Chris M

I don't remember two-way radio outages. - Jason Carreira

I see your point, but sadly Twitter is terrible for doing anything but making a shout and getting a group of replies. Actual conversations are pretty clumsy slash impossible. - Steve Isaacs

I've subscribed to Nielsen's weekly e-mail newsletter for years. I can't recall any anecdotal recommendations at all. He is meticulous about backing up his tactics with data. As for the site design, I'm just a civilian, but I find it very legible. (Much easier to read than, say, the gray color used in this comment on FriendFeed.com!) - Stephen Mack

The blog post you link to is discussing this page: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/... -- just curious, but why is the information layout terrible? Breadcrumbs, site nav, headlines, summaries -- seems very easy to scan and read to me. - Stephen Mack

I should be a little clearer. I don't mean anecdotal as in 'Boo.com uses flash in this way and it sucks don't do it' (though there is some of that) but more 'This very specific UI practice is bad' as opposed to Norman's more holistic discussions of UI principles. I don't want to sound too harsh though. I use his Heuristic Evaluation hit list all the time and it's extremely valuable, but again it's on a tactical level. - Kevin Fox

As for the information design, the typography is inelegant. It feels very pushy with text either being very dense or VERY BOLD. The leading isn't used to tie the bold headings with their content, but rather to just make them stand out more. The use of Verdana and interspersed bold terms invites people to skim and just pick out the buzzwords as a way of finding the piece they're looking for, which is fine in some cases but not for essays where one would assume there's something to be gained from the narrative flow of the piece. The design speaks to the largest problem of Nielsen in the world, which is that people anecdotally say things like 'Don't use serifs on the web because Nielsen said so.' They say this because this kind of bulletpoint is all they absorb from a layout that fosters this behavior. - Kevin Fox

@Stephen Mack: the font is rather large and not pretty, and the line spacing is all scrunched. That post could also have benefited from some anchored links. It is not horrible, but certainly not aesthetically pleasing. - Laura Norvig

To be clear, I think Jakob is brilliant and I respect him a great deal. What I'm saying is that his own site suffers from the same problem that, for example, DMV parking lots do: If you're an expert and try to apply every rule you advocate in one place, the result is often the opposite of what your expertise implies. Check out the useit.com home page and imagine it from a first-time visitor's perspective. - Kevin Fox

if he was to make a winamp skin -> http://www.kottke.org/00/02/di... - AJ Batac ♘

clearly part of the WAVE - Marc Canter

This goes all the way back to the Handbook of Mathematical Functions from NBS (now NIST) in 1964 and an effort to continue that in the age of the Internet - Dennis E. Hamilton via twhirl

now to put this into an ontology... - Frank

II wish DADS had really obscure things like priority deques. My faith in dictionaries is inversely proportional to the number of times I look for something and it's not there - Adewale Oshineye

Priority deques? So you can take off either the lowest *or* the highest element? - ⓞnor

@Frank: an ontology - sweeeeeet. - MikeAmundsen

@nor I've only ever needed that on a real project once. It was a trading system which required a way to fetch messages from either the front or the back of the queue. The queue needed to be ordered by a Comparator and we needed this to be done as quickly as possible since delays meant that users were trading based on outdated info. Trying to track down someone who had implemented a priority deque in anything other than a research paper was surprisingly unfruitful. - Adewale Oshineye

Seems like you could bang something out on top of a tree map that would be only slightly less efficient than whatever complicated thing could be done with pivoting heaps or such. - ⓞnor

really freakin awesome pics! - Tim Hoeck

Spectacular!! I love fireworks, displays and LEDS! Visuals are awesome.. - Akshay Dodeja

Oh, that AT&T picture. Classic! - Colby Olson

↑ 楼上这一句笑死我了 - Calon

not ATT, but ur-anus... - Pajama Domain via twhirl

I'm still wowing! Awesome photos! - BeeLing

not AT&T, it's earth XD - fiorano

加油，北京！ - suso

That is what I was thinking, too. - Robert Scoble

You'd think they'd work toward getting something relevant if you search on "cuil launch" - Michael Markman

It's the only thing that makes sense when you look at how bad the results are. You don't roll out something like unless you are just showing off the interface. - Kevin Bondelli

Would also explain the weak branding. Who cares, if it's just going to get plugged into something else? - Chris Baskind

Not very good results at the moment I will say - shinchi via twhirl

It must be so hard to launch something in a realm where there isn't much tolerance/patience for incremental improvement. The bar in this space is high and consumers are very picky. Look at Yahoo. Their search is actually pretty damn good. However, they keep losing share. - Christopher Sacca

agree with Sacca - also, I thought the people behind Cuil had already sold some search technology to Google and hence they wanted to try it out on their own this time - so if anything they'd have more intent than others not to flip. - Adam Kazwell

