Disqus - Latest Comments for ikirigin

Re: Facebook's Priorities

ikirigin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:43:32 -0000

(IMHO) facebook connect is so much more important than anything on facebook.com

great post

Re: Fare Thee Well, reddit!

ikirigin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:45:48 -0000

Good luck!

Re: Copy Cats | Like Eating Glass by Tempera[mental] originally by...

ikirigin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:31:39 -0000

This song is pretty horrible compared to the Ladytron Zapatista remix http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/219130686/auto...

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

ikirigin — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:37:13 -0000

Yeah, I missed the meeetup first time through. You should record it
and give access to donors. That might be kind of hard. The long tail
of donor management should be easy though - not hard.

Re: Donors Choose Blogger Challenge: Something's Wrong

ikirigin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:50:02 -0000

The constant asking for donations (not just on this site, but everywhere) is so fatiguing. People really hate it. At Tipjoy, we wanted to remove the friction from the transactions (and a big part of that is asking for a large amount), but had a lot more to do.

Why don't we see more subscriptions that are directed at non-profits? That seems like it could really help remove some of the thought from the process.

It would be great if you could just "connect" to some system in a widget, set the amount and period, and say "go". Then you would maybe be subscribed to first hand accounts of what the money went to. I really like the way Charity: Water did this, with live streams of well drilling but also a twitter stream of pictures
http://twitter.com/charitywater
http://twitpic.com/jvrsw

You should also try to give something back to those who donate. It would be great if they could see a post early, get an early RSS feed, or something like that.

This is related to the recent thoughts I've had that blogs should be more like web apps. You should have a single sign on, subscriptions, and features built into each post that only subscribers can see.

Re: The new economy

ikirigin — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:56:19 -0000

Not all people paying are taking offers. Huge gaming platforms like X Box have thriving virtual goods businesses based on storing and processing credit cards. Those paying aren't necessarily young.

Most people who own rockband or guitar hero are going through the same process. It is not a fault of Zynga that advertising can be effectively utilized to bring people in game. It's a benefit. Harmonix would love it if you could see an ad on facebook, and be a few clicks away from giving them money while playing their game.

That said, I think offers are quite ugly. They offer a poor user experience. I'd prefer people just become banked at a younger age, or use some sort of game card system.

Re: A Great Systems Engineer Job/Challenge In NYC

ikirigin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:25:17 -0000

Wow, those stats, for their size, are amazing. Facebook is an amazingly leveraged environment. It's more than 1M users per engineer, which you can rarely find. But Tumblr must be higher with 2-3M per engineer, right?

Facebook is a bit different because it doesn't have the writer / reader split userbase. I doubt Tumblr does even 0.5M writers per engineer, right? Also, you can work on something that greatly impacts the whole userbase at any company...

But these stats alone should give people an idea of how good a job will be. Feeling utilized is pretty much the primary metric good engineers use to judge a job, perhaps second to having interesting technical challenges.

Re: The SUL as a tool to control news (Scripting News)

ikirigin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:14:39 -0000

Is this surprising at all? Is it any different than, say, a charity they like being featured? It is to a great degree editorial. Taking @techcrunch off the list is a delightful way to get back at them for posting stolen docs.

It would have been far worse had they done it in response to a negative story, like an editorial saying twitter isn't worth their recent valuation.

Re: The Best Deal In Startup Land

ikirigin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:56:59 -0000

I'd give YC the same amount of stock just to be advisors. Do people even need to know more?It isn't about the money.

It's just bad journalism to ignore the non-monetary components.

Re: The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps

ikirigin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:27:23 -0000

Twitter is a company that understands the value of an API and development community. In that sense, it is optimizing both its own revenue, and that of the developer community.

It might be a local win to get the revenue from a popular app, but a global loss in increasing the disincentive to make apps for their platform. I think they get this.

There is a balance between functionality that is core to twitter and that which will always be outside Twitter Inc.

The question for each app maker is where you are in that spectrum (and for how long).

Re: The inevitable showdown between Twitter and Twitter apps

ikirigin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:57:30 -0000

I think you're using "apps" when you mean "clients". There isn't an inevitable clash between twitter and a twitter dating app, or something else that isn't the view into the stream.

