Disqus - Friends of centernetworks

Re: Meebo Comes to the Desktop

profy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:02:26 -0000

That's exactly what I keep talking about: we are supposed to move online from desktop yet numerous online apps populate our desktops with further apps - some of them pretty resource-hungry as well.

Re: Stand proud Svetlana – you don’t need to be on the bandwagon

profy — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:26:29 -0000

Louis, of course I do realize that you don't necessary have to download mobile apps if you consider yourself an early adopter - it was just what made me realize there were some things that were not making me excited any more even despite of the fact that everyone in the tech community adores them.

Re: You too can follow President Obama

profy — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:25:58 -0000

The thing is that they could easily launch a new site for the new President if he enjoys a similar popularity and also keep this one in case there are still people who will want to listen to what Barack Obama has to say after his Presidency is over.

Re: louisgray.com: You Don't Need To Know Where This Rant Was Written

profy — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 01:03:54 -0000

Yes, that's what's really amazing: we are moving to total transparency that does not really seem to be actually reasonable or needed.

Re: GReader Leaderboard: Louis Gray

profy — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:30:59 -0000

Louis, thanks for the explanation about my absence, I guess I'll have to rethink my posting schedule again to ensure at least some sort of comeback to your leaderboard :) Anyway good to be interesting even despite the timezones!

Re: Facebook announces fbFund app winners

profy — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 02:40:58 -0000

I guess the apps were selected for their potential and probably the MouseHunt still has a long way to go, even if profitable now. Besides, given that users also participated in the decision making process with their votes it is no wonder as the game seems to have tons of passionate users judging by the reviews on the game's page on FB.

Re: Google buries Lively

profy — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:44:54 -0000

Yes, I was also surprised about that. The thing is that they reported that their economy is growing pretty rapidly with a user spending less than a dollar per hour on average. My guess is that it is less expensive and more healthy than drinking a beer in a bar to escape of your problems. So could be pretty sustainable.

Re: Trusting Employees to Know Their Jobs

profy — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:32:14 -0000

Daniel, of course missed deadlines can be considered as a perfect indication of a very poorly organized workflow. But the problem here is that the entire industry works like this. I believe it is due to our post-Soviet mentality when everything in the country was considered as belonging to the society and no one felt ownership over anything - and when it's common and not mine why would I care about it? So people never thought it was intolerable stealing in this or that way from the state and the company you worked in. And I guess this is exactly why we have all the programmers actually behaving like this - constantly engaging in various personal activities when at work and thinking it is Ok to do that. I am no psychologist or HR specialist myself but I think this is very visible here - and I have not seen such examples in the US myself (or maybe I am just not familiar enough with the workflow across the ocean).

Re: Windows 7: The search for a good headline

profy — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:08:26 -0000

Sure they will as this is something Microsoft is totally perfect in - they know exactly how to make us buy all their new products (or relatively new) even if we don't even like them. But that's the power of OEM distribution and I don't think we can really do anything about it.

Re: Windows 7: Vista gets a sequel

profy — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:46:51 -0000

Anthony, I don't think anyone is impressed by the name but it is very true - the irony is definitely here in Nash's behavior.

Re: Trusting Employees to Know Their Jobs

profy — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 07:20:51 -0000

The problem in Russia is that we simply hire full-time developers and set goals and deadlines for them. But it is not unusual to have deadlines broken - especially with fixed salaries that don't depend on the results achieved.

But I do think it is a problem of mentality as the more you trust people here, the lazier they seem to become. And it is not even about imposibg deadlines - in my experience we have always discussed goals and terms and agreed on what sounded realistic to them as well. But unfortunately such deadlines were almost always broken - maybe too much trust.

Re: Google relaunches Blog Search as a less-good version of Google News

profy — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:26:21 -0000

True, I also think we will still stick to what we are already accustomed to - but this new product also seems to have an interesting future provided that Google fixes a few things about it.

Re: How To Capitalize On Google Phone Hype | My Philly Network

profy — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:13:16 -0000

Imagine if it's tempting for the people that see it's a fraud how tempting it must be for those that won't see it can't be real :)

Re: Google + Amazon = Mobile Takeover | My Philly Network

profy — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:26:38 -0000

LOL, it's just that I seem to have a peculiar form of paranoia when I see advertising-related motives everywhere. But to my dismay my suspicions often prove to be the reality :)

Re: On the road to one million | Broadcasting Brain

profy — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 06:55:41 -0000

LOL, it's the easiest way to do it - provided that you can achieve it. I have failed miserably myself :)

Re: T-Mobile Android phone to hit stores on Oct 17, Sprint Android phone coming next year

profy — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:12:38 -0000

Yes, Dream definitely sounds better from the marketing perspective, especially when it comes to mainstream market that does not care that G stands for the Google almighty.

