"Early stage venture firm Y Combinator, which has funded over a 102 young startups, has “open sourced” the legal documents that they provide to their startups to use as they seek additional funding. The documents were created with their law firm, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati" - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Paul Graham is doing a terrific job. FEw days ago, for thr first time, they published a document showing what kind of startup ideas they particularly look for, and now this!!! Cool. - Hayk Hakobyan
Yahoo User Interface Blog: "... We’ve been obsessed with the canvas tag for a while now; we think it represents a huge opportunity for creative interfaces on the web, and current browser support for the tag is excellent ..." [Accessed Friday, 2008AUG15] - Peter Renshaw
Yahoo User Interface Lib: "... The foundational YUI Grids CSS offers four preset page widths, six preset templates, and the ability to stack and nest subdivided regions of two, three, or four columns. The 4kb file provides over 1000 page layout combinations. ..." [Accessed Friday August 15] - Peter Renshaw
Yahoo! User Interface Blog: "... The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) has an ample assortment of components. Nevertheless, there will be always some functionality you want that a library like YUI hasn’t anticipated or hasn’t built yet. ..."* [Accessed Friday, 15 August 2008] - Peter Renshaw
Yahoo! User Interface Blog: "... The web is made of open standards. This was a significant factor in the web’s displacement of proprietary application platforms. Openness is hugely attractive, so much so that the web dominates over competitors with better technologies. ..." [Accessed Friday, 2008AUG15] - Peter Renshaw
Remind them that cruel and unusual punishment is forbidden by the Constitution - Jason Carreira
not to make the situation worse, but what if you are selected for a trial :) - Allen Stern
@Allen, I will claim insanity from lack of Friendfeed. OR maybe I will show them some of your videos and claim I had a small hand in them! - Steve Rubel
years ago i was a finalist for a jury trial - judge calls me to the witness stand for the attorneys to ask me questions - they ask me personal questions, i said "i am not answering that, this guy could be a murderer!" the judge said answer, i said no - he threw me into a private room. I sat there 4 hours, came out, they asked me again to answer, i said no, they said i could leave. others in the jury hi-5'd me on the way out - it was fun but damn scary! - Allen Stern
That's a great story. Acting! Bravo! You're hired to play the part of Steve Rubel. - Steve Rubel
yeah ..how about being part of da run away jury..write down 140 char on slip of paper, toss it out of the window, blogger waiting down will read the slip and then post on ff and twitter.. - Peter Dawson
Steve I'd do that in a minute - I'd give anything to be a normal size. - Allen Stern
@Allen, I got other issues - like Internet addiction. Don't we all? - Steve Rubel
In the 90s, a Star Trek uniform didn't get a certain someone out of being part of the OJ trial. What if you wore a big paper mache Fail Whale? - Chris Brogan
@Peter if I were a lawyer I would deliver a closing argument in 140 character installments. Maybe I will get an Internet law case - that would excuse me fast. Even better, I am going to write an iphone app for jury dutyites. - Steve Rubel
just wear a shirt that says "i hate everybody" - Allen Stern
if only there was a thing with words on it with which one could occupy their time... - Ernie Oporto
@Chris I can say that I run a camp for disciples who all bow to the Great Fail Whale. We all sit and wait for it to go away - kind of like the inverse Great Pumpkin. Great story. I will send you the bill for the straight jacket they put me in. - Steve Rubel
@Steve, they haven't renamed that? Allen, my uncle used to use that all the time. Well, that and the fact that one of the judges was a drinking buddy. :D - Cyndy
aah - they don't let you bring your laptop because the internet hasn't made it out to Islip yet - Allen Stern
If the comments at 37Signals were threaded, they could have an option to hide all replies to the trolls. It'd be a great noise suppression tool. - Michael Nielsen
Is saying something negative the same thing as being a troll? - Nicholas Molnar
Looks like it's just slapped on the comment by whoever does the moderating (according to http://www.37signals.com/svn/a...) - it doesn't seem to be a per-user flag. That comment is the first one, so it doesn't demote it, and in fact it sort of draws my eye to the content. If I were a troll, it would be a badge of honor. - ⓞnor
I think it would be even more clever if the troll comments were hidden by default (for everybody but the troll). - Gabe Schaffer
