elad

We call it a "consumer exploration tool" - a quick way to tap into the wealth of information in social networks to get a better picture of what people are like. The target market is marketing professionals - brand managers in consumer products companies and such.

We tried to build a tool that's easy to understand and use - our hope is that you go to the website, and after just a few clicks you get it. We'd appreciate any feedback from the HN community on that point.

Oh, and it's absolutely free for now, so if you can use it to get some insights into the market for your own startups, that'd be awesome! - Let us know if you found anything interesting.

Personally, I never ever give my email credentials out. I totally agree with Jeff Atwood on that.

However, while you're at it, why not ask people for their facebooks/myspace credentials? You'll find many more "friends" there than in my email contacts, plus facebook is far less sensitive privacy-wise. If someone got hold of my credentials, the maximum they could do is deface my profile and send some stupid messages to friends. If they got hold of my gmail account, they could access almost every other account that I have through "forgot your password" links...

Not that I'd actually give you my facebook credentials though :)

It would also mean that your level of protection depends on the amount of air in your tank.

As someone who chronically forgets to fill-up, I wouldn't like that idea...

What people seem to be forgetting is that the US ad market is the biggest by far, and thus the opportunity to make money isn't in the global market.

Ask Peanut Labs (formerly xuqa.com) how much money they made as the biggest social network in Turkey, and why they changed their business model completely...

Good points. Especially no. 1. However, the eventuality of it makes it unlikely IMO. The web is about here and now. Why not just use a wiki?

Maybe part of the explanation is that it's very light-weight - the car in the photo looks tiny, it says it's made of fiberglass, and my guess is that the engine must also weigh much less than a comparable internal combustion engine (you don't need as much metal to contain the combustion...).

Of course, that probably comes with a heavy price to passenger safety. Fiberglass won't give you any protection in a crush. That may be the reason why Tata is involved and not some European manufacturer. The Euro market has some serious safety regulations.

Which makes the phenomenon even stranger - nobody here seems to be able to come up with a good explanation of scribd's success, yet somehow they do succeed.

Really, if you have an office doc that you want to put online, then why not export it as a pdf?

So let's see, students submitting papers and receiving scores. Sounds familiar?

It should strike everybody as an idiotic way to evaluate potential business success. If anything good's gonna come out of it it's that we may come to questions that same process that's used to evaluate academic prowess.

Palm actually did have the distribution in place - through palmgear (interestingly, it still exist) which was THE go-to place for Palm apps.

Regarding advantages to the software developer, having just one place where you distribute, and that place being controlled by Apple, isn't a good thing at all. It may mean that it's easier to start selling, but also that you have no negotiating power if and when your app becomes a success.

The stupid music companies managed to hand over the keys to their distribution to Steve Jobs, but they're not exactly happy about the fact that he now has so much control over their fate. Apple's great at creating consumer electronics that actually appeals to people, but they don't seem to be a very nice company to deal with as a business.

Not being sarcastic at all!

If a website is too slow, it has a significant adverse effect on my likelihood of using it.

And it's not just me - see Google's assertion that speed is "just about the most important concern of users" - http://battellemedia.com/archives/003076.php

Very nice and useful idea. I may actually come back and use it (which happens very rarely with new apps nowadays).

Problems:

Way too slow. Spend more on hosting :(

The "meat" is in the flickr, youtube etc. search results below. The tag cloud should appear blow it IMO. Also, limit its size, and let users enlarge, sort it etc.

How about letting me filter results to just some of the sites you're crawling?

Who develops desktop applications anymore anyway (except maybe game developers).

If in the past you used to build apps for windows because that's where the installed base was, nowadays you build web apps.

I learned Delphi and VB back then when I wanted to hack together simple utilities with lots of UI. In the last couple of years I learned Django and Rails for the same purpose.

That and more: Apple's platform probably won't be adopted by anyone else, so even though the user base is attractive right now, down the road it would look diminutive compared with the user base for an open platform that could gain support of multiple vendors.

7-8 years ago I used to develop mobile apps in both Palm OS (closed platform, just one vendor) and J2ME (open, widely adopted). Palm had the more attractive installed base back then, but as their fortunes changed, that investment is now worthless. Compare with J2ME, which kept growing thanks to support by most vendors.

That's true on the sole hacker level. If you're considering writing some mobile apps, and the iphone seems like a nice platform, then learning a new language for the purpose should seem like an opportunity, not a problem.

However, I guess the article refers to a mobile app shop that wants to make money, and that's when economic considerations set in. New language/framework means an investment in re-training your (mostly average) developers. Objective-C vs. Java also means having a tougher time locating experienced developers. In short, it makes less business sense.

I find that Microsoft tools in general offer a compelling package when you start out - great IDE, good docs and purportedly good support (I never use customer support myself, so can't comment on that from a personal experience). The problems begin when you want to move a step further - explore the code or hack stuff.

Also, you're stuck with their platform for everything. The advantage in using an open package is that you can mix and match. If you're willing to do some research and work, you can find the tools that best match your specific requirements and hack together your dream application.

