I always felt there were lots of gymnastics required to get data into a suitable format for Google charts (filling zeroes in time series, tough to work with multiple series, etc)
20-30 minutes of content is plenty to satisfy me. I really enjoy the ignite format, where the slides are on a 30sec timer, but they do too many presentations. We need events where there's lots of pressure on the attendees to keep the presentation tight and fewer presentations in the whole event.
A bunch of you all emailed for invites--we're sending a batch out later this week. We'd love to hear more of your thoughts once you use it. A few cursory answers: everything is free for now (we're still trying to figure out what the transaction fees will look like, but they will be competitive with credit card), Paypal is a great comparison and as someone recced with a link Paypal Wars is an awesome read, we love the Godaddy brand too, the syntax is very flexible and constantly adapting to the way people want it to work, if anyone knows the textpayme guys would love to chat with them (i'm @kortina), Fundraiser events-YES!, and yes security and fraud are tough problems but we are eager to tackle them. Think that covers most of them. Again, thanks to those who wished us luck and provided criticism.
In a more informal vein, I just got some space in Soho and am looking to host a semi-regular hackathon. I have done these in Philly in the past, and it has worked as follows. A bunch of people get together for a full day on the weekend, enter with a goal of accomplishing a side project (either a small new project or a piece of a larger project), and we all work from early morning til late night, then get some good food and drink afterwords. At previous hackathons I've gotten iPhone apps and simple web apps built, and they have been great fun. Sometimes it's just motivating to be around a bunch of people who are working something out of passion for creating, and this is a good way to harness that vibe. Get in touch with me if you're in NYC and interested in this sort of thing: @kortina on twitter or the same on gmail.
I posted here because I thought you guys might have some tips for further refining the estimate and some ideas for other sharing sites to include besides webmail sites and facebook and twitter. Also, I make the claim that most apps that send direct traffic are "sharing" apps - email, twitter and facebook clients, RSS readers. Can you think of any apps that might lead to large amounts of direct traffic that aren't necessarily "sharing" apps?
One of the things I always liked about Facebook was the lack of a global namespace. Every name on Facebook was contextual, when you logged in, so that Steve Andersen to me would mean something different than Steve Andersen to you, just like in real life. Sorry to see that go, but I suppose it's a tradeoff and a lot of good things will result from the new namespace.
Updated the post with some of this research y'all did: https://s3.amazonaws.com/4rk/screen-shot-2020-03-22-10.25.27... . Thanks again for sharing the edit history you found!