100% agree with Paul .... what they have launched really sucks and I don't think I would be going back again to search .... Sacca seems to be right that the bar is really high in this space and whatever gets launched really needs to work well or it will fail - Raza via Alert Thingy

It is also strange that Cuil has no presence on twitter or friendfeed. There is no friendfeed.com/cuil. There is a twitter.com/cuil account but no twitters there. It would be interesting to hear from someone at Cuil on the FriendFeed/Twitter as to why they launched with the poor results... - Atul Arora

Yahoo's crawl speed is not close to GOOG. - Michael

It's something, and a reasonable first step. Yes, the results aren't that great but they seem reasonably comprehensive. Their make-or-break will be showing continuous visible progress - if they don't, sure, they're just a $XXXm dog and pony show for another company too scared of Google to see straight, but if they do improve, there may be potential for even more upside than that. - David Weekly

Google Killer? I do not even need to look to know the answer - Mike Reynolds

maybe there could be business in opening up their index? - Alex Gawley

I'm not saying that the results are good, but people seem overly critical. I saw one piece on how their name is too hard to spell. But if they did become popular, this would not remain a problem. - Clare Dibble

It's embarrassing IMO. The results are thin and the images completely wrong. Not good is one thing ... Cuil seems a cut below not good right now. - AJ Kohn

There results aren't -bad- but they are in no way great. Worse yet, anytime you start throwing around X-killer, you are pretty much setting yourself up for destruction. - Steve Spalding

can a startup beat google with a link-based algorithmic search engine? msft's cashback.com is an example of changing the game. trovix.com's deep semantic indexing is changing the game. same for thefind.com. mahalo human-powered engine is too. Who else? - Tim Connors

Paul, maybe they launched because they believed gathering data and feedback from the public would help them improve their ranking and other aspects of their service? I don't think that their ranking is anywhere near as good as Google's right now. But, there's no a priori reason to believe that Cuil ranking won't improve quickly. Anna, Russell, et.al. are actually pretty sharp. I for one am excited to see another player in search with new ideas about infrastructure and user experience. - Kevin Scott

They of all people should have known to release with fast results (latency).. The fact that they did not surprises me, and had the exact effect I would expect.. I have no plans on going back, good results or not.. :) - Derek Collison

Does "launch early" work for search engines? Don't think so.. - Jing Lim

One of the nice things about Google is the speed they index. Consider the indexing of a blog post made yesterday: Google already picked up the post and Cuil has not. http://www.cuil.com/search?q=C... VERSUS http://www.google.com/search?h... Google shows 367 results and that is trouble for Cuil. They'll need to work on that quickly to convince people they are being serious. - LPH™

it's about as useful as Archie(Gopher ref) - clarke thomas

considering I got server overloaded errors when I tried it at first, I'd have to say launching early was a big error in judgement. - sean808080

The indexing speed of Google and other search engines is pretty good, but another area that needs fixing is when content moves. It takes a long time for Google to catch up. Example: Let's say you move your blog or an early well-praised site goes stale, many search engines have trouble adjusting their rankings to the new site or to push down the older one. - Loren Heiny

Trouble is that indexing and ranking are closely linked. If all you return is a hitlist there's no good ranking that can be done. Can't yet tell whether they're in that situation. What I don't get is why the rush to launch now. - Daniel Dulitz

I read similar thoughts on Reddit yesterday and they made some sense... is there any chance all the negative buzz right now is going to hurt their buyability though? - Philipp Lenssen

IMHO there have to be better ways to show off your very own crawling+indexing technologies than opening up to the public and getting thrashed for not delivering what people expect when you dub your service search engine. I have a hard time believing that the cuil/cuill guys did not know what they were doing though ... Were they pushed to release by financiers? Were they in dire need of usage data? - Mustafa K. Isik

I do think they built Cuil to be bought. The reason they launched is they hoped their valuation will go up with all the press blitz... Which seems pretty well planned.... I think they went overboard selling themselves to the press and did not expect some of the back-lash. Of course, the saying goes - "All press is good press :)". So who knows this might indeed increase their valuation to 100s of millions :). It all depends on what the folks over at MSFT think/know about search :)) - Bindu Reddy

someone cough microsoft cough - Sarah Perez

M$ bait! ah ha!! Bindu and Sarah, you're on to something there!! - Susan Beebe

I liked this thread so much that I blogged it: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - Erick Schonfeld

