"Customers have had to do a lot of leg work to compare the costs of a flexible solution based on cloud computing to a more traditional static model... To that end, today we released a pair of white papers and an Amazon EC2 Cost Comparison Calculator spreadsheet as part of our brand new AWS Economics Center."
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
I wish they had a 'personal edition' of s3. The cost of a TB on S3 is ridiculous
- Phill Price
from iPhone
I can't believe I'm sad that the college football season is almost over! Who would have known I would be into football! Also, can't believe I'm nervous about 3pm today where the Heisman candidates are being announced. Good Luck Toby!!
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. For all the overhead of keeping a full-time staff (in the thousands for Facebook, and hundreds for Twitter), that cost starts to become negligible relative to the per-user costs associated with scaling the site itself (to hundreds of millions for FB, or tens of millions for Twitter). For companies like FB and Twitter to go on to have successful IPOs (which seems to be both of their objectives, and more power to them), they do need to be profitable, and that profit will need to be unlocked on a per-user basis. So the question seems to be -- do the economies of scale drive per-user cost low enough that per-user advertising revenue is a net positive?
- DeWitt Clinton
The FT article on MySpace (http://bit.ly/6CsAgM) suggests that the secret to a per-user sustainable model is far from a known science. I suspect that we're still a AdWords-style paradigm shift in the monetization of attention (like AdWords did for intention) away from seeing sustainable profitability for social networks. I could be wrong -- the old approaches may work, albeit with smaller margins -- but I'm not totally convinced yet.
- DeWitt Clinton
Facebook is profitable already. I've heard rumors that Twitter is close.
- Jesse Stay
I'm not sure either of those statements are true, Jesse.
- DeWitt Clinton
All that said, this article may give some insight into the paradigm shift necessary: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs.... Specifically, the opportunity for brokering application transactions and taking a share of the revenue.
- DeWitt Clinton
*However* (and this is a big however), if the web platform itself were to be made more social (the graph and the communication channels distributed), then applications like Farmville would do just as well stand-alone property, or one that can migrate between networks at will. This would be an advantage to Farmville as well, as their percentage of the in-app revenue would increase if it didn't need to share with the application platform provider.
- DeWitt Clinton
This competing interest between app developer and app host is a negative for the app host when it comes to creating sustainable ecosystems.
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt: Facebook is both profitable and cash flow positive: http://www.businessinsider.com/faceboo.... I would encourage you to read all the articles talking about how Google doesn't make money before Google went public in 2004 for some context ;)
- Bret Taylor
@Bret - right, which is why I mentioned the paradigm shift of AdWords in relation to understanding how modern social networks can reach sustainable profitability. I was among those in 2004 that didn't have a clue how Google would work, and boy was I wrong. [Edit: and I meant to add that I actually hadn't heard that FB is profitable today, which is different than cash flow positive, of course, but that's something that I imagine FB would want to keep private for now.]
- DeWitt Clinton
So here are the questions that raises - 1) are there paradigm shifts afoot in the monetization models (ala Farmville), 2) if not, then how will modern social networks make the old models sustainable if MySpace couldn't (what's the qualitative difference)?, and 3) if either of those models are dependent on maintaining social silos, do the countervailing forces of web decentralization posit a risk to sustainability?
- DeWitt Clinton
DeWitt, Bret works there so he's much more authoritative than me, but this was all public info: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009... - the Twitter rumor is just a rumor, but I do know, based on people I know that are paying, that Twitter is making money. I've also heard that they could be close to being profitable.
- Jesse Stay
@Jesse - glad you mentioned the firehose, as that's exactly what I mean by paradigm shifting models. While I firmly believe that a user's data is the user's data, and should be available to the user (or their proxies, such as an aggregator) at their request without additional fees and without a deal, charging for low-latency access to public data, or charging for aggregate data, is totally legitimate and a new business model. If Twitter can make that approach sustainable then I'm all for it.
