
Code as photo-op - idiginous
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/05/12/codeAsPhotoop.html
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edw519
I'm sooo confused...

    
    
      Release early and often.
      Get eyeballs, then monetize.
      Bootstrap.
      Get basic version working, then add features.
      Get basic version working, then scale.
      Get basic version working, then license the technology.
      Get basic version working, then sell to enterprises.
      Get free version working, then upgrade them to premium.
      Get free version working, then sell support.
      Get free version working, then sell services.
      Get free version working, then put it on your resume.
      Raise money, hire wisely.
      Be first to market.
      Be second to market.
      Wait for market to clear, then enter with second wave.
      Find your niche.
      Have the lowest price.
      Have the highest price.
      Use technology as a barrier to competition.
      Win a business plan competition.
      Get into an incubator.
      Get into a seed accelerator.
      Find an angel.
      Find a mentor.
      Crowd source fund raising.
      Get press to raise money.
      Raise money to get press.
      

I think I'll just fall back on the only thing I know:

    
    
      Build something people will pay for.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
This comment should be hyperlinked from the main bar of HN.

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jsz0
He doesn't make a very compelling case for this being irresponsible
journalism. Maybe it's mediocre journalism but I don't see any attempt to
misrepresent the situation. The take-away is smaller companies/projects will
try to challenge Facebook. That's it. Is that irresponsible? It seems to be a
completely accurate mainstream sort of way to look at things for an audience
that doesn't care about the nitty gritty details as much.

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jasonlbaptiste
Dave winer needs to build his open source Twitter thing already. He's capable
of it and can get the press. He mentions it everyday but hasn't done it. Dave,
just fucking do it.

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jimboyoungblood
The world has more than enough Twitter clients already. What would be a lot
more interesting is an open source Twitter server.

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martey
What about <http://status.net/> ?

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jimboyoungblood
They're on the right track, but they need to make it 100% compatible with the
Twitter API, not just 95%. Client developers must be able to simply replace
"twitter.com" with some other endpoint and have everything work.

This would allow all the client developers (who now suddenly find themselves
competing with Twitter Inc) to immediately rally their users to a new social
graph.

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ephermata
"A 2005 Times article by John Markoff about a new startup that aims to
commercialize podcasting. Didn't happen."

The article is on Odeo. The people involved seem to have turned out all right.
This is a joke?

~~~
jluxenberg
I had the same reaction until I realized Odeo is down _"until the first week
of May"_ : <http://odeo.com/>

and it looks like the whole site is down, i.e.:
<http://odeo.com/channels/1844-2600-The-Hacker-Quarterly>

~~~
portman
I'm not sure if you're joking or not but...

Odeo turned into Twitter. Hence the comment "The people involved seemed to
turn out alright".

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NathanKP
There isn't any code yet, but that nice picture got them a pretty nice chunk
of money, which will hopefully fund some nice code and infrastructure.

~~~
aeontech
Well this is what I find bizarre. People are throwing money at them, when they
haven't even shown that they have a good idea of what they're doing, while
existing projects struggle along.

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megablast
I think these other projects need to spend some time marketing themselves,
come up with a catchy name, and find a blackboard to stand in front off.

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brown9-2
Who cares? This is what the Times frequently does - these types of articles
are less about finding something actually currently-breaking-ground rather
than the NYT appearing to be hip to the latest trend.

~~~
robryan
I would say there written on interest, some startups that are going well
probably aren't as interesting as this. Mainstream press has always been about
what will draw the interest of the most readers, everyone knows facebook and
anyone reading tech at all would have heard about the privacy concerns of
late.

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donaq
_We could really use a great open source Twitter client_

Nitpicking a little, but he probably doesn't mean "client" here. And I think
the need for an open source, distributed Facebook is greater than for Twitter,
considering the relative amounts of influence and information the two services
wield.

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apgwoz
I am not sure why laconica (errr, whatever identi.ca's code is called these
days) doesn't fit the bill for him...

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apgwoz
Actually, he clarifies in the comments that he really does mean a "client" and
not Status.net (what Laconica is called these days). But, there are definitely
quite a few out there. Gwibber, Spaz, Canary, etc, etc.

