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A comment on Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08).

Re:Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08) by maxklein on Sunday June 22, 2008 @10:17AM (#224205)
And on testing it, it does not even work. I tried yahoo.com and it keeps popping up this message box telling me there is a limit of 2000 characters, when I'm selecting small paragraphs. So YC funded a startup with an idea that has been tried many times over and with a product that just does not work? Hmm, somebodies gonna lose $10.000. Not saying who, but somebody....
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Re:Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08) by webwright on Sunday June 22, 2008 @03:34PM (#224374)
Evaluating a first release like this is kinda silly. It's a road, not a destination. For a v1 (or a beta, which is what this really is), you're better off evaluating the road...

Regarding "tried many times over"... You mean like web search was before Google? Or MP3 players before the iPod? Or photosharing before Flickr?

I'm not saying I'm convinced this idea is a winner, but come on... Predicting failure for a startup is so laughably easy that I don't know why you'd bother, unless you just wanted to feel smug.

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Re:Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08) by mynameishere on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:46AM (#224246)
somebodies gonna lose $10.000.

I found it buggy, too. But there's one thing I've learned from the software business: I have no idea what a given thing is worth, and whether it can be sold. I almost fell on the floor when that calendar company sold their (cough, cough) "technology" for some 200K. Xobni's widget got an offer for 20m or something like that. Wtf?

So, yeah. Don't be surprised if a semi-functional, 1000-times-already-done, text highlighter pulls in a couple million. I don't get it either.

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Re:Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08) by nirmal on Sunday June 22, 2008 @10:50AM (#224216)
It seems to work fine on this page. I wonder what's on Yahoo! that's causing that issue. I wouldn't consider a warning about 2000 characters a fail. If it didn't highlight and didn't warn you then I would call that a fail. Right now it's more like a bad user experience.

Anyone know how they are calculating their limit and/or why it's there?

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Re:Awesome Highlighter (YC summer 08) by fallentimes on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:22AM (#224240)
If they can listen their technology to newspapers they'll be fine.
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