I'm not being clear. What does this site actually do? All I saw it do was echo the text I entered back at me, and store it the equivalent of a tinyurl.

It can password protect it, and you can link things from page to page. Some of the best sites don't do anything "impressive", really...

For example?

Reddit, LiveJournal, FaceBook?

Wow. I can't remember ever seeing a negative nostrademons comment. Obviously that's not earth shattering but it is feeling like downvoting is more generally on the rise around here.

You can criticise many aspects of Facebook... but it does a lot of impressive things.

Actually? I sort of think that facebook's impressiveness is in its ability to scale the features so nicely.

I don't think there are any features on facebook that couldn't be made by your average ycombinator news reader (they might be slow as all hell, but I bet most of us could create working demos of most features).

Facebook does a lot of almost invisible but extremely smart things. Two examples: when you specify the type of relationship when adding a friend, Facebook uses the info to decide how much information to present about the person in your news feed. Or when two people list themselves as being in a relationship, Facebook will show the most recent picture of the two together (if such a picture exists, and privacy permissions permit it in your case).

Nothing fancy. Just extremely well thought out.

easy to test because it doesn't do much...

Neither did the first iPod.

Edit: Okay, okay, sheesh, I'm not insulting it. I meant that it had one feature, which was to play music. It did exactly what it needed to do and no more. That's all I'm saying.

You mean besides fitting ten CD cases worth of music into something that fit in your pocket? What a silly argument.

We're talking focus. The iPod wasn't especially innovative, but it was extremely focused on exactly one thing: playing music. And that focus was executed perfectly.

Having an extremely narrow focus isn't a bad thing, so to use the statement "it doesn't do much" to suggest that Jottit a bad product seems weak.

and the iPod was the first hard drive based MP3 player to use the new 1.8" hard drive.

All due respect to aaronsw, but, the iPod's "one feature" was EXTREMELY FUCKING IMPRESSIVE. Help me understand what's impressive about this site, other than that it still has me talking about it hours after its launch?

I said exactly one thing: Suggesting "a product has a narrow focus" == "a product is bad" is lame. I didn't compare Jottit to the iPod, I compared the number of features. There's a subtle difference.

Also, sorry for the 'hominem, but it's people like you that turned Reddit into Digg. Keep your fucking language clean, your caps lock off, and your rhetorical questions to yourself, or get out. This is not Slashdot. It's really sad that you act like a total troll since you're an excellent hacker, judging by http://www.matasano.com/log/thomas-ptacek

I know you have more to contribute to News.YC than your ego and your snarky remarks. Try harder.

Grow up. You compared Jottit to the iPod. Ludicrous.

Why can't we all just get along?

This argument is about nothing. Jottit doesn't have to be the greatest thing since the iPod. Aaron doesn't need the money and he wanted to do something with his code wizardry. Here we are.

I apologize.