- DeWitt Clinton
spammed again. what are we group admin supposed to do? keep on "unsubscribing" those spammers over and over and over again? locking the group? because that's all I can do, there is no ban or anything else and they keep subscribing back.
- alieb
Allowing admins to block spammers from groups would be a nice addition. It's gotten to where there are so many surveycheese spammers that it would be even better to automatically remove anyone that posts that URL.
- Greg Guitarbuster
My guess would be McCoy gets it if Texas wins, but if Texas loses, I would say Gerhart will actually be the frontrunner. Really happy about the result of the SEC championship :)
- Bret Taylor
Having to use Vista for reasons beyond my control. Will someone please explain to me why the built-in Windows zip file extractor runs *literally* two orders of magnitude slower than 7-zip? Seriously, in what world should it take five whole minutes to extract a 64MB zip file?
Maybe it's bad I/O code when reading or writing to the file system? Is Microsoft crazy enough to have implemented their own deflate instead of using zlib?
- Ray Cromwell
Yes, I believe they may indeed be that crazy. Even so, I just can't explain this level of slowness in any sane way.
- Joel Webber
File copying on Windows is similar. It seems to get in deadlocks all the time or something. I feel like they must have introduced abstractions in the shell that make it impossible to make things fast or something.
- Bret Taylor
I hear it runs faster if you toss the computer through an open, 2nd-story window
- j1m
I have *many* complaints about Vista but I've never run into your problem. Not that this note helps you :(
- Michal Cierniak
from iPhone
'On average, couples that live in [zip code] spend between $34,575 and $57,624 for their wedding. This does not include cost for a honeymoon or engagement ring.' The first time I looked at this site I almost died.
- joey
Flat nothing where I live - I can't get legally married.
- Sparky
How do they get their data, though? I never told anyone what my wedding cost.
- Stephen Mack
My zip code says between $25,854 and $43,091. I'm not buying that at all.
- Rochelle
In my zip code is says $40,235 and $67,058 DAMN
- Shevonne
$19,735 and $32,892 in a little town outside of Austin. Wow...that is insanity.
- aden
Stephen, just a random guess, but I would assume that they would survey the vendors out there in a certain area and then add it up? The average cost of a caterer in my zip code plus the average cost of a florist plus the average cost of a venue, etc.
- Rochelle
ours was JOP and home-made food. i think we spent less than $600 on the honeymoon.
- Joe Silence is not dead
Louisville, KY 40220 spend between $13,922 and $23,203 for their wedding. - Never known anyone who spent that much.
- Tsali, The Native of FF
Whoa! I was married at my mom's house in Palo Alto. The range there is $66,090 and $110,149!!! We didn't spend that much, and I still thought our wedding was costly!!
- Georgia Diehl
I don't suppose they subtract the value of the cash and gifts given
- LogEx
we were broke when we moved to the US from NZ and weren't about to go into debt for our wedding. my parents paid for our honeymoon trip as a gift.
- Joe Silence is not dead
I definitely see destination wedding if I ever get married
- Shevonne
Our wedding is a little on the high end...about $20k to $21k for my area. Range is $13,769 and $22,948
- Alex Scoble
the wedding? about 6 grand. since the breakup? $1,550 a month. for 8 long years.
- Morgan Haley
Joey, it just seems like too much. When I was doing my planning and all that, I don't think it would have been that much even if we had paid full price for everything. I guess it really depends on what kind of wedding you have and where you have it. Cake/punch in your church hall is going to obviously be less than plated dinner at a hotel downtown.
- Rochelle
that sucks.. its does not take canadian zipcodes
- Peter Dawson
Morgan, how many children do you have?
- Georgia Diehl
Wow! I had no idea child support was that much! Although, I guess I'm just assuming that's what you were referring to!
- Georgia Diehl
Child support? Try 'spousal support' aka alimony. But divorce is expensive because it's worth it.
- Morgan Haley
The site's figures are based on survey results from people who've paid for weddings and not based on polling of vendors according to the site.
- Alex Scoble
the 3 'rings' of relationshits: engagement ring. wedding ring. suffering.