@Michael: Sounds a bit like Digg. Frankly, it always surprises me to find unthreaded comment systems. Usenet was threaded way back when, after all. - Christopher Granade
The lack of threading is by design these days, usually. Not threading makes it hard for flamewars to persist because the back-and-forth responses get diluted by all the other comments on the article. - Mr. Gunn
I guess I understand that it's by design, a la 140 character limits and whatnot. I just don't agree with it for a lot of sites. Go look at threads on Pharyngula and try to follow the action. It's infuriating. - Christopher Granade
"lacadaz, I agree. The de Young is awesome. I'm a member there as well and shoot there frequently. Never have I been harassed at the de Young or the Legion of Honor like I was today at the SF MOMA. I've got some wonderful photographs of my wife and children in silhouette taken at the top of the stairs on the second floor of the de Young. I also shot the Chihuly exhibit there as well which was *amazing* and very cool that they allowed photography. The Oakland Museum of California, where I am also a member, has been awesome as well. The thing is, had Blint been more of a human being and actually sat down and reviewed and discussed my photography, this definitely could have been resolved amicably. Instead he thought he could just get away with bullying someone because he probably gets away with this all the time. It's unfortunate that the SFMOMA, despite their amazing exhibits, has to treat people so poorly." - Thomas Hawk
Imagine if the world of Instant Messaging had been under one roof, if one vendor had invented it, and had 100 percent market share. Further, what if that vendor had the foresight that there would be other vendors and that compatibility between their services would make a huge market, and that incompatibility would keep the market fragmented and relatively small. What would that vendor have done? - Dave Winer via Bookmarklet
Dave - I don't quite understand your argument for how Twitter could have been the NSOL of microblogging. Are you saying that Twitter should have been the site that binds every other micro-blogging service together? - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
I don't understand your question, sorry. All I get from it is your first phrase that you don't understand me. So neither of us understand each other. Oh well. Maybe someone else can bridge the void.. - Dave Winer
Love it Dave. We're having a meta conversation about microblogging. Maybe I'll go craft an old fashioned blog post of my own to try and elaborate/clarify :) - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
Another example, I read somewhere on FF the other day that people took a feed from a music room here and added it to iTunes and it knew what to do with it! I feel really proud of that cause it was made possible by some early foundation work I did with RSS, a long time ago, paying off now for users. Exactly the kind of foresight I would like to see Twitter do now. - Dave Winer
Dave, yes you spot on (once again !). However, twitter doing it is basically like asking like asking water to turn to honey. Only a miracle can make it happen. The underlying architecture of Twitter, really can't support a framework of collaborative sharing of info with other 3rd party vendors. FB did a great job with creating the app that was actually a platform. FF seems to be like this, twitter is ouf of the window. - Peter Dawson
Do you think the problem lies in the fact that they are a Valley startup that needs to look like something Google or Yahoo would buy and put ads on. - Harold Gilchrist via twhirl
Harold, I don't think there's a "problem" -- they're overworked and head-down and faced with an enormous amount of opportunity. It must be hard to sort through it all, and to them, a missive like this from me probably sounds pretty shrill. "Oh there he goes again." I don't blame them for this, but I would be remiss if I didn't put my stake in the ground so we can play Monday Morning Quarterback in 2010 or so. (Murphy-willing, knock wood!) - Dave Winer
Network Solutions are the worst company ever, i don't know why you related Twitter to them. - Nicholas James
I suspect that the problems from this past weekend are only going to exacerbate the problem. http://tinyurl.com/5pkpjs Not only have they missed they opportunity, but poor communication and support are seriously eroding the customer base. That the victims of this weekend's situation included several strong Twitter evangelists has unfortunate potential. Even tho the folks involved seem to mostly still carry a fondness for Twitter, their followers witnessed the problems and were involved in the solution. - Patricia F. Anderson
