gets tiresome when I just want to, as you put it, find out about new technologies to make my life better.

Right now I can't find a lot of good "hey, check out this cool service" articles from the mainstream tech blog articles because it's all anchored around the vicious cycle of buying into the PR process.

So I'll tell you what: you start writing about cool new services beyond the latest iPhone app, beyond "whatever's hot now," and I'll subscribe again. FriendFeed, iPhone, Twitter - they're all over-exposed and well known; tell me what I don't already know.

Saw this via the conversation you started on LinkedIn. I like the post, but those videos are going to haunt me for the rest of my life :(

In all seriousness, Twitter does have some major noise control issues. I usually unfollow people at the first sign of "giving my dog a bath," "I TOTALLY LOVE CEREAL," and so on.

noob is right on the money. This article is total garbage. Why would WSJ say "goodbye" to millions of dollars in recurring revenue for high quality content? In addition it republishes premium content to academic institutions on an issue by issue basis free of charge.

What the hell is the point of this post?

Speaking as a Facebook Application developer and someone who's been using the site since 2004, I can attest that the performance issues have gotten a lot worse. Whomever is in charge of managing their server clusters is doing a shitty job as my connection resets constantly when I browse the site.

A sensationalist headline with zero content in the body of the post to go along with it? Someone's getting lazy.

Honestly, why go and buy a 60 server cluster *cough*Edgeio*cough* when you don't even have any fucking customers or revenue? I know it's good practice to prepare for scaling, but going out and buying enough capacity to serve millions large data queries a day right off the bat makes zero economic sense for the average startup.

In most cases, there isn't even a reason to invest in a VPS, let alone a cluster, unless the amount of demand the service experiences dictates that it makes economic sense to do so. Blowing a budget on establishing a huge infrastructure is stupid, and any startup that does this without any justification other than "just in case" deserves to go tits up.

While I think Amazon's service is a good offering, I don't think dedicated SQL/ORACLE/MySQL hosts have anything to worry about.

Speculate much?

ESPN offering free coverage of basketball games won't hurt the cable companies at all, given that there are like 4 families in the U.S. that still pay attention to the NBA.

Can we please have another gigantic list of useless, half-baked online services for random stuff? Where the hell is the list monkey who normally puts that stuff together?

If I got 11000 to 17000 pieces of spam a month, I suppose I'd blog about it too.

Where did you get the $150 million in revenue figure from? I had heard that FB's revenue was significantly less than that.

http://www.dotnetkicks.com/ is a real up and coming .NET resource. That should have made the list. Not to mention weblogs.asp.net and at least Scott Guthrie's blog.

The man who spoke and whom I happen to agree with wasn't trying to say per-say that college and high school students don't have any money to spend; what he meant was trying to grab up as much real estate (users who have installed your application) without any discretion as to whom your target audience should be is a waste of time in a lot of cases. High school and college students were his example simply because they do, in fact, constitute the largest portion of users and they do not have as much buying power as many other demographics present on Facebook.

So do you disagree with him then in which regard? That high school and college students don't spend as much money as self-sufficient people who use Facebook? That buying up as much real estate as possible without any idea on how to use it is a bad idea?

You are not alone. I just wrote an article myself discussing the causes of Facebook Application Fatigue. If you'd like to read it: http://www.ajaxninja.com/?p=88