- Morgan Haley
$14,993 and $24,988. Thank you Rochester :)
- Benjamin Golub
We saved a lot, Roberto, that's how.
- Alex Scoble
Well, that's most certainly better than borrowing the bulk of it :)
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
My mom wanted us to have a larger wedding (200 guests), so i told her fine, as long as she was willing to pay for it. She did...
- Georgia Diehl
That's all crazy talk - we spent about $3k-5k on our wedding. $10k+ for a one-time event is ridiculous!
- Jesse Stay
That's more reasonable Jesse. But there is no accounting for taste. :) my parents got married and had the reception in the back yard.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
Reasonable-shmeasonable...my catering bill alone, including alcohol is like $7500 and frankly, that's reasonable.
- Alex Scoble
Roberto, nothing wrong with that - it's where we had ours. It was still decorated beautifully, people still had fun, and we still got married. We made a lot of our food, and ordered Sams club for the rest - nicely decorated most people don't even notice the difference.
- Jesse Stay
It's like I've said before, once you get in to the traditional wedding industry, there is no cheap.
- Alex Scoble
Exactly what they did. I will probably do that as well. I'd rather spend that big money on the honeymoon.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
...and don't get us started on the diamond cartel ;)
- LogEx
Roberto, oftentimes you (the groom) have no say in the matter, hehe. If you aren't already in a relationship, choose wisely. :)
- Alex Scoble
This is an interesting site (and again an uncannily timely post) 8^)
- Chieze Okoye
Duly Noted, Alex. Some of my friends are getting married next year and that's what's happened :) Poor guys.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
ROFL...unfortunately, I fell in love with Cassie because she's intelligent, passionate, caring, cute, delicious, hard working and some other odds and ends as well...only later did I find out that she like Country Music, Christmas, Disneyland and big weddings...You have to take the good with the bad, hehe.
- Alex Scoble
There was someone here on FF (I don't remember who, but it was a guy?) who said his wedding budget was $100k and his honeymoon budget was $50k and thought that was totally reasonable and realistic. I was O_O
- Rochelle
People make lots of money off weddings and funerals. Sometimes it's really sad. In Las Vegas, I contributed $40 for a car wash, when I heard that the reason they were washing cars was to cover the funeral costs for a friend. Elopement maybe?
- Mitchell Tsai
It says $11-18K where I live. I think my wife and I spent around $8K.
- Jason Huebel
Mine cost $16 at the county building. It was still fun.
- Jeremy (cropmarks)
I think people *greatly* underestimate the cost of their wedding because they mostly look at recent bills after the event, but so many expenses, like deposits/stationery happen so far in advance. People also tend to not bundle-in related costs, like gifts for the wedding party, etc. If you think about it, if you host your reception at a hall w/ a catered dinner (which is what most people do), the food/beverage costs alone are like $100/person, so it's pretty easy to imagine how the average gets up to +$20k.
- Ana
@Mitchell Be wary of funeral car washes. Frequently those are scams.
- EricaJoy
My brother and his gf have ditched their idea to marry in the UK, instead of £10-13k they can spend £2-3k in Greece and get *everything* paid for. It's no contest, so we all off to Greece in a couple of years. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
The old one died; after my computer was on for a few minutes, the screen would turn a uniform color (the first time it was pink, then blue, then black). I got one of these: http://www.nvidia.com/object...
- Tudor Bosman
and that was when it decided to boot; after a few reboots, it wouldn't boot at all, and the computer made the "bad video card" beep sequence during POST (1 long, 2 short).
- Tudor Bosman
896 MB! Wow things have changed since I last had a gaming desktop
- Benjamin Golub
512 MB is still the most common, I think. The new video card I got (nvidia gts 250) has 512, and Steam's survey is showing 512: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurve...? although that's not only new systems.
- Amit Patel
Left to right, as if you didn't know already: Dan Hsiao, Casey Muller, Ana Yang, Jim Norris, Tudor Bosman, Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit (with Camilla), Sanjeev Singh, Kevin Fox.