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WorkerBee
I thought about working in this problem space. Maybe I should think about it
again, and receive wads of money as a result. Except I'm not that young, or
working in Ruby on Rails so I won't just get handed money before producing any
working code. Even then, there are plenty of one-man projects with working
code up on google code, codeplex, github etc. that get nothing at all.

When I last thought about it, I became convinced that we don't need a single
_implementation_ , we need _standards_ for multiple implementations to
interact. Stuff like RSS, OpenId, OAuth, etc. It's a lot less glamorous to
work to these, and to try to push them forward, but it's a lot more useful.

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dpritchett
The real problem with a crowdsourced startup is that there's less room to
pivot to a new product or business model once it becomes clear the original
plan's not going to work.

VCs are happy when startups pivot as long as they get a big payout. Folks who
donate to an open federated Facebook aren't going to be nearly as supportive
of major shifts in focus.

~~~
robryan
You have no obligation to them though, most are donating small amounts of
money to support while knowing the realistically the dream may never become a
reality.

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phatbyte
I don't know if I'm understanding their concept , they basically want to store
locally (users computers) every data ?

If so, how would this work ? A special app ? A plugin on FF to connect to it ?
Will it store your friends data as well ? What if your HD drops dead or
something ?

Sorry if I missed their concept :\

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johnrob
"What if your HD drops dead or something?"

This is the crux of the matter. You've got two options: store your data
locally, or store it in the cloud.

Local storage minimizes the chance of loss; Cloud storage sacrifices you
privacy. Pick your poison. It comes down to what you're more afraid of, and I
am much more afraid of losing pictures than being subject to some sort of
privacy violation.

Not saying one is better than the other, but if you sampled 1000 random
people, my money says that people err on the side of keeping their pictures
safe.

~~~
phatbyte
Well, I can see the reason why. I just don't think they will pull this off.
I'm thinking that for every profile, there will be a node(computer), so for
instance, if a computer is not connected, will it not be available for viewing
that users photos,etc..

But, if they save all of the content (personal info, friends info,
pictures...) locally like say a repository(GIT, SVN, etc..) wouldn't this miss
the whole point of owning your data, since instead of my picture being in one
server..it's living in all of my friends computers.

~~~
johnrob
Exactly, I don't think this project will get far trying to deliver privacy at
the expense of redundancy/availability.

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phr
Store encrypted data redundantly in the cloud, with peer-to-peer crypto magic
for key distribution?

I have no idea how you'd protect against one of your "friends" deciding to
release your stuff in plaintext.

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KevBurnsJr
Right story, right place, right time. Doesn't matter that it's vaporwear.

The money is real. [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-
the-p...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-
personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr)

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joezydeco
Sounds like Chandler all over again. "Hey gang! Let's build an Outlook
killer!"

~~~
inkblot
<http://www.google.com/search?q=chandler+kapor>

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helwr
i loved this

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/technology/25podcast.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/25/technology/25podcast.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1273716038-3er+cO6SuhaxaIdcqBxZLg)

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orblivion
In this case I would say that buzz just may be exactly what's needed to get
this thing off the ground.

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Kilimanjaro
Just shut up and let them be. That article alone has produced them more than
$50K already.

There are two types of people in the world, those who do and those who blog.

~~~
merubin75
And there is a third -- those who criticize without doing a tiny bit of fact-
checking first.

Either on his own or with others, Dave Winer has created a lot of the tools we
take for granted for today. Outliners, RSS, OPML, podcasting, roll-your-own
blogging tools, etc.

I don't know him personally, but I've been reading his blog and DaveNets for
over 10 years. Go back and do some digging and you'll find he's the real deal.

Regardless of what you feel about him personally, his point is valid. There
are plenty of other efforts out there to create a forked version of Facebook
(and Twitter, for that matter). Why puff up some guys who haven't actually
written any code yet? Most folks would call that what it actually is --
vaporware.

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jarin
I'm just gonna say this much:

1) It's a Rails app, so

2) I will be contributing to it as long as round 1 is not absolute crap

