DISQUS

"AT&T customers who haven’t bought an iPhone yet" can be eligible for the $199/$299 prices.

I don't get the "social networking" aspect of the service. Who ants or needs that? All these services stil can't figure out how to call Italy Mobile for less than 20c/minute which is a joke. Forget all the social curd and concentrate on the core service!

Mike's right, Cyndy's wrong. Scaling is *way* easier than creating a super-popular service.

Does anyone *actually* know how Twitter does what is does? Given the 140 byte limit, Twitter seems very "doable" with some basic design choices. This is why I think Ruby/Rails may really be a culprit here...it's too high level to support some of the things Twitter needs to do.

Why would AT&T subsidize something that will sell fine without a subsidy? Wouldn't the subsidy be much better timed several months after all the early adopters claimed theirs?

Despite the echo chamber in the valley, it's still a far better place to start companies. Has much value been created in those other cities you mention?

For general purpose browsing, IE on WIndows, Safari on Mac.

For special purpose (development, preference) I will occasionally fire up Firefox on Mac/Win or Safari on Win.

The point is, if you are going to try to develop an online-video-based franchise, you're going to have a rough go of it because you are up against millions of others who have different standards of "success".

Also, I'd like to point out that YouTube was far from lucky. They made some very conscientious decisions that were key to success, namely using low quality Flash-based video that started instantly, having little or no restrictions on uploads and uploaders and making it easier than easy to push videos out to MySpace et al.

Brilliant idea!

Putting out an open source copy of Exchange is a total no-brainer. Zimbra was far too focused on the front-end. Scalix is interesting but on a weird platform. Open Xchange could be the answer although it clouds it's story with all sorts of "collaboration" mumbo jumbo.

Why didn't IM bots ever take off? Seems like such a no-brainer but I didn't see anyone other than ActiveBuddy pursue it.

This point cannot be overstated: "From the consumer's perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you're in an entirely different business"

The reason you should offer FREE is because you *can*! The variable cost of providing an interent service is very near zero. If you don't, someone else will. And it's a perfectly reasonable way to acquire paying customers.

It's lame we are still conflicted about this. And please don't give me any of the "yes, but" or "it depends" crud.

So was Delicious below Ask.com the month before?

As some have pointed out, you can start watching the movie in about a minute.

The best test-to-pay use case I've seen so far is paying for parking. There are several municipalities and companies rolling out such service.

PayPal's "Text-to-Buy" is also interesting as a general putrpose payment solution.

Don't get defensive...get offensive!! Monetizing early can leave services vulnerable to competitors who wait. It's easier to make money from heavy usage than it is to create a service that garners heavy usage.

What is "GPC"?

Until there is a fairly decent competitive offering, I have to think that it is too risky to put your whole company on AWS.

Technorati has never had a very good handle on how users do and would use its service.

Email might take a hit but I think any day now we will be discovering that SMTP would be the best way to deliver outbound notifications (for programatic consumption). Request/Response-style APIs are not approriate for everything.