- Tudor Bosman
That's why I love today's web : you can talk with the people that build the next web, and see those who build your current web. Congrats guys!
- Zackatoustra
FriendFeed Team, I love you !!!! Thanks to you all, I'm very happy everyday!!!
- Renchin(Reina)Wang
So that was the TGIFF ("Thank Goodness It's FriendFeed") party? Perhaps slightly off-topic, but if Camiila hasn't been betrothed yet, have I got a grandson for her ;-))
- ianf ⌘
TGIFF was excellent. Great event and great people.Thanks for the invite and hospitality.
- AJ Kohn
Louis, thank you and thank you to the FriendFeed team for making a killer product and hosting a great open house!
- Brian Solis
(bump) Ana and Casey are now married. Here's a pic of them on the left, between Ross and Jim. Congratulations to Ana and Casey! (per http://friendfeed.com/jessica...)
- Louis Gray
علی حجوانی تو روحت، ای واسه چه موقعیه؟ :)))
- Mehran
:))))))))) مال بعد از عیده. اواخر فروردین فک کنم
- Aly
When he was still working at a start-up, Bret Taylor remembers sharing an office with a former Google engineer who was building a virtual pets game on Facebook called "(fluff) Friends." "I didn't really get it," said Taylor, now director of the Facebook platform. But he asked his office mate, who toiled alone with his laptop, how many users he had. "And he said, 'Ten million.'"
- Mike Sego
Ah yes, the FF 1.0 office days. I remember this. :)
- Louis Gray
International growth has started to completely dominate on FriendFeed since August. Below is an unlabeled graph of page views on FriendFeed this month, broken down by country. Guess which country is the largest green slice below? (Hint: it is not English-speaking)
where other is proxied users from Iran. ;)
- EricaJoy
If we were not blocked , we would win a big slice for iran :(
- Milad.p
from FreshFeed
Both China and Iran would have been in there if they were not both blocked currently
- Bret Taylor
Is Russia any of the other slices pictured above? (other than gray)
- Schadenfreude
That's where Australia is, in the grey :)
- Glenn Slaven
OMG. Friendfeed is going the way of Orkut ;) Btw, is Norway/Scandinavia even visible in all this ? Just curious.
- Thomas Bøhm
@thomas. even though Orkut is Turkish (the guy), it is (site) not big in Turkey.
- Ozgur Demir
i'm sure finland is forbidden long time ago from this list ;)
- Nia
from fftogo
Just look at the public feed for 2 secs or 2 hours - yep, definitely.
- Micah Wittman
from iPhone
Facebook has a very similar story as far as I know.. we are a communicative nation:)
- Neşe Uyanık
Who's Gray? It's Gray, Louis of course :)
- Micah Wittman
Thank you for sharing this graph, Bret.
- Micah Wittman
Interesting - though for the sake of data visualization, pie charts are the worst of all.... :)
- See-ming Lee 李思明 SML
See-ming, a-hem, take a look at your avatar ;)
- Micah Wittman
@Bret, what is the exact number of Turkish people on FF?
- Ozkan Altuner
Ozkan, I'd be curious to know too, but I have a feeling there's an internal policy about not releasing absolute numbers, hence the percentages. But it never hurts to ask :)
- Micah Wittman
@Micah, it's the page view, however, not the number of users :)
- Ozkan Altuner
Good point, Ozkan. But I can't remember Visitor or View counts ever publicly reported before. But today could be the first time! :)
- Micah Wittman
I'm not surprised that Turkey is the green portion. I've seen more and more Turkish posts in my home feed. I thought it was just a biased sample, but perhaps not.
- John (a.k.a. dendroica)
Intense competition between Iran and Turkey occurred :D
- Nimaa
Hmmmmmmmmmmm...MOZAMBIQUE luminous orange l guess
- Pam Gwenzi
the desire to push the boundaries of internet of the turkish is troubling. the possesive tendecies of the turkish can be observed in the currently popular ''ff bu deYil'' (this is not ff) comment. turks are crowding ff, westerners are in panic!