Re: Failure

ikirigin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:59:04 -0000

Great post. Interesting contrast and some comments: http://giantrobotlasers.com/post/183766525/push...

Re: Failure

ikirigin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:58:23 -0000

That is dangerously close to the infantilizing trend of calling everyone a winner just for playing. You're more likely to win with a winning attitude - that is certainly true and important. You're not a winner if you didn't, you know, win.

Re: Founder Liquidity

ikirigin — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:34:57 -0000

I cringe when I hear VCs talk about "keeping founders hungry". This is usually from people who are already rich talking about people who aren't. It also betrays a deep misunderstanding about what motivates good founders. Wanting to win is a reason I do a lot of things. I would still be doing them if I were rich, but with greater risks. Your point about swinging for the fences makes complete sense.

I also think this issue is going to be less and less about what the investors want. The shift towards cheaper companies means that founders should just take control of this issue from the beginning, and not work with people against them.

I do appreciate the perspective of people like Ron Conway who say the money a founder gets from a personal sale is what could have gone to the company, but doesn't. I happen to think it is bullshit, because plenty of VCs have the problem of not being able to allocate their funds well. There is enough money for the company and the founder.

Re: Why I (Still) Code

ikirigin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:23:50 -0000

Ohh, I didn't know that you coded.

I'm running into this issue right now actually. I still have things I want to make on the side of a day job. I can only reasonably do it when my son Luka is asleep (sometime after 7:30-9pm). Then it is competing with doing something entertaining or decompressing. On top of this restricted schedule is a drastically reduced efficiency from the hour and maybe some wine in my belly. So I totally hear where you're coming from.

Hopefully I can launch a micro-app and say "it's possible" soon.

Re: Entrepreneur’s and investors can learn from the Facebook TipJoy “scandal”

ikirigin — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 18:18:59 -0000

Did you even read my comment? Or reread the techcrunch post? You got some basic facts wrong in your blog post, namely, that at any point Tipjoy walked away from a deal.

Re: Entrepreneur’s and investors can learn from the Facebook TipJoy “scandal”

ikirigin — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:05:11 -0000

"TipJoy allegedly said no"

Wow, you read an inflammatory and incorrect TechCrunch article, and even managed to get their version of the facts wrong.

When making a personal attack like this, try to keep the signal to noise ratio above zero.

Re: Why Startups Fail (Hint: It’s not because of money)

ikirigin — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:51:10 -0000

Raising money takes a great deal of time and attention. You can avoid that if you're profitable.

The trend for ever cheaper startups could cause more people to fail because they don't have the development resources to go as fast as they need to to capture a market.

Re: HowTo: OPML for Twitter subscription lists

ikirigin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:32:10 -0000

Thanks. I don't know much about the space. What kinds of tools exchange subscription lists?

Re: HowTo: OPML for Twitter subscription lists

ikirigin — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:52:20 -0000

How is this different from the social graph methods in the Twitter API, besides including a bit more data?
http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Met...

Re: Does This Blog Get More Traffic From Google or Twitter?

ikirigin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:30:58 -0000

This made me think of a test you can run to estimate the direct traffic original source. Just look at the graph in direct traffic before, during, and after the bump you receive from posting a tweet to the blog. The absolute value of the organic direct traffic should remain roughly the same, so any increase in direct traffic is actually twitter direct traffic.

Re: Does This Blog Get More Traffic From Google or Twitter?

ikirigin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:12:34 -0000

As I mentioned on twitter, you can see this in Real Time™ http://bit.ly/wBQVX on your chartbeat

144 total
73 direct
25 from twitter
8 from google

But you just posted a tweet to this link...

Re: http://icantdeci.de retires today. It was a fun... - Aaron White

ikirigin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:07:04 -0000

why? expensive to host?

Re: Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement

ikirigin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:37:17 -0000

Hacker News is written in Arc and is open source. New Mogul isn't just the same format as Hacker News, but the same code.
http://arclanguage.org/install

Re: Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement

ikirigin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:34:27 -0000

The real value in Hacker News for Paul and YC is to get people interested in startups and aware of YC funding. Keeping it tied to the ycombinator.com domain is a big part of that.