DISQUS

I've randomly bitched and moaned about your posts, and generally I'll defend what I say. This one is actually smart. The fact that I work for tripadvisor.com has nothing (nothing I say.. please believe me). to do with it.

Umm, on the title. The metaphor is strained and you're identifying yourself as old. That is all.

I guess I should have read the whole post ;-). Thomas Hawk would probably say that this is an opportunity that Flickr missed out on, because he's been saying flickr should have done exactly what Shutterstock did.

Or you can understand CC licenses enough to find the pictures on flickr that are available for commercial use, as long as you give proper attribution (It's not that difficult to search for them). Here's a couple of you:
http://flickr.com/photos/ojbyrne/507863093/
http://flickr.com/photos/ojbyrne/465536396/

The two examples you've given - both Starbucks and Microsoft - were held up as exemplars of great companies not too long ago. It makes me think its just the natural growth cycle of businesses - growth, stagnation, decay, failure. Some companies may have cycles of different length, some may never have the growth to get them to the next step, and probably no company is exactly the same. 10 years from now (or less) we'll be could be denigrating Google in the exact same way. It's the rare company (IBM and Apple come to mind) who can reignite the cycle and grow again.

Whaddya mean paying for the use of a still from a high profile Hollywood movie to promote my commercial website?

At least one person would say you and Ron Conway have the "buyer's market for VC" exactly backwards:

http://www.paulgraham.com/divergence.html

Here's the thing, that I've said repeatedly in various forums. Just the very fact of Obama winning the election is going to make people happy, worldwide. It's going to resemble VE day, a one-time lift to all economies worldwide.

This sure seems like the RIAA would go after it. It's still technically illegal to rip MP3s, so it seems like incitement to pirate.

As the person who built digg spy (though Daniel Burka and Kevin Rose did design it), I just have to say - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and none of these have even come close to what we built in 2005.

Remember digg spy? http://blog.digg.com/?p=289
Since I built it I'm kind of sad to see it go. But really this is just the same thing, within the friendfeed context. Actually not quite as sophisticated as spy was in 2005.

In my opinion, the n*n problem isn't an email problem. It's a MS Word problem. Without the content being locked up in that document, people could just "reply all" to the most recent email in the chain. There may be n*n copies, but people only see n.

Chances are, if you have an outsized ego and live in New York City right now, you're going to overreact. You are not the center of the universe, and you probably just made a mistake.

I believe there's one other factor - smallness. Views on flickr actually mean that people visited the single photo page. They often do that just to see the picture in a larger size. It is also a stronger picture - I'm gonna quote Philip Greenspun on the fisheye one: "Except for a few aerials, I think fisheye images look like refugees from the 1960s."

I thought John Edwards would be the perfect VP for Obama. White male, southern democrat, great rabble rouser. OOPS!

My last comment got eaten by (presumably) Akismet, presumably because I had a link in it... So I'm going to try again.

Just to continue to annoy, I'd also like to point out that Microsoft's first product wasn't a compiler, it was an interpreter ;-).

And just to continue to annoy, I'd like to point out that Microsoft's first product wasn't a compiler, it was an interpreter ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_BASIC

I'm gonna apologize for the cheap shot about civil servants - "Non-passionate" made me angry. Going forward though, I'm gonna think of early adopters and late adopters as "naive" and "skeptic" because I think that it fits just as well.

Personally, I think "skeptic" is a better term.

Robert, I've heard you say "good enough for government work" in person. I find "non passionate" to be pejorative.

I find "non-passionate" to be obnoxious. Why don't you just say "lazy" and be clear about it. And then lumping in everybody in the world who doesn't use friendfeed or whatever the latest ego amplification device is with people who type yahoo into the search-bar is really obnoxious. I've met lots of people who couldn't care less about the latest thing out of the valley because they have demanding jobs that draws all their passion into it. I've met medical researchers and doctors and university professors who do lack computer skills, but guess what, thats because their jobs suck up all their passion, and rightly so. Yet you also find that they're often experts at software that actually helps them in their job (and usually that software is clunky, and old and not very easy to use - yet somehow they manage to make it work for them, whereas if you put a 25-year old web 2.0 whiz in front of it, they'd whine about the interface and give up in ten minutes)

I think today's earthquake provides a great example. While the chattering classes are all agog over how great twitter is in disseminating news, the real heroes are the people who built the USGS service - they're most likely "non-passionate" users who are underpaid and overworked civil servants who get no real credit at all. In fact I've never met an American who didn't use the civil service as anything but the butt of jokes (and that includes you).

Is there a reason you didn't even mention the market leader? The market for smart phones is beginning to look like a rather epic battle between RIM and Apple, because while Apple is gaining huge marketshare, RIM seems to be holding steady (probably bad from their point of view as they were growing fast). They call them "crackberries" for a reason.

@Jake, that's why I said "maybe." Post-rank's algorithm is not really clear.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like you're not accounting for the volume of items submitted at different times, so that a post at 2 am might be proportionally more likely to become popular, even though the absolute number is smaller, because the total number is also smaller.

Thanks for the mention! Since I'm the programmer Kevin hired for "a few grand" (actually a founder but never let the truth get in the way of a good story).