- ferayebend
international growth dominates FF and yet the USA dominates the world. Not always in good ways either. What is the link? I don't think there is one. All I can say is that I love the USA and I love FriendFeed. What does it all mean? More free, cold beer is needed to find the answers.
- Morgan Haley
.. because, Turkish Facebook users are 10-20 years old. FF is very good alternative for older users. (and in addition Twitter is non-useful)
- Murat Tatar
If that is so, can we get some way of filtering by language? I want to follow more international people but be able to ignore them or their friends when they post in what I cannot read :)
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Just tried that VMware chrome OS image, it is a SUSE Linux distribution with GNOME, GDM is customized with Google Chrome logo, and also Google Chrome browser, that's it for now :S.
- Orlando Pozo
Arg! I can confirm, it's a fake (the live cd) :(
- Brandon
Let's see Brandon, I am anxious to test this thing :)
- Orlando Pozo
The build is also pretty broken. It is missing a bunch of the Google packages like google-gflags. I am almost done with a build - we'll see :)
- Bret Taylor
I built it earlier, check it out at: http://gdgt.com/google... And we just released a VirtualBox and Bootable USB image (not mentioned in that TC article).
- Jon Ursenbach
Amazing! If it's out of the bag, I'll surely read about it.. X at least will do the job in the meantime. Thanks for the share Bret!
- ElijahBailey-Zu of FF <0,
But the use of X is easy to change at will. Yay layered architecture!
- Daniel Dulitz
they are still taking care of spam, maybe a bit less hardcore than before, but it's still being done [looks like i was wrong they are just as hardcore as ever with a 7-minute turnaround time - amazing!]
- Chris Heath
I contacted FriendFeed about the status of this room and what they want us to do in terms of reporting spam. Ana replied and said "You should use this form. The spam group was not started by us, and we do not link to it from anywhere on our site. Thanks, Ana". I guess that's the final word, then.
Sure but they use the group for spam reports as you can see. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
this group is a better way to report spammers. we can see the result ("gone, thanks" comments) thanks to the moderators
- Hakan İyice
Kol, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some level of disagreement between them. :) Bret seems to respond well here but Ana and Dan both said to use the form. *shrug*
- Rochelle
bump for clarity... i never knew this ...
- Chris Heath
We still monitor it, but we have been working with Facebook support/operations to answer our official contact forms at http://friendfeed.com/about.... Facebook has a fantastic operations team responding to that form now, so it is reliable. Ex-FF employees still monitor this room actively though, so feel free to use it - we like to kill spam as quickly as possible :)
- Bret Taylor
you rock bret... thanks for the explanation - glad to hear that facebook is helping out with this stuff
- Chris Heath
I haven't seen the original series. I watched the pilot, and it was campy: the dialogue was cringeworthy, and the overtones were pretty funnily not subtle (the aliens have come on a promise of hope, change, and universal healthcare but it's really a plot to enslave the human race!). I think the campiness is going to keep me tuning in for at least a few more episodes.
- Mark Trapp
I thought the acting was pretty bad. It reminded me of acting on most SciFi channel shows.
- Bret Taylor
i watched the original series - they were cool!
- barbarars
I prefer my sci-fi to be timeless instead of picking on current “hot” problems. This bugged me about some of the more recent Doctor Who episodes.
- Amit Patel
I removed it from my season pass schedule. Even forgiving the bad acting, I'm not a fan of these "What's going to happen next? We don't know either!" serial dramas. Give me a serial like Battlestar Galactica where they tell you in the first episode what the end game is and I'll be on board.
- Mark Trapp
I watched part of the original series, but wasn't grabbed by it. I'm about to stop watching this one too.
- Cristo
"Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire AdMob, a mobile display ad technology provider, for $750 million in stock." Congrats to Kevin Scott and the other folks I know at AdMob.
