The "what's going on now" stuff will require a little more work, and a lot more thought because I've been consciously designing the site to let users be as private as they want to be, which has had the unintended side effect of making it hard for some users to be as public as they want to be.
3: There's a Facebook "like" button and a Google "+1" button on every game's page, and there's a general "+1" button for the entire site.
4 I should look into. A few of my most well-connected users have evangelized about the service quite a bit without any incentives (although they probably understand that the more users and ratings are in the service the better the recommendations will be). So I don't know how much more effective incentivizing evangelism will be; it might be what finally cracks the big game forums as users post their referral links there, but most of those forums forbid referral links in the same breath that they forbid talking about your own service. So, it might get some people banned from their favorite forums, but it would get me a few more users in the process. :\
I refrained from posting a link of mentioning the service by name in the original post, because I didn't want it to look like a "stealth ad". But maybe all the crap about not promoting your own services in forums has just made me over-cautious. :)
If you have equity, however, then your profit is tied directly to the success of my startup, so I could rest assured that you would have a (literal) vested interest in making my company successful.
At the beginning of this year I "soft launched" a video game recommendation service. I knew how to build the site and make it work, but I'm mystified by marketing (even if I had a million dollars to throw at marketing I wouldn't know where to throw it), so I applied to a bunch of incubators (including YC, of course), sure that one of them would pick up the project because recommendation...
When you bring in someone older to make your business seem more experienced it's called a "gray hair". So what's the opposite? "Purple hair"?
I am interested in the future of Dubai, but this is not how I want to read about it.
I'll be interested to see how their plan to be "gatekeepers" of the mods works out, and suspect that if it takes off programmers will quickly find a way around it, if Jersey Jack's hasn't already decided to completely open it up by the time they launch.
A couple months ago I quit my day job and devoted myself full-time to learning Rails and starting up my exciting new web project: reccr, the amazing automated video game recommender! Rate the games you've played, and it'll tell you what games you should play next. It's currently in early beta, and capped at 500 users, but the all-important core "recommendation" engine is working great, so come...