> But hey, try building a $500 billion social network business, before you start connecting up the users, see how it works out.
Guess what, I did. We reached about a million monthly active users at some point which was quite the high point, but still that's a drop in the bucket compared to where the web is today. Still, back then 100K active users per day put us well in the top 500 of all websites.
Needless to say I fell a bit short of the mark of making a $500B company but we really were trying to connect people and video chat was exactly the medium that we used. And no, we did not build up user profiles to track their behavior, not because we could not but because we felt that was not right.
So instead, we charged for the service and eventually it went under.
Personally I will not use any of these services unless I pay for them and my data is not retained or mined. Zuckerberg is the last person on the planet I would trust with my data.
That's also why I use plain old SMS rather than whatsapp and email or IRC rather than Gmail or Google hangouts or similar.
Guess what, I did. We reached about a million monthly active users at some point which was quite the high point, but still that's a drop in the bucket compared to where the web is today. Still, back then 100K active users per day put us well in the top 500 of all websites.
Needless to say I fell a bit short of the mark of making a $500B company but we really were trying to connect people and video chat was exactly the medium that we used. And no, we did not build up user profiles to track their behavior, not because we could not but because we felt that was not right.
So instead, we charged for the service and eventually it went under.
Personally I will not use any of these services unless I pay for them and my data is not retained or mined. Zuckerberg is the last person on the planet I would trust with my data.
That's also why I use plain old SMS rather than whatsapp and email or IRC rather than Gmail or Google hangouts or similar.