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
So, so true. Plus, rendering any part of your app on the server (except perhaps as a startup optimization) makes offline support damned near impossible.
- Joel Webber
I haven't been following GWT lately, but my main issue with these approaches is they make the latency of first view inherently, significantly worse than simple HTML because you have to load the HTML and JS serially before doing the additional work of rendering the page/fetching the page data. That "flash" we see in all Google apps annoys me quite a bit, and annoys me more for web sites that aren't really "apps" in the Google Apps sense
- Bret Taylor
FriendFeed renders stuff on the server and the client using shared code. I think that approach leads to the best user experience by far for most apps (apps like Gmail and Google Docs are probably special/different in this regard). I just think too many apps start off with this approach when it doesn't really benefit their code or use experience.
- Bret Taylor
I think that the client-only approach is difficult initially because there aren't a lot of good patterns for it. With careful juggling of CSS/script load order, you can get an experience that's faster than that of most server-rendered websites (ie: Digg) without any sort of UI flash. Once you've taken that initial hit, you user experience can be so much better. I'm still working on some code in this area, but I hope to release a GWT library that automates the whole process soon.
- Matt Mastracci
Without using GWT's runAsync, you definitely take a big initial runtime hit. If you hope to run all of your code dynamically, there has to be some sort of incremental load process.
- Matt Mastracci
Another approach is to send the data down with the scripts. In general, GWT reduces the number of HTTP transactions compared to what people usually do by hand (it's had automatic resource bundling/spriteing for a long time). For example, you could write a servlet that bundles the first fragment of a GWT app, along with data, in the initial download, so the major overhead is generating...
more...
- Ray Cromwell
@Bret: I completely agree that "content" and "apps" should be treated differently, and some sites are difficult to place into one of these two pigeonholes. If your site is primarily "content" and you really are just loading one (mostly) static page after another, you're probably never going to be able to write js that outperforms the browser's progressive renderer. I also agree that if...
more...
- Joel Webber
But I'm also looking forward to seeing Matt's library. I think that with really aggressive code splitting, careful precaching of data, and careful rendering (a lot of work, I know), you should be able to get the best of both worlds. And avoid *my* big pet peeve, which is static pages that get into bizarre, inconsistent states because they attempt to perform some logic on the client, some on the server, and have no consistent model.
- Joel Webber
I think you could also enhance server-side selection script by allowing it to combine the initial host "dynamic" HTML page and initial JS fragment in one HTTP request. They'll be no blocking or extra HTTP requests to get the page up and running, assuming you runAsync() on a point after the DOM is stable. This would avoid any flashing, limit serial HTTP requests prior to first render to...
more...
- Ray Cromwell
We are serving all of our big JS from a CDN, making it tougher to customize dynamically. Including the initial RPC fragments in the HTML would probably work, though I haven't experimented along those lines.
- Matt Mastracci
from iPhone
Edge Side Includes may or may not help. e.g. you can deploy your JS to the CDN, and use ESI to inject the JS into the HTML served from the CDN. I think it depends on how 'dynamic' your HTML is if this is a win or not.
- Ray Cromwell
Our current CDN (CloudFront) doesn't support any ESI magic and has a minimum TTL of 24h, so we have to ensure everything served from there is really static. I'll probably revisit most of the choices we've made so far in the near future and put together a set of good practices for highly dynamic web applications that I can offer up for peer review. There's not a lot of public literature on this sort of webapp.
- Matt Mastracci
So what are your thoughts on Cal and Stanford this year, Bret? Cal got toasted by both USC and Oregon, but has won elsewhere.
- Louis Gray
Louis: hopefully going to be a good game. Two great running backs, defenses that are inconsistent. It is really hard to predict given how inconsistent both teams have been, though.