As of yesterday, they didn't even have their own name indexed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/b... - Brady Brim-DeForest

actually, they are off to a decent start. They have a nice interface that needs work, and some results are good and many others bad. I can tell you it takes about a year to getting your feet under you and figure out where you can fit in the search ecosystem. They are funded for a three year run it seems, so I would give them a year and see where the product is at. - Jason Calacanis

grabbing contextual images process is too weird! (o_O) - Pınar Yanardağ

great discussion. the more I've read about the various GRAVE screw-ups (with porn images being linked to some people's bios, etc.), the more I tend to agree that they must have known that things weren't ready. It just feels too much like a prototype... Thus the buy-out scenario seems plausible. Who knows, buying their indexing technology could actually give a boost to MSFT or even Yahoo, given that they have a hard time keeping up on the tech/scale side of search. One thing we do know is that Google... - Alex Schleber

... isn't going to buy them :) I wrote a post on the branding aspect of the Cuil debacle earlier today -> http://businessmindhacks.com/p... but now I'm not so sure anymore if they were even serious about the whole thing. Maybe they're having a hearty laugh right now that no one is getting the joke. If they are serious though, it's a horrible launch and horrible branding. - Alex Schleber

Is that for realz? - Yuvi

Yes, it's from the very beginning. Here is Google's history: http://www.google.com/corporat... - Paul Buchheit

I dug up this page because I was thinking about http://friendfeed.com/e/026800... - Paul Buchheit

wow. In the beginning, God created.. Google. - Tim Hoeck via NoiseRiver

Ironic that there still isn't a very good solution to that without 3rd party libraries.. (ie, the system property solution works, but affect the entire JVM which is less than ideal. You can manually set the header, but you'd think this would be solved properly by now) - Nick Lothian

@Nick - you mean, YOU CAN'T SET USERAGENT IN JAVA? :O - Yuvi

@Yuvi - no, I mean it's a lot less convenient than it should be in a platform that's been around for over10 years (which I guess relates to Paul's thing abotu how long it takes software to get good). - Nick Lothian

placeholder comment so @jasoncarreira can take a gander. - Cyndy

@Nick - yup, pretty much any time you need to do HTTP in Java, you should start with HttpClient rather than Java's HttpUrlConnection :) - Patrick Lightbody

Who does things without 3rd party libraries (and why would you)? - Jason Carreira

@Nick - my point, pretty much. In most languages I've used, it's a single line change affecting a single instance.... - Yuvi

@Patrick - yes. @Jason - well there are some cases where you don't want to introduce additional dependencies, or you have clashes in dependencies. In this case it's pretty clear the correct answer is "use HttpClient", but I think that it's sad these simple use cases haven't been fixed. They did fix timeouts, so you can set them per connection in JDK 6 (or 5?), but not the user agent thing. - Nick Lothian

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

2-3 years. Based on Moore's law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... - Igor Poltavskiy

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

It looks like the incandescent light bulb was around for 75 years before it was commercialize-able: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... - Clare Dibble

Game development is about 2-3 years but not sure if there's much correlation of development time to quality. - Chris Bentzel

Human brain software takes 2–3 years before it is able to reasonably control its host human. - Amit Patel

how long does it take for a good product to go bad or rot? Why do some products still remain relevant after many years? - Shakeel Mahate

The first fax machine was sold in 1861. - seth

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 stinks and everyone bails on it, what's the point? (Case study: Friendster.) - Brandon Uttley

somewhere between 3 days and 3 years - Gabe Ragland

Varies. You can nail it first time (rare) or you can work toward it from a decent base. The latter generally happens in the 2-3 year range. If it takes longer nobody adopts it unless they have to (or if they can change it). - xero

it depends on the company ( big, small or a startup) usually when big/established companies trie to build a product in a market which already has competitors, they try to make it game-changing (a.l.a iphone), or differntiate it ( gmail ) and this means spending sometime on the product to get it right and better. Also, big companies have the advantage of scale means they will have a user base that's willing to try their product out... This could also be a disadvantage, as they would need to worry about all the issues beforehand. That's the reason Google worries about scalability, Microsoft spends months to years testing their operating systems... I guess its different with startups.. how long did it take to build a youtube or a flickr or even a friendfeed ? Months ? Most of the consumer software startups work on their product for a few months and then put it out and iterate over it. - Krishna Gade

Until it's ready. Sort of like toasting a piece of bread. - Ryan Massie

Lil' Wayne has a problem with the lean. I can point you to some rappers that actually make sense. - Eric @ CS Techcast

Perhaps this is also some form of Old English???? - Kevin Shannon

It's probably just my translation. - Leo Laporte

word - Grant

If it gets more people to wear condoms, I'm all for it. - xero

Lil Wayne... the man, the myth... the linguist. - rykos via twhirl

Lil Wayne also sez: "Gangstas and pimps, Love lobsters and shrimps, Kool-Aid and chicken, Flashy things and women. " - These are a few of his favourite things. - John Worthington

a better sermon than my pastor's - Andrea Baker

I actually thought you meant to type "weird" cause in my head that made more sense. - Ryan Cates

