

Now this is how you pitch your product to an open source company - arthurgibson
http://blog.reddit.com/2010/04/now-this-is-how-you-pitch-your-product.html

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jedberg
Congrats to the embed.ly team for doing it right and making our job easier.

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screeley
You're welcome. A lot of credit has to go to Chris and the Reddit guys. They
were awesome. One phone call, some code, a few emails and it was done.

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jedberg
(I'm one of the reddit guys) ;)

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stingraycharles
Just curious, but what's the business model behind embed.ly? How does one
generate revenue from such a service?

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codexon
I'd like to know that too.

The only product I see here is an open standard which would be forked the
moment they try to slap ads on it.

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Mongoose
Love the TLDR summary at the bottom. That should become more of a trend.

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apsurd
I never got why its standard practice to put it _after_ the "too long" part?
Shouldn't it be before?

I guess semantically using "didn't" is past tense, implying some type of
initial attempt to read it and then because it's too long, you didn't. But
nevertheless it would more helpful at the top?

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lief79
Since you asked, my guess is psychology. If it was at the top, then most
people wouldn't bother reading the comment, as they already know the
conclusion.

TLDR is useful for and needed by those who are skimming.

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dunstad
It also makes for a nice summary if you read the article.

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cookiecaper
As a guy who runs a reddit install, I am pleased to hear that we'll be getting
updates soon. : )

Is github going to be kept in sync with reddit's copy now? Is that the idea
there?

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jedberg
We are trying to be a lot better about keeping everything in sync.

Our goal right now is to publish weekly, but we'll see how that actually works
out.

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CUViper
The best way to keep in sync is to remove the need: just publish everything
live and unfettered to a public repository.

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jedberg
We used to do it that way, but we stopped because it was breaking people's
installs. Sometimes we have to push half-baked code, and if you sync at that
point, bad things may happen.

Also, we stopped doing it because it meant revealing features before we were
ready to reveal them, like sponsored links. That is when we split the public
and live repos. Before that, the public repo _was_ the live repo.

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CUViper
Hi, thanks for responding. Obviously, I'm not involved in reddit development,
since I didn't know you used to publish live. But still, I think it's ok to
have half-baked code out there -- you just need to mark releases occasionally.
Those can be as slow or frequent as you like, but it's still important for
people to see what's going on in the interim. And in turn, those people can
help you get it fully baked.

As for controlled feature revelation, I think that's counter to the spirit of
open source community -- the community is not really on equal footing with the
company. It like you're saying "aren't we nice to share our code with you"
rather than "let's all work on this together".

Well that's my two cents. I understand that not every company feels they can
work that way, but I think the really successful projects have figured this
out.

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jedberg
> As for controlled feature revelation, I think that's counter to the spirit
> of open source community -- the community is not really on equal footing
> with the company. It like you're saying "aren't we nice to share our code
> with you" rather than "let's all work on this together".

We very much embrace open source -- we use only open source software and we
contribute back as much as we can.

However, we are still a for profit company, and occasionally have to keep
things secret (especially new features, for competitive reasons).

So yeah, unfortunately the community really isn't on the same footing as us.
The idea is that the code is modular enough that if someone wants to work on a
new feature, they should be able to do so without having to worry about what
we are doing, and for the most part that is the case.

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Sthorpe
Love the idea. I did find a down page btw.

<http://api.embed.ly/about>

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howsta
nice