"Imagine if the world of Instant Messaging had been under one roof, if one vendor had invented it, and had 100 percent market share." Wasn't that *mostly* true of AOL, though? Didn't AOL consolidate their position by buying up ICQ? Didn't they drag their feet for years and years on efforts to make their IM play well with others? By illustrating your point with IM, perhaps you have explained why Twitter *isn't* kicking themselves. Perhaps in this game, the tendency is for the dominant player to *not* cooperate. - Karim
Likewise, Network Solutions is an example of *abuse* of a dominant position: in 1995 they charged $100 to register a domain name for 2 years, which led to an antitrust lawsuit. They've also been guilty of domain name censorship, domain name slamming, subdomain hijacking, domain name frontrunning, selling WHOIS information, etc. ad nauseam. - Karim
I, for one, am glad their business model didn't become IP of a namespace - Ross Mayfield
I'm really surprised that this weekend's problems of account closings haven't caused more of a fuss. It seems to me that it would be such a big deal, it would be the final straw that would get most of the major twitter advocates to finally pay attention to the whole issue of federation of microblogging. Also: this is the umptyzillionth thing that's made the thought go thru my mind that they must be *trying* to fail! - Tegan Dowling
@Karim: While AIM is definitely the dominant IM standard here in the US, it doesn't even come close to being so abroad. People I know in India and Australia, for example, don't even know what "AIM" is. Yahoo and MSN Messengers are both the dominant IM networks there. I think that Dave's example very much reflects why Twitter would have done better in the long-term with an open model. - Mohit
It would be great to see FriendFeed run their own laconica service (identi.ca). - Dan Cameron
Isn't Identi.ca exactly what you're looking for? FriendFeed doesn't support multiple instances of FriendFeed, but I'm already party of multiple Laconica (the source of Identi.ca) networks via one seamless interface. There are some kinks, sure, but I'm bowled over by how much they've gotten done in a month. - Marina Martin
Marina, I am an identi.ca user. How do I follow a user on another laconi.ca server? How do they follow me? Please post a pointer to the docs. This is very important. - Dave Winer
Dave, when you are on the profile page of a user on another laconica server (such as mine: http://waka.me/wil) just click on the Subscribe button. It will then ask you for your profile URL (yours would presumably be http://identi.ca/dave) then submit the form. Your browser will do an OAuth redirect dance, after which you should be subscribed to me. - Wil via MojiPage
Mohit, the market is badly fragmented *now.* QQ is huge in China. Yahoo! and MSN started beta testing interop only in 2006. Google whipped out their checkbook and paid AOL a billion dollars for interop, and even that is lame -- AIM users can't see GTalk users from AIM. My point was that AOL *used to be* the dominant IM, just as Network Solutions *used to be* the largest domain name registrar. History is replete with dominant players abusing their position, sometimes to their ruin. It is NOT replete with examples of companies that, experiencing massive growth, decide to share the load (and wealth) freely with others, even if that kind of behavior has the greatest benefit for society at large. Not saying it can't happen -- just that it *usually* doesn't work that way, as is made clear by the two examples Dave gave. IM and Network Solutions are two examples of groups collaborating only if they are dragged kicking, screaming, bribed and lawsuited to the table. I'm not sure why we should hope Twitter would - Karim
(continued) be different. Maybe "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." -- G.W.F. Hegel - Karim
"Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly, he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekov" - edythe via Bookmarklet
I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't actually know he was still living. Even more embarrassed to admit that I only know his work "by reputation" -- never read him. I think I'm slightly afraid to try to read his work. - nathan
Nathan, I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't even know of his return to Russia 14 years ago. I thought he was still in Vermont. My musings: http://tinyurl.com/oeonsolz - Ontario Emperor
and I am not embarrassed, only have mixed feelings - but it is not a time to cast it out: old Slavonic tradition, "about dead only good or nothing". here I stop... - silpol
I can recommend reading Solzhenitsyn's works, especially the shorter and earlier works which I did read. He was a great writer indeed. (Provided a good translation, of course.) - 9000
"The next Australian state to receive an update review post is Victoria, where a lot has been happening lately. From north to south, east to west, here are some recent reviews from Melbourne, capital of Victoria. Not everyone is entirely satsfied with their neighborhood, but the high StreetScores means people can't be too unhappy!" - ben barren via Bookmarklet
