Disqus - Latest Comments for pwb

Re: SMTP is dead, long live SMTP

pwb — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:23:19 -0000

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.

Re: My Love Hate Relationship With Technorati

pwb — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:44:28 -0000

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

Re: Why I Just Bought Amazon (AMZN)

pwb — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 20:43:56 -0000

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

Re: Why You Can Sometimes Wait For Scale To Execute Your Business Model

pwb — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:47:44 -0000

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.

Re: Texting In Purchases

pwb — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 01:46:40 -0000

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.

Re: delicious search

pwb — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 15:55:40 -0000

So was Delicious below Ask.com the month before?

Re: Free Is A Great Way To Make Money

pwb — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:07:03 -0000

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.

Re: Free Is A Great Way To Make Money

pwb — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:20:11 -0000

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"

Re: A Twitter Stock Quote Bot

pwb — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:13:52 -0000

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.

Re: Thoughts On Online Video

pwb — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:14:49 -0000

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.

Re: Are you using Firefox 3? (Scripting News)

pwb — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:50:05 -0000

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.

Re: Twitter and the importance of architecture

pwb — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:05:27 -0000

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

Re: Reports of the 3G iPhone’s imminent release may be slightly exxagerated

pwb — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:30:14 -0000

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?

Re: Jaxtr raises $10 million to expand cheap international calls

pwb — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:10:31 -0000

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!

Re: My new iPhone will cost how much? Thanks a lot, AT&T

pwb — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:19:45 -0000

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

Re: 2008/03/24/peerflix/

pwb — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:54:53 -0000

Brilliant idea!

Re: Google Reader needs GPC

pwb — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 13:23:54 -0000

What is "GPC"?

Re: Google about to drop the other Enterprise shoe on Microsoft?

pwb — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:19:40 -0000

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.

Re: Israel: a country too far from Mike Arrington’s house

pwb — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:50:38 -0000

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?

Re: Should services charge “super users”?

pwb — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:37:15 -0000

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.