- Bret Taylor
Evidently the University of Oregon PK Ducks Pro Team are not well liked by Stanford message board guys...some good comedy there. :-)
- Christopher A Carr
"While it is obvious that this maneuver creates a problem for the multi-billion dollar GPS market, it also poses real challenges for the leading smart phone players – RIM’s Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone. Without access to their own mapping data, these vendors now face an interesting dilemma. Do you risk flying naked without free navigation or do you suck it up and swallow the above average royalty fee for each and every handset? Neither option is stellar. This problem isn’t nearly as daunting as the one now faced by the Windows Mobile and Symbian teams. As software providers, they are lucky to get a per unit royalty equal to that extracted by the GPS data guys. If they are now forced to integrate this data merely to keep their product competitive, their gross margin just went negative. Ouch!"
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
I would love to be a fly on the wall in Redmond
- Ray Cromwell
I'm psyched to get Google maps powered navigation. they provide much better directions than tom tom ever could... and if they calculate live traffic as well thats good. but i'm curious as to why Verizon doesn't seem to mind since their nav package is normally $15/month.
- Matt Ellsworth
My experience with Google has been completely different. They were notably subpar when they stopped licensing the leader in map data a year or two ago, and their directions now are as bad or worse than MapQuest. I split the difference now between them and a GPS unit when I need to, but generally prefer to use an actual map for most accurate directions.
- Cole Jolley
I think this is likely to change in a big way once they fully leverage their Street View database. Still, I can't argue with free when the errors are few IMHO.
- Ray Cromwell
Is this an example of "open" systems putting people out of business? (of course, it's not personal, it's just business..."
- Cliff Gerrish
What I really don't understand is: why are there so many lost people?
- LogEx
from iPhone
Does Google actually make any money from their maps? How many Google behaviors are enabled by their huge search revenues and how many of those can continue as their dominance wanes? Also as the article mentions Nokia owns Navteq so the "Symbian" problem is a non issue (unless you think there is a viable Symbian outside of a Nokia context).
- Hayes Haugen
Now the droid initiative on verizon finally makes sense to me. I watched the demos as they showed off feature after feature that verizon likes to charge extra for thinking no way is this not going to be expensive. But with google paying verizon on search ad revenue, verizon doesn't have to nickel and dime their customers for every added feature.
- dthree
"I would love to be a fly on the wall in Redmond" - things may be just as interesting in Cupertino.
- John Craft
Google's move is similar to MSFT's free browser play.
- Cliff Gerrish
I'm wondering how Apple's purchase of PlaceBace is going to play out. Are they going to ditch Google Maps on the iPhone?
- Matt Mastracci
I also have issue with the "less than free" thing as a new disruptive thing. Pay-to-play on a platform or a device is not new (e.g. anti-virus software).
- Hayes Haugen
@hayes yes, you're darn rite about Navteq thingie...
- A.T.
That seems pretty counter productive if you ask me.
- Matt Ellsworth
We have a client whose "logo" is basically their biz card stuff, complete with address. They had a quasi-meltdown last week asking for the address in *their* image to be changed. No one there seems to understand why we won't or can't change it. Silly.
- Admiral Anika
When we launched Maps, one of the best "new" features we put in that didn't get much attention was capturing the clipboard paste and replacing line breaks with commas so you could copy and paste a full address in an email into our search box (rather than typing all the components into separate form fields like MapQuest). Turned out to be a pain to do in many browsers - I spent an annoying number of hours tweaking it at the time (though it is easier in modern browsers).
- Bret Taylor
Bret: Why not just offer a multi-line text box?
- Gabe
Bret: I noticed that :). But it didn't always do that did it? I vaguely remember being frustrated that nobody did that
- Benjamin Golub
from email
Ben, what about companies that put email addresses in images in their info area instead of letting you click on a link or select the email address text? :)
- Cristo
Cristo: I'm not sure which is worse but I feel like I run into the maps issue more :)
- Benjamin Golub
Louis: the important part of religious humor is that it is equally offensive to all religions ;)
- Bret Taylor
I agree with Louis (and have been cringing every time I see this shared)
- Jesse Stay
Bret, that's understood. Jokes are jokes, but some religions fare worse in this one, and rely on old stereotypes/falsehoods that should go away.
- Louis Gray