I started using erlang a couple of months ago and did face the problems you mentioned. I used Armstrong's book and read about 1/3rd of it.
After that I switched to writing programs, some for fun and some for work. Coming from Python, I did face a lot of resistance in using erlang, but the upside is so great (message passing, insane concurrency, pattern matching) that sticking in was a no brainer. Erlang has introduced me to a totally different way of solving problems. Its quite an experience.
I will advice you to write some real world applications using erlang. The entire semicolon, comma, fullstop argument will vanish within a couple of minutes. You will realize the power once you start architecting a solution. I implore you to not quit.
You can contact me if you need help regarding erlang.
:) Thats a nice piece of advice.
I never thought about faking users before (I do have about 4 accounts of my own on the site, but that was due to dev work).
I have created 3 top movie lists (IMDB 250, Palme d'Or winners, Time's ALLTIME 100) to help users get started. I will be adding more soon.
Also, I have lots of content that is not user generated ( around 50k movies). But I think, you are right in saying that user generated (even if fake) will be rather useful.
List of movies recommended by top leaders will be a good thing to add too. I do show top leaders on the home page of logged in users, but I guess it will be better if i can somehow show their movie lists easily too.
I will be glad if you try the app once. Here is a demo account cred:
username: [email protected]
password: demouser
The "Roll" tab is in fact a news feed. However, since you are noy following anyone yet, there is no news to show. I need another way to make these updates though.
The app is basically a stand alone web app. And Iframe seemed to be the most painless way of integrating it with facebook. It was laziness and not any strategy which led me to decide on Iframe.
Just a followup on how you start building your lists. You can visit profile page of users mentioned on the top right. Or you can visit any of the "Lists" present on the header section. You can search for a movie you wish to recommend too.
I think I will put some links for users to help them start building their movie lists (Movies watched, Movies you want to watch, and movies which in your opinion are trash).
I guess one way would be to show user say IMDB 250 list or any other such All Time list.
Plus the thing you said about getting viral. I will need to come up with a way to do that. Sharing list is definitely one of them. I also integrated FB Like for all movies which may help in spreading the word.
Thats the million dollar question. How to know if the app has breached that level of usefulness where user will want to come back? Hence the urge to blindly add more and more features.
If you are a movie buff, would you come back to the app?
Apart from every page in Cormen's Algo book (which I will ignore because of the share number of those), my biggest AHA moment was about 3 years back when I realized that I can say "return a,b,c" to return 3 variables in python. Till then I had been only using C++ and could not fathom that a programming language can be painless.
If this spreadsheet management is really something that people need, then I wont mind making an app for that. However. I think all of us should contribute in deciding the features needed.