He drinks cough syrup all day, babbles incoherently on a mic, and people eat it up like he's the best rapper ever. It's amazing. - Rahsheen™

women and chicken! excellent off rhyme! - edythe

I've been listening to Lil' Wayne on mixtapes for 4 years now, and have loved all of his mixtape material leading up to his latest album, which I find to be too "mainstream." I think he's got a lot of lyrical talent, and has clearly aligned himself with decent production. I'm not saying he's better than 2pac/Biggie and is the best that ever lived, but I believe his current reign is more deserved than 50's. Oh, and I would have never expected Leo of all people to tweet his lyrics! Good on you Leo!! - Granteezy

Not gonna lie, the man says some awesome stuff. I hadn't realized 50 was that important as a rapper...HAH. I avoid radio/videos though, so what do I know... - Rahsheen™

Favorite rapper. 2nd best to Jay-Z. He says things that are just...GENIUS! Love him. - Corvida

So many nuggets of knowledge built into Tha Carter III, Leo. This is one of many, my friend. - Liz

andrea: ! :) - edythe

I'm still a BTH man myself, but then again I most listen to rock/alternative. - xero

Thanks for letting me know I can safely continue to completely ignore urban contemporary music. - Brian Norwood

That's considered incoherent babbling? o_O hahahaha - Bob via Alert Thingy

Leo foshizzle! - Jim Bednarz

That's a misquote. It's really: "Safe sex is great sex, better wear a latex / 'cause you don't want that late text, that "I think I'm late" text" - Hashim Warren

One for true techies: "I got game like EA, but I wanna let you play." - Sean Quinn via twhirl

@brian norwood - Leo got the line wrong...Hashim corrected him. It makes plenty of sense and it's promoting safe sex. Not sure why that's worth ignoring? - Angel Smith

Thais pretty fly, Leo. - Mike Lewis

@Angel It's not the message, it's the messenger. A person could eat alphabet soup and poop more sophisticated lyrics. - Brian Norwood

Yeah, I mean. Sometimes I do feel like kicking Wayne in the chest...watch him fall into a bottomless pit...but that's just me :) - Rahsheen™

This... IS .. SPARTA...er, I mean, MUSIC! - Brian Norwood

It's just depressing how much money he'll make from this... - Brooks Guthrie via twhirl

ACtUALlY liL WAYNE SAYZ 'SAfE SEX iS GREAt SEX; bETteR WEAR A lAtEX kCAUSE YUh dONT WANt tHAt lATE tEXT tHAT i THiNK iM lATE tEXT !!' dUhh ACtUALlY liSTEN tO thE lYRiCS. ANd YES liL WAYNE iS thE bOMb LiKE tiCk tiCk(= - Dawny

Yahoo only paid $35 million for Flickr? That seems like a real bargain. How much did Google pay for YouTube again? - Robert Felty

Finally, a resignation letter that's not full of cliches. - niniane

The Tin Man is off to see the wizard. :) - Morton Fox

So, when are you going to let me start buying bling for my FF page? - Christopher Sacca

I'd like to believe this is true but ... why buy the Mercedes (which is a total nightmare of a car now) except to show status. What of the newest golf clubs? The newest techno-gadget? Perhaps a little less conspicuous to the masses, but they're still showing off to THEIR peer group. Show up at the country club and you flaunt the clubs. Show up at a conference and flaunt the new iPhone or MacBook Air. It's just different for your social/economic class. - AJ Kohn

As far as cars go, the majority of "fine German automobiles" are leased, which is the most expensive way to operate a vehicle, because people can't afford to buy one, but want to look affluent. They're thinking "monthly payments" vs. true Cost of Ownership. Is it any wonder that the most frequently owned vehicle among millionaires is the Ford F-150 pickup? - Dave Roth

"...[A]lthough, unconditionally, racial minorities and Whites spend approximately the same fraction of their resources on visible consumption, Blacks and Hispanics spend about thirty percent more on visible goods, after accounting for differences in permanent income." (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn...) - Jim Norris

Dave, I think many of those luxury leases (at least in U.S.) are due to tax code and people being able to write-off much/all of the lease pmts if can be claimed for business use. And to your point, for CF reasons it's easier for some to go the leasing route than lump-sum pmt. But back to the cultural flossing, yeah, they get to update to the latest bling vehicle every two years; these aren't really the buy-and-hold types. - Casey

This article also keys in well with the book "Millionaire Next Door." - Jason Kaneshiro