"So we're trying something new: we're going to list some of the ideas we've been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn't anticipate." - Paul Buchheit via Bookmarklet
Good ideas, mostly. Of course, as always, the devil is in the details (and to some extent, I think that's the point). - Paul Buchheit
interesting list, surprised to see photo/video sharing sites on there. - Adam Kazwell
From pg's comment "Most people who read that one [search engine that concentrates on design] will think "huh?" But if someone reads it and thinks "Damn, how did he hear about what we're working on?" that's someone we'd really love to hear from." - seman
"More open alternatives to Wikipedia." Wonder whatever happened to Google Knol... - Philipp Lenssen
They should start FF rooms for each of these. I'd contribute to a few. - Amir Gharaat
I think most of these are *great* ideas. This post isn't food for thought, it's a banquet :-) - Karim
Seems a little like bait? Some of the ideas are excellent reading and should be interesting to a few thinking about 'what they can do better'. Some of the other mentions (and wording in particular) leads me to wonder why go public with the list. - Charlie Anzman
Related problem: Using your inbox as a to-do list. The solution is probably to acknowledge this rather than prevent it. --- :-) - Kishore Balakrishnan
Jesus, this single page has more original content and ideas than the last 1000 ff and blog posts I read. Inspiring. - John Murray
AWESOME idea, thanks for sharing Paul... this is going to be fun to watch! - Susan Beebe
Haha i posted thast too. Although Paul is most more visible on FF, of course. - Akshay Dodeja
did any of the y combinator startup go big ? perhaps an ignorant question... a couple of them i know of are scribd.com, and a search engine for mechanical parts.. forgot the name. - Krishna Gade
Interesting: "Advertising could be made much better if it tried to please its audience, instead of treating them like victims who deserve x amount of abuse in return for whatever free site they're getting. ... What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. " How does TV advertising treat its audience better than web advertising? - Constantinos Michael
TV advertising is generally more entertaining than web advertising. - Ajay Kapal
@ Peter yeah... I was talking about octopart thanks for the link. - Krishna Gade
@ Ryan, what is it ? do you have something outside to try ? - Krishna Gade
The WP app is solid (disclosure - I made the screencast and have been playing with the different builds). Not on my in-phone app store yet either, I had to go to iTunes to find it. - Michael Pick via twhirl
It's good they are going open source. I hope they don't get in trouble with Apple for breaking their NDA (not sure if it forbids open sourcing your code). - Ole Begemann
Re: other solutions - not many I've seen. Shozu worth a go maybe (seems to support blogger, WP etc.) - Michael Pick via twhirl
I was getting ready to open a Tumblr blog for mobile use. This will make me rethink the platform. Set up one of my WP 2.6 self-hosted sites on the new mobile app, and it seems to work quite well. Very nice. - Chris Baskind
Is an application which comes wrapped in DRM really "open source"? - Ian Betteridge
@Richard I was able to install it this morning from the French iTunes Store. - Olivier Tharan
Ian: good point and probably debatable. I'm no licensing expert. Ironically, since Apple's DRM seems to be incompatible with the GPL, if Wordpress released their source code under the GPL, developers who use that code in their own applications would be required to release theirs under GPL, as well, which might not be possible with Apple's DRM. I'm not certain that's true, though. - Ole Begemann
@Oliver Got it off the UK store last night. Nice little app. - Richard Peat
"Citizen Engineer is an online video series about open source hardware, electronics, art and hacking by Limor (Ladyada) Fried of Adafruit Industries & Phillip (pt) Torrone of MAKE magazine." - Jason Wehmhoener via Bookmarklet
Just heard this on the radio - I used to think it was "Aluminum Struts! Aluminum Struts! To put on!" like some sort of weird robot costume... yeah - well, the real lyrics don't make any sense either... - Tad Donaghe via Bookmarklet
The real lyrics ... almost ... make sense. I'm always a little amazed at the emotion people can put into pseudo-deep lyrics. Always nice to hear The Who though. - Jason Wehmhoener
Awww - but it's more fun to think it's about wearing Robot costume parts... - Tad Donaghe
“How long does it take to develop a "good" product? Google search took at least 3 years (1996-1999) and Gmail was about 2.5 years (2001-2004). How about others?”
