

On Comet, Paul Graham, and YC rejection - heyadayo
http://cometdaily.com/2008/01/08/comets-disappointing-mindshare/

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axod
Sounds like focusing on technology, rather than a clear problem that you have
a solution to.

Comet technology (If you want to call it that) is fantastic. I wrote
<http://www.mibbit.com> using the techniques, and you can bet it loads a lot
faster than flash/java applet/anything else. Also these days with browsers on
far more platforms, you're not guaranteed flash support. (Not to mention it
being proprietary/slow/etc)

Focusing on comet though seems like saying "I want to do a web2.0 startup" or
"an AJAX startup". They're all just buzzwords with little substance.

Does look like you've got a great system, just need the killer app now :)

~~~
oditogre
Handy app. Much more convenient than java clients. '/list' is pretty ugly,
tho. :) Didn't test much beyond that and joining a chan to chat for a sec.

~~~
axod
Thanks for the feedback, and agreed about /list. I'm thinking of the best way
to present the /list data at the moment, I'd kinda like a hierachial system...

computers -> linux -> #ubuntu

Probably user generated categories, but not sure yet.... ah well, it's on the
todo anyway :)

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cperciva
Show, don't tell.

Don't tell me (or pg, or anyone else) that Comet is a cool new technology
which will transform the web -- show us something which you can do with it.
Lots of people say "hey, I'm cool", but few of them actually are -- until you
show us something which your cool new technology can do for us, you fall into
the category of unsupported hype.

 _We were ultimately not given funding, probably because our proposal seemed
to be "Look at this cool new technology that will transform the web. We're
experts on it." rather than "Here is exactly what we want to make and
precisely how we'll make money."_

I obviously can't read pg's mind, but I strongly suspect the issue was more
that you hadn't convinced him that Comet was useful rather than due to your
lack of concrete business model.

~~~
heyadayo
cperciva: on the one hand, you're right -- We didn't convince YC that Comet
was a useful technology. But its not a matter of showing versus telling. We
showed a few prototypes (<http://www.orbited.org/livehelp.html> for example)
and proved that we could do cool things. The Rejoinder was, "But flash can do
that." and we were unprepared for that response. The point of the article is
to illustrate that pure html/javascript technology apparently is given no
credence in the eyes of YC, an important player in the venture industry.

I clearly think Comet is a useful technology, but then again, I lead
development on an open source comet server (Orbited) and I write for
www.cometdaily.com. So why doesn't someone more unbiased let me down easy.
That is, explain to me why Comet is not a useful technology.

~~~
jgrahamc
I did look at Comet when it was mentioned here a while ago and my general
reaction was that it was total overkill for most applications. It's worth
remembering that the so called 'Push Technology' of the 1990s (such as
PointCast) was doing a straight HTTP GET at regular intervals, the only push
was that the user didn't push a button for an update. Now in the noughties
we're doing similar stuff in the background with XHR polling from timers.

If what you really want to do is _real time_ pushing of data to the client
then you need to come up with a really compelling situation in which that's
needed. The current Comet proposal seems as you say somewhere on your blog "a
big hack". What it really needs is simplicity. Tell me how this is better than
polling using XHR.

In fact, if you want to excite me then give me a chunk of Javascript that as
the following methods:

stream_to_me( url, callback )

I call this, it returns to me immediately. It handles a background connection
to url and streams data off it using standard HTTP (perhaps it's holding a
connection open, perhaps it's polling, user shouldn't care and should be
transparent to the remote web server).

When it's got a complete chunk of data (perhaps it's a complete piece of XML)
it calls callback with the chunk.

That would be compelling to me because I could just include that little
library and then get async. callbacks with data coming 'live' from my server.

~~~
simonw
The JavaScript you described exists - it's called dojox.comet, and it looks
like this:

dojox.cometd.init('<http://example.com/cometd'>);
dojox.cometd.subscribe('/channel', callback);

That's basically what you described, but with the additional concept of
"channels" to make it easy to support lots of different event streams.

~~~
simonw
I wrote more about this here: <http://simonwillison.net/2007/Dec/5/comet/>

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iamelgringo
I understand being upset about not getting funded. But, that's the game,
folks. Just because PG didn't like your idea, that doesn't mean you're a
failure, it just means that PG didn't fund you. So, take a night off, have a
beer with your co-founders, sulk a bit and then get up the next morning and
work on your product.

Make something that people want. It's all about making something that people
want. Everything else is distraction. What PG said, PG's attitude towards
Flash vs Comet is irrelevant. Not having mind share in the hacker community
regarding your favorite technolgies is tough, but success in getting hackers
to use your comet framework for development is much different than success in
getting users to use the cool stuff you put on the web using comet

No one in user land cares about the framework, they just care about the cool
and useful website you built. So, focus on that.

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jkush
I think PG probably knows _exactly_ what Comet is. I also think his question:
"aren't all web pages real-time?" was most likely a loaded one.

