doug_m

* There is plenty of time to try a few things out and not feel like your doing anything wrong. I went from school to university and threw myself into a career and it brings you financial advantages which, I suppose, may compound in future life but looking around my peers nobody regrets the year travelling or the year working a couple of jobs that were never a career (teaching abroad?).

* I think most people would say its sensible to start early with savings/pensions and personally I have but, you know what, balance is as important.

* People do nice things for people they like. This, in my experience, has extended to pay rises and favours in work so I try to work for people who like me even if that involves playing a game. Another place I apply this is I'll only contradict or criticise someone at work is if they ask my opinion and even then only in the right setting.

* Finally, basically I wish I hadn't worried about stuff so much. Property prices, interest rates, fillings in my teeth, projects running over etc. At 29 I think I worry about 2% of what I did at 21.

Obviously these thing vary depending on age etc but my girlfriend has a policy like this and one for unemployment any they aren't preclusively expensive.

One place I worked even let a guy save his allowance and work 4 days weeks from September to December. Another from time to time asked people to cancel their leave at very short notice because of the projects that were on.

Ever heard of duvet days? my mate's boss let him that day off by sending a text from his bed in the morning if he didn't fancy it that day.

Take more than 5 days off and you're relying on good will and have to attend meetings to explain it, in theory you might get dumped to statutory pay.

In terms of family emergencies you either take them as annual leave or you rely on goodwill. Normally I've been able to get half days for funerals but that's based on the IT world where they know I'm making up time for them regularly.

The consequences feature in his thinking about if and when to report it to techcrunch a bit later on

Not meaning this as criticism of Daniel though who comes across fine - massive, massive difference between considering doing something unethical and actually doing it.

Cool thing if the guys who make the software are reading this - started a new job earlier this year at a mostly non-software company managing a few development projects. I doubt most of my colleagues are aware of this startup culture or have heard of .NET much less Y Combinator.

First week "You've got to see this program we have the sales team using, called Dropbox... its tremendous there's about a thousand things we can use it for". Not only are they using it its their "we're showing this off to the new guy" thing.

I like it too but liked it more when I turned off the spam it adds to google results

I mean, it what way were the job board and twitter clone different if we're drawing this out past a single example of successful dating website building in China

Its another situation like StackOverflow where they can tackle chicken and egg situation others can't because of their exposure.

I'm a fan, his shows like Newswipe and Screenwipe are worth a look if you can find a copy.

He had a great line in his tv review at the weekend, was something like "the tv show presenters had the kind of chemistry that would get a swimming pool closed for 25 years"

As far as the scale goes, this is what it is - its cost TC 600,000 followers on Twitter - if there is a numeric value to that of even a dollar I still personally find the situation interesting because I find the principal of this kind of sanction to be a moral point of debate.

Moral is a strong word though I admit!! I just can't think of another way to express it.

TC is media/journalism and even if that's at a tabloid level personally I do believe that companies shouldn't withdraw privileges or sanction a media company based on unfavorable stories being written about them.

I think its a bad precedent to set even on this minor scale.

As far as depriving revenue goes, I'm obviously talking up the effect because I find the stance Twitter took interesting. I'm not suggesting this is tens of thousands of dollars and I don't think its less interesting just because it isn't.

TC certainly shouldn't be in the industry of doing this or that because they do or don't hurt Twitter's image.

It does seem Twitter was willing to deprive a benefit (read exposure/revenue) granted to TC on the basis the documents were leaked. In the future if TC had interesting/harmful information on Twitter to reveal they would decide commercially whether to publish by taking into account any negative impact for them in exposure on twitter.

That's unhealthy isn't it? Twitter would be less likely to receive negative/unhelpful press than other similar companies on the basis they can punish those who do it.

I know I'm deliberately talking up what happened here but it is an interesting question, to me at least

At the end of the day I value journalism of this kind which is in part investigative and doesn't, to my uneducated eyes, appear to have any personal cost. I'm not sure how interesting it was in this case, but in general "wasn't supposed to be published" is about a fraction of the rationale that needs to be there for a media organisation not to publish.

At the end of the day, TC broke a story here and leaked something Twitter didn't want out in the open. They took a hit on traffic and, by extension, to their exposure which as a media company presumably is a measure that affects revenue. Therefore Twitter deprived TC of revenue as punishment for publishing information they didn't want to see in the public eye.

That's a bad thing, for me, for a media company to have done and it is unusual + interesting.

If use of these was as widespread as say twitter, then there's countless things I'd be interested in, imagine you could sit in at houses of parliament when "Xyz" law was passed 4 years later.

I'd like to read about the impact "Joel on Software" and his celebrity has had on his success/sales though.

Its almost like you read the article and he discusses "this made my company successful", "this was a mistake of mine" but talking about his blog and celebrity is seemingly off limits, to a layman like me its a huge factor in the appeal of his products but it goes unsaid in his articles - as though it had no impact.

I wonder if there's a worry openly discussing the marketing benefit to Joel of us reading his articles would be almost breaking down a wall and change our perception of them.

Or am I wrong, has Joel (and/or Jeff Atwood) discussed openly the difference their blog-marketing has made to their business success?

This is very much untrue, at least in the UK. The quality dailies have had a very strong year and have driven forward the debate on all kinds of things:- parliamentary expenses, the Brown/McBridge spin sleaze, the Iraq inquiry, the News of the World tapping scandal.

Whether we'd have seen anything like this kind of investigation from the BBC's news organisation or online is no sure thing. Possibly in a TV show like Panorama but then you're talking about 50 such shows a year.

Sometimes I feel like a minority of one but when the papers start charging I imagine I'll think its a good use of my income and I'll pick one.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology in the UK did a survey recently but they seemingly haven't published the full results though they do mention they might provide them on request.

Some of the stats are a little discouraging though

If anyone has anything that shows it more thoroughly I'd like to see it?

Take a DVD player as an example, if he was inclined to load the data I could put in a model number and it could show me the technical specification, picture, manufacturer etc.

If I put in two model numbers he could compare them. Could he include in the contents things like product reviews? (is the only problem a trusted source for the data?)

Or, he seemed to have a link for movies - presumably if I type the name of a movie he can list actors, year of release, sales gross etc. If I put in a band can he tell me whether they're touring, back catalogue?

Its obvious from the demo he hasn't been building something to help me pick a DVD player to buy, but does anyone know if this system is likely in the future to support this kind of thing that would be useful to the layman? because that's what might scare Google (or not if I'm barking up the wrong tree here).

Personally I think there was some kind of internal BBC briefing about using twitter for publicity - then the radio 1 jocks logged profiles all in the same weekend, started talking about it daily the week after and so started a snowball from the publicity.

Could that explain some of it?

Then you purchase ITunes gift vouchers for a dollar above value from ebay and apparently save 30% off the equivalent UK prices. The 30% being the figure in the heady days of nearly 2$/£1 - soon I guess we'll be selling the gift cards.

The fact is we're in such a rush to launch our websites and start being businessmen who actually talks this kind of thing through? Who's asking themselves how best to moderate comments and chat as they scale to protect children. What's your response to someone posting obscene or inappropriate content? and how quick do you act?

There's definitely an inherent danger here, often we build and engineer so quickly and cheaply that we sacrifice having the kind of staff numbers we need to live up to our ethical responsibilities.

All the best to the guys at justin.tv and anyone involved, I'm not judging you for your statement sure you have the best intentions.