In the end it really depends on your temperament as a developer. If you prefer easy gains initially and can live with the limitations down the road, plus you don't really care how it all works under the hood and rather just have something that works OK in the end, then I guess MS should be your choice.

The reason that you find mainly "microsoft sucks" answers in hacker forums, is that hackers love the freedoms that being locked in to the MS platform takes away.

Hopefully Android is just the beginning and soon enough the mobile industry will find that it needs to be educated in the way open source works.

I started a (commercial) project with Rails, and eventually, when we needed some 3rd party libraries that Java provides moved to running it on top of JRuby.

Since then we've been getting the best of both worlds IMO - our code is more mixed now, where most is still Ruby based so it's fun, easy, simple and fast (to develop), but some things are done with Java - when it needs to run fast, or we can't find a comparable ruby library to do something.

In short, instead of Groovy, and in view of the rest of the comments here regarding its maturity, why not consider JRuby?

It's not. You're looking for gigs, which means networking, interviewing etc. Marketing yourself essentially. Vacation is when you don't work.

My co-founder and I started out working from our own separate homes, and we experienced a huge surge in productivity once we moved in to a common office. And I mean HUGE. Phones, IM, email, they're all very nice, but nothing beats face-to-face, sitting in the same room, looking at the same computer screen when necessary.

IMO productivity in a team, where the people are working on the same thing (which makes DHH's case irrelevant) goes exponentially down with distance. Measuring the distance in feet vs. miles makes more difference than measuring it in miles vs. thousands of miles.

Since it's a start-up, it's most likely that their lawyers just drafted this up for them, and the founders don't really know any better. Lawyers tend to be overly cautious this way, but entrepreneurs usually realize that running a business takes some risk. If they really want to hire you, it's likely that they'll be willing to change the terms. If they're not, then this is what should raise the red flag for you...

In any case, if the contract doesn't feel right to you (as it should) and regardless of whether it's enforceable or not, don't sign. Why put yourself in a position where you are likely to have legal issues in the future?

Indeed, your product is suitable for people who work fixed hours, 9 to 5 and such.

I guess you should promote it to people in government, manufacturing or retail jobs.

Agreed. Here's another thoughtful post on the subject: http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/06/the_rise_of_a...

I started using the filesystem for storage a while back, and then realized that I'm re-implementing a lot of DBMS functionality in my own buggy code. I switched over to using a database.

I'm just saying that you should consider all of your requirements first, figure out how much code you're going to need that just manages your data, and then decide whether a database is really such a bad idea.

A co-worker, who worked with COBOL years ago, keeps getting phone calls offering him COBOL jobs. Very highly paying COBOL jobs. He laughs at them.

In other words, a dead programming language doesn't mean that there's no demand for it anymore. What it means is that good programmers won't touch it with a stick.

So indeed, java developers shouldn't worry - they'll have plenty of jobs well into the future - the platform is just too prevalent, and especially in financial institutions that only recently moved over from java to COBOL, and will take another 30 years to make the next move. On the other hand, if you like programming and it's more than just a way to make a living, then java isn't where you want to be.

In my case I didn't work in the industry that I'm trying to serve now, but instead realized that a solution from an industry I did have experience in could be applied to another one.

The problem is that you're guaranteed to get it wrong at first, simply because you don't fully understand what people in that industry need or want.

What we did was build something, show it to some people, get feedback, improve, repeat the process. We're in our third iteration now, and I believe that we're closing in on a real solution. Of course, if it was a solution for the software industry, we could have been there much earlier...

Highest scores go to the NT's - ENTJ (20 points right now), ENTP (24), INTG (64) and INTP (71) together represent 76% of the total sample (179/235). It's not surprising though that hackers and entrepreneurs tend to be intuitives and thinkers. INTJ myself.

It depends on whether your blog (or whatever it is that you're feeding through RSS) is meant to achieve.

If you're trying to make money from it through advertising, then the paragraph makes sense. However, your blog better be one of the top blogs in the world if you're to make a living off it, so what's the point. Also, it's clear from the comments here that many people (myself included) are turned off by partial feeds, so that will only decrease your chance of being successful.

However, if you're trying to build a name for yourself or your company, that is - you're the advertiser (of yourself, your skills, your thoughts), and the ads are the blog posts, then it doesn't really matter where and how people read them, and it makes the most sense to provide whole article feeds.

Whenever possible, pay cash rather than equity. Cash you can get more of. Equity is limited - there's only 100%. Once you run out, that's done. If it's such a great business idea, than you should all the more want to keep the equity.

Ask yourself this - are you able to find an investor that puts in the 30k you need to hire them for cash, and add more value (advice, connections, more cash, etc.)? How much equity would you give to such an investor? Is it more or less than what they're asking for?

Finally, I'm wary about entering into partnership with a firm that does other things (that aren't investing in start-ups). This isn't like bringing on a full-time partner. It isn't like bringing on a VC/angel investor either. They're likely to have their own agenda, and will only contribute up to a point. They have a business to run that is probably bigger than yours.