If I were interviewing you, you bet I'd ask something similar. I'd want to
find out if you grasp the implications of using Comet as your company's
technical backbone.

~~~
hhm
Yes, or he misunderstood the question about real-time. If PG doesn't know
about Comet, he surely knows about Ajax, and so he surely is aware on how most
web pages aren't real-time.

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greendestiny
The fact that this article doesn't even consider the widgets themselves to be
the reason for the rejection probably sums it up. Your customers don't care
what you're using to poll. While it might be true that Comet will enable
someone to develop really good 'live' web applications it doesn't sound like
it will be you, you're too caught up in Comet itself.

~~~
heyadayo
I think you're exactly right. We thought our expertise was valuable, but what
YC wanted was a business, not technical expertise alone.

~~~
pg
We don't look for business _expertise_ so much as the raw materials that go
into it. E.g. the judgement to realize that publishing (supposedly) verbatim
quotes from your YC interview on the web would cause any future investor to
think twice before talking to you.

~~~
heyadayo
Paul, its important that the Comet community understands how little mindshare
we have. If you hadn't heard of the technology after reading thousands of
startup ideas, then what chance do we have? Thats compelling enough reason to
post what I remember of the conversation. I sincerely doubt my article would
make other investors nervous. The interview contents don't reflect poorly on
YC, they reflects poorly on our (my partners and I) ideas and the entire Comet
community.

~~~
timr
If nothing else, publicly speculating that your interviewer is bad at his job,
is somewhat less than tactful.

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tptacek
Lots of important technology makes no money, and is a poor investment. Do
Prototype, Mochikit, or Twisted have VC funding?

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Tichy
I haven't looked up comet into detail, but I suppose it is using Server Push,
which was described in the first CGI book I ever read, 13 years ago. There is
the problem of realtime updates with AJAX, and of course that Server Push
odditiy has come to mind several times when I discussed it with friends. Maybe
if Comet pulled it off in a proper way, it could be rather cool. However,
ultimately it would also be a hack of sorts, which gives me an uneasy feeling
about basing my business on it.

Sorry for the uninformed blabbling, I just wanted to challenge the "community
has never heard about it" stuff - at least I have heard about it, sort of, but
I did not yet consider it the next killer application.

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bayareaguy
The good is the enemy of the best here. With few exceptions, good sites
deliver most their value without resorting to push techniques.

Suppose YC hacker news incorporated some kind of "push" system. Unless it was
very unobtrusive I probably would try and turn it off since I want things to
stay static while I'm reading.

I could imagine this being useful to complement a management interface,
especially for providing detailed progress indicators.

Is Virtualmin ( <http://www.virtualmin.com/> ) doing anything with Comet?

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bayareaguy
I've always wanted to be able to run terminal-style applications in a web page
without polling. Can Comet do that reliably?

~~~
axod
Yes try the telnet app at <http://www.mibbit.com>

~~~
abstractbill
Any chance you can make it do ssh? That would be awesome.

~~~
axod
On the ever expanding TODO list ;) Looked into it and it's not too hard to
incorporate.

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edw519
Why would an end-user care about Comet over AJAX?

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marcus
Example if GMail used Comet, your Inbox would get updated the second you got a
new mail instead of every x minutes.

You can achieve something close to it by using very insistent polling but this
causes an unreasonable load on the server. Whereas with push technology you
can get live updates without this unnecessary load.

How is that for a compelling argument?

~~~
anamax
It's not.

Your most compelling argument would be something like "GMail would be 10x as
popular with sub-second client updates and Comet would make that possible with
the existing resources."

Note that the premise is clearly false - GMail would not be significantly more
popular with subsecond client updates. That leaves you arguing that push would
save resources but I'd guess that the current polling intervals are such that
10% is spent on them, which limits the benefits to 10%.

You need to show that comet enables valuable new apps, makes existing apps
significantly more valuable to users, or makes it easier to produce new apps.
And, even if you do, you're not going to make much money.

Note the weasel word "most" - your best argument isn't all that good. Your
users, the app writers, are going to make far more money.

~~~
marcus
Google chat couldn't exist without Comet, (unless they redid the entire thing
in Flash and please don't get me started on the whole Flash/Silverlight mess)

A lot of tech decisions don't deliver 10x improvement in the value-add for you
users, but even a 10% value-add can be a powerful differentiator in a
competitive market.

And finally Comet isn't really a significant technological hurdle.
Implementing it versus simple AJAX isn't a very big increase in your tech
efforts and might be very much worthwhile.

I'm not saying you should use Coment in all your future web dev, this isn't
fanboism. Just spend an hour or two to get a rudimentary understanding of the
technology its costs & benefits so you can decide for yourself if it is a good
fit for your next project.

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yubrew
Yet another technology looking for a market application...

~~~
axod
It's already used in applications.

IMHO It doesn't really need a 'buzzword'. It's just a common technique.

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alaskamiller
<http://searchyc.com/comet>

FWIW, it's gotten quite a few mentions here at hacker news.

