I think the larger issue is about getting user adoption. It is actually great case to have a situation where users overwhelm your service in a way that it outgrows a system such as this. If he ever gets that large, obviously there will be plenty of people looking to help him figure out how to make the storage portion feasible.
More interesting is the user experience. Creating something users can enjoy, agree with, and possibly part money for is a much more difficult problem to solve than figuring out to make large scale storage cost effective.
I think user experience can and will be duplicated. I did post a link to an SVN front-end that has a very similar interface. Maybe the competitors are locked-in to some bad design decisions and can't quite recreate the same user experience... but that's a little optimistic.
Anyway you slice it, you need to have a profit margin. And with a commodity like storage (and the soon-to-be commodity of online storage), you have to be competitve with market prices. The reason that most YC startups can worry about user adoption is because they aren't tied down to this problem. They aren't really making commodities and the cost of makign the product isn't so suffocating.
That's why Dropbox needs to plan for moving off S3. There is so much innovation in storage backends... so much research to read. Think of Google Filesystem. It makes storage very very very cheap.
Here's a good plan for Dropbox. Use S3 as a secondary solution. The primary storage should be local to them (servers running a filesystem that takes advantage of unique properties of the workload... like Google does). When it fills up, traffic thereafter is handled by S3 instead. Then, they can relax in worrying about and scaling local storage. They can take their time buying more hardware, and rolling out software changes to the storage system. They can migrate the data from S3 to local storage at will. And now, their customers can be charged a flexible price, because they control their own expenses. In other words, think of S3 as "datacenter outsourcing".
But this might be too long-term... it might be something to worry about post-YC.
But I think it might be easy to build a storage implementation that runs local and exposes the same exact interface as S3. And, poof, we just abstract the whole backend away, and just flip a switch when we want to go one way or the other. And it reduces latency. Then you go after zero-downtime data migration from S3 to your local systems... which can be done I think... and I think you would be happy.
I feel the title is too much of a pun, than a good indicator of what the story is about. But has some nice tips about how to use and compose a visual presentation.
Either you didn't read the article carefully or have not used the site. There is a lot of communication tools built into the site. The main point of the for the point system is to put a barrier to entry in establishing relationships. On most dating or Social network sites, people can easily cast a wide net of people they want to get in touch with. But with IILWY, the points make it too costly to do the same approach. In other words, your relationships are more special. Once a game is finished, the person who put on the game and the chosen player establish a connection like in other social networking sites. They can message each other, or even have it call the other user's cell phone (safely without revealing each others phone numbers). And there is much more coming.
"Either you didn't read the article carefully or have not used the site."
I've read the article very carefully, which is not to be said on the way you read my comment: By asking for an invite, I expose the fact that I haven't used the site.
"On most dating or Social network sites, people can easily cast a wide net of people [...] Once a game is finished, the person who put on the game and the chosen player establish a connection like in other social networking sites."
So basically, IILWY is limiting/filtering/queuing connections based on a 'how much he's willing to invest' filter.
Why is that a better filter than any other random filter, like, say, what day of the chinese blogoscope he was born or what color hair does his grandma have? It seems like something totally irrelevant to relationship success, IMHO, especially at a stage where the parties don't know each other at all.
To tell the truth, I just don't like services based on limiting the user. I think that requiring the other user to accept a connection (like most IM services, LinkedIn) is good enough at filtering connections without forcing it on the users.
Are you a founder/involved person? You sound so. If you are, cool. Regardless, can I get an invite so that I understand better what this is about?
I'm not really a founder or an involved person, but has helped out on the project quite a bit. I'd be glad to give out an invite, but currently I do not have any more.
But Just in response, the nature of the limitations are to address real problems that exist in real dating sites at the moment. Also the social structure of the site is targeted more towards users who do not necessarily use such dating or social networking sites to find a mate, but to play it like a kind of social game.
It's definitely not for everyone, but it seems to be catching someones attention.
Regardless of that, they have a number of interesting pieces of technology in their site and groundbreaking ways to integrate them in useful ways. Whether or not the actual site is successful, it will be a point for many to learn about what a web service can be.
As far as a typical outline or long term goal, from my experience with YC's quite a few of them have goals way off in the horizon.
I do have to agree that a certain extent of the whole plan should not center around one solid idea, but an idea that can easily be remolded. This industry changes so fast, and it has no room for others that cannot change with it.
Personally, I had a sledgehammer going into this from the get-go. I'm just waiting for those walls to finally use my shiny new hammer on.
