Things that I don't need to get separately when I buy a computer.
I'm not advocating for Microsoft. In fact, I use Linux, Open Office, and Gmail. But for regular consumer, they just want something that comes in one package and works without additional effort. That's why iPad is hitting the spot, because it's even more packaged than a Microsoft PC. Microsoft couldn't careless about Ubuntu, but they should definitely be worried about iPad (or packaged computing device in general).
I'm curious how are they are going to solve the problem that most people hate to learn new interfaces of their old tools.
For example, it took me a while to start using google reader, google calendar. I told all my friends how great those tools are, but none of them has converted.
People are used to their twitter, facebook, newspaper interfaces. Crossing the chasm from early power users to mainstream users will be hard.
Actually, the future is recommendation via brain composition. Or better yet, direct brain stimulus that makes you think anything is a good recommendation.
Facebook is the future? I hope we are a bit more imaginative and ambitious.
I remember somewhere in MongoDB documentation that states why you shouldn't use Mongo for sensitive information (i.e. money related) because of the lack of transaction. (No reference, but obviously I read it somewhere because I remembered it.)
Which do you think grabs more attention in a resume:
- Graduated from xxx University with Honor in computer science
OR
- My site was so engaging to students that my university had to threaten to retract my degree three months prior to my graduation in order to force me to shutdown my site.
This is the kind of PR Bill Gates get by dropping out of college. If I was him, I'd keep the site running, let the university take my degree, then take them to the court (knowing that I won't win), just to create more media attention.
"A few weeks away from getting his degree" is exactly the kind of thinking that I'm trying to avoid. But of course, who knows what I would actually do when I'm in his shoes.
His site is worth so much more than his degree, IMO.
I guess this is the I-am-pot-committed-so-i-have-to-go-through-with-it effect. It's hard to make decisions based on future returns as suppose to past efforts.
How about a mailinglist automatically filters out posts based on relevancy? Using ardvark-like NLP?
A small niche mailinglist is probably the closest thing to a real online community, for two reasons:
- relevant emails always get read by everyone in the mailing list
- people read emails anyway, so there's less step involved as suppose to going to a website to read posts.
But a conventional mailinglist is not scalable - some of the lists I'm in get so many posts everyday that I become de-sensitzed to them.
There's a solution however.
The way to keep the posts relevant is to sub-categorize them much like subreddit, but that's also work and it's manual. That's where NLP and machine learning comes in so that the system can learn your preference and only email you the relevant posts. Of course, you also get an option to receive less-relevant posts too.
(I should probably make this into a post as suppose to a comment.)
However, I don't want to stay solo. I have been solo for two years. It's too much work and not as fun as a partnership.
Building a community is a long-term investment. It will give me a wider range of resources and opportunities.
Plus, I have often found that I become more creative, focused, and generally better at things when I interact with other people periodically, even with regular non-hacker-founders (alone time is important too of course). I imagine having a social circle of smart entrepreneurs will be exponentially more beneficial to each individual. Y-Combinator is so sought after because of that social aspect.
Great products are nice, but great friends are even better.
Yes. I don't really see how this solves my problem though.
The design of HN is news oriented, not discussion or community oriented. And because it doesn't have categories, when the amount of submission reaches a certain size, up-voting "new" posts has marginal effect compares to random floods of submissions.
A year and half ago, I was reading every "new" post, because I wanted to be fair, but it's just not feasible right now.
There's a place for command-line and there's a place for shortcut. It all depends on the number of options in an interface.
If you only need to do a few things in an interface, shortcut is better because it's clean and intuitive. But when you have lots of behaviors (i.e. millions of potential websites to go to), shortcut just doesn't make sense. That's where an auto-completable search command-line becomes useful.
Plus, I rarely see people use the address bar the way it was "meant to be" or the way that the author described it. People either google the website that they want to go to or the address bar auto-complete it before one finished typing.
Even facebook has a global auto-complete search box.
Watch it, when the number of frequently-used apps in an iphone reaches a critical amount, it will make more sense to use app search/run interface.