Re: Google buys Korean blogging software platform TNC, one of first purchases in Asia

profy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:24:02 -0000

Yes, that's why I was also curious about the "pictured left" thing in the post. Besides, I am also under impression that the CEO is actually a guy from a phrase on his blog "In Korea, all men must serve in the army for several years, but instead I ended up at an internet company called Nextel through a special program for people with IT or other skills." So I guess the girl's photo on the blog is more intended to show how beautiful Korea can be :)

Re: louisgray.com: Blogs' Never-Ending Battle of Page Views vs. Conversation

profy — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:16:13 -0000

Louis, very true, ads are only viable for a tiny portion of blogs but I am sure that smaller blogs will continue looking for other solutions. Sponsorships (similar to that on Techmeme - which is obviously a very sustainable model) may be the answer for many blogs but it will take some time for more advertisers to realize they could use blogs advertising for their business. Right now the majority of advertisers prefer the hassle of working with every single blog on a case by case basis to comfort of paying higher to an ad network. But hopefully this will be changing – it just should take time. And of course there are always other money sources, like consulting – a very popular thing among many tech bloggers.

Re: What is the value of Docstoc?

profy — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 13:06:10 -0000

Roger,

Yes, it is pretty obvious that this niche is a very small one - after all,
people really embed documents into posts only occasionally. I have actually
embedded docs a couple of times - once I wanted to include original research
(pdf) that was the basis of a post and second time was very recently when I
wanted to embed a spreadsheet with multiple figures of my own calculations
in case someone wanted to take a look at them.

But the niche is truly small. And while I like the documents backup service
Docstoc has recently launched, I will probably not use it myself until it
gets more advanced features (for example, for me to only use it from home
where I have unlimited internet plan and never from the office where we pay
way too much per GB).

But if there's one thing I know, it's that we are obviously out of
interesting ideas already and all the new products seem to be based on
something already available but improved and often it is hard to understand
the value of this or that service.

Re: Our review: Chrome More Than Capable of Taking on IE and Firefox

profy — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:56:22 -0000

That's optimistic :) Hopefully you realize that "nothing to hide" can be used not only to record when you visit porn sites but can be used to target you better by advertisers? How comes someone absolutely ignores the huge amount of information we provide Google with out of our free will?

But actually I have seen posts today addressing privacy issues and the conclusion is that Chrome downloads information from Google but hardly sends anything from you to Google. If that's actually the case, we hardly have anything to worry about.

Re: louisgray.com: BackType Goes Forward With Comment Tracker and Search

profy — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 09:00:54 -0000

Yes, we all know tons of tools to track mentions already, I believe - but actually participating in all the discussions is a very different thing :)

Re: louisgray.com: BackType Goes Forward With Comment Tracker and Search

profy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:03:27 -0000

Mike,

I must say that I really admire how you and your team are handling the comments on multiple reviews BackType has seen today, great approach. And yes, Chris' comment was sent to moderation for containing links, I've approved it already and will be sure to reply to him as well.

I understand that URLs are simple identifiers almost always available in comments while emails are visible to blog owners only. But services such as Gravatar (as far as I know) already use either emails or URLs to attach an avatar to a comment. So I was wondering if some similar arrangement was possible with BackType (probably for registered users only if it could raise privacy concerns.

I will be sure to keep an eye on the way BackType will develop (as it looks like one of the startups that I not only review but will be using as well). I'm sure it has a great potential and will be looking forward to you addressing some of the issues discussed today on numerous blogs.

Re: louisgray.com: BackType Goes Forward With Comment Tracker and Search

profy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:28:50 -0000

Mike, a question here (I have actually raised it in my own post at http://profy.com/2008/08/28/backtype-new-model-... but I'll ask here as well since you are commenting already). Why have you chosen URLs for an identifier? I already have 2 (http://profy.com and http://www.profy.com since I tend to use either one of them in different cases while if you had an email as an additional identifier, you could have found all my comments, even if I leave them using my OpenID or whatever. Services like Gravatar choose one of them, I believe, and it would have been a great addition to have an email as an additional identifier.
Besides, it could eliminate the problem for multi-author blogs where all the comments left from various Techcrunch authors, for example, are aggregated into a single account showing Michael as having 4,300 comments. Of course such aggregate accounts are possible but I'm sure some bloggers would prefer to have them separated.

Re: FriendFeed working on a new RSS supplement to speed up data retrieval

profy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:21:20 -0000

If you replace RSS, you will get nothing in your RSS Feed Reader :)

And I believe Paul explained somewhere that RSS was still needed because if a service is down when it is pinged by SUP, some content can stay unnoticed so RSS will serve as a backup.

Re: Google is neither buying or running many online display ads, but Microsoft and MySpace are

profy — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 02:17:35 -0000

True, reach can be (and is) misleading often and Google obviously shows more ads of other types (I don't have stats but I tend to believe it must be on the top position if all ad types were combined). As for the choice between reaching US audience once or target audience 4x, the latter option is quite obvious unless you actually target all the US audience. And I'm not quite sure if Yahoo's second position is about it pushing less ads to each reached user or about it not being able to sell all the impressions it could potentially generate.