I'm guessing that the iPhone was under development for at least several years before 1.0 was released. FriendFeed is less than a year old -- I bet that it will be a lot better when it is two years old. - Paul Buchheit
But as you know well, Gmail have got quite many updates after that (but most of them could be counted as minor fixes probably). Just saying that product is good only if it's been maintained. ;) - Daniel Schildt
Does good mean, good enough to go live? I'm a little confused by how good is evaluated. Our hotels meta-search product (wego.com/hotels) has been around for about 2 years now, but we did a re-write a couple of months and it's much much better than before, but still don't know whether it compares to GMail's 2004 level of goodness, or Google's 1999 level of goodness. - arunthampi
Yes, of course good products must continue to improve. The Google of 1999 wasn't very good by today's standards either. It only searched about 70 million pages, for example (vs maybe 20 billion now). - Paul Buchheit
arunthampi, I'm thinking of products that will stand out and have significant impact on the world. - Paul Buchheit
FriendFeed have been under development for just little bit of time but considering that amount it has gone greatly forward. I wish it will develop to even more advanced (but still usable) tool for keeping persons updated without too much of information flow. I wish there would be more features for filtering of information that user could set and control from settings. - Daniel Schildt
Not sure how long Evan was working on identica prior to launch but I am absolutely staggered and amazed how far identi.ca has come in what must be less than 6 months.” - Andy C
I started eventseer.net 9 years ago, but it wasn´t until recently it became good (after Thomas took over 3 years ago). - Amund Tveit
Habari has been in development for about 18 months. It's a "good product" now (though with pretty low market penetration :) but it will be a lot better in a year. - Michael C. Harris
I think the iPhone was under (serious) development for 3 years prior to its launch last June. - Jamie
@Paul, ah in terms of significant impact, maybe we don't measure up (as yet) but im guessing that will happen very soon :) - arunthampi
It depends on what you mean by "good product". Good for lead users? Good for a distinct social milieu? Good for the masses? Also I believe it is very hard to tell when a product has been finished. Gmail 2010 won't be the same as Gmail 2008. - Benedikt Koehler
"Good to use" is not universal since different people have different need and for some of them, tool can be always difficult to use. - Daniel Schildt
Software is generally asymptotic to good, (isn't it?) because as software gets better it attracts more users, each of whom has a slightly different definition of "good". But some more random examples: Windows 1 -> Windows 3 == 5 years; Unix 1969 -> 1985 (by which time it was clear it was dominating workstations except for DEC); Linux on the desktop 1991 -> 2007 (Ubuntu 7); Mozilla/Firefox 1998->2005. It's pretty clear that web software matures quicker than desktop. - Nick Lothian
if you write software you should consider your users as BORC, not those weak dumb individualistic humans. that way you write software that fulfills needs. the more streamlined your BORG can do it the better. leave the task to make pretty buttons to the designers. the last step would be to imagine a human again and make your software human/error-proof. - krz9000
I heard Writely was built and sold (to Google) in 10 months - Stewart Rogers
Interesting question, but I can't answer it because I can't figure out how long anything has been in development other than by the community of people who are working on it, but then I can't correct for the bakedness of ideas when a community starts. And then I'm not sure which of the ideas in the bundle that is a product was really important to its success. Hmm. - Daniel Dulitz
Products are so different from each other, it doesn't always make sense to compare them. Products that are built on existing technology usually take less time than those built from scratch. The reality is usually a gradient between the two extremes. Consumer electronics often take longer than other products because of the difficulty developing, testing, and certification of hardware, as well as having physical alpha and beta testing of the software. - Chris White
@ seth Sadly, the first fax spam came in 8 minutes later from a travel agent offering a package to Hawaii. - Brian Norwood
The original version of WebTV was built within one year. I refuse to ever work that hard again. :) - Chris White
I think it's a question that can be answered historically, if you look at the time from when a group of people commit themselves to the realization of some idea, to the time when a similar group with a similar idea make an impact on the world. The answer for software *seems* to be 2-3 years, much of which is spent fumbling around in an unfamiliar space. For new drugs or new modes of transportation or new paradigms in visual art or whatever the time is different, and there's a lot of variance in any case. - ⓞnor
based on the startups i've seen over the years, 1 yr to prove the concept and 2 yrs to fully launch first "stable" iteration, then improvements from there on out to succeed (definition of success differs based on model/plan) - that'd be my swag of it... - mike "glemak" dunn
I like this topic Paul -- don't see it delved into all that much, at least in places that I tend to keep my eyes on - Eric Berlin
great topic.. longevity is key to successful product. if you are working on something new (not a copy of something else), you got to factor in some iteration time as well. It's interesting that many here are coming out at the same 2-3 year time frame - i agree also - Travis Parsons
I've been PM for an enterprise software suite for 8+ years now and it's taken that long for it to mature to the point where large corporate customers around the globe are deploying it for mission critical applications. We've gone through 4 major releases and countless minor/dot releases in that time. This is technology that originally was developed by a startup back in the 1996-2000 timeframe that was bought and sold via M&A activity 3 times in just over 8 years. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg
“software is lettuce, not gold” (Brian Behlendorf) so perhaps it's never good.. particularly if you are marketing guy facing ever-changing competition - Travis Parsons
I'd say 2-3 years easily, just to get real traction and work out the kinks before the product really starts to mature (if it's any good to start with). If you're out too early and it st
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