I almost missed this post (meaning I scanned the title and didn't read it). I'm glad I didn't. It's a good post. I like it for a number of reasons:
1. Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, I too think it's got a lot going for it. Housing (at least compared to SF; I'm less familiar with how horrible the housing market is further as you go towards San Jose), infrastructure, a more balanced mix of people (the Valley is more dominated than NYC by 20 and 30 something male engineers), etc;
2. This post in some ways echoes my own feelings about Twitter {eg [1]). Twitter seems to suffer this dichotomy between being a service and being infrastructure. One of my arguments is that the messaging infrastructure that ultimately dethrones SMS is too valuable to be proprietary.
Of course to be clear Dalton seems to be talking about a "real-time notification API", which is a little different to messaging but it shares a lot of the same problem domain.
I think this is important infrastructure but it's going to be a thankful (and probably fruitless) task, particularly in building an open, well, whatever.
3. It echoes my own view that something like a "better Twitter" is really a "small problem" [2].
I see Dalton has responded and there he has roots in his current community. You can't argue with that. But I'm all for promoting NYC as an alternate tech hub and the idea of tackling big problems.
1. Speaking as someone who lives in NYC, I too think it's got a lot going for it. Housing (at least compared to SF; I'm less familiar with how horrible the housing market is further as you go towards San Jose), infrastructure, a more balanced mix of people (the Valley is more dominated than NYC by 20 and 30 something male engineers), etc;
2. This post in some ways echoes my own feelings about Twitter {eg [1]). Twitter seems to suffer this dichotomy between being a service and being infrastructure. One of my arguments is that the messaging infrastructure that ultimately dethrones SMS is too valuable to be proprietary.
Of course to be clear Dalton seems to be talking about a "real-time notification API", which is a little different to messaging but it shares a lot of the same problem domain.
I think this is important infrastructure but it's going to be a thankful (and probably fruitless) task, particularly in building an open, well, whatever.
3. It echoes my own view that something like a "better Twitter" is really a "small problem" [2].
I see Dalton has responded and there he has roots in his current community. You can't argue with that. But I'm all for promoting NYC as an alternate tech hub and the idea of tackling big problems.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4186157
[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244709