It strikes me as kind of odd that the billboard says "We", implying that DuckDuckGo is a company of multiple people.
Then again, saying "I don't track you" would sound extremely strange.
I guess we (as a society) have become so accustomed to companies requiring large groups of people to be successful. I guess Gabe's ability to take on Google, the biggest tech company this decade, by himself, is a testament to computer programming being so empowering.
You could easily argue that about a hundred years of engineering have gone into computer science, and many, many more than that into mathematics and algorithms. And this is the stuff that Facebook is built off of.
Also, Audi is certainly not the only player in town when it comes to automobile makers. On the flip side, Facebook has hardly any serious competitors right now, and no one seems likely to catch up any time soon.
If we're using cars as an analogy, Facebook has basically created the Model T of online communications, and it will take a while before other car companies can come along and steal market share.
Wouldn't that sound like a sweet deal if you were an old and not-so-tech-savvy investor?
This is great news for the Appcelerator guys, but I've gotten so used to writing Titanium apps in TextMate, that I'm not sure I'd really need a dedicated IDE!
Same situation for me, which is why I much prefer to use Twitter these days. It's considered downright rude to defriend someone on Facebook, but on Twitter, you really only have to pay attention to the people you care about. It feels a lot more "opt-in" than Facebook in this way.
Also, I really don't care about people's virtual mafia's and pictures where everyone is obscenely drunk.
But this country loves extreme cases. The media tends to ignore the 40+ successful CEOs out there because it's not uncommon to see someone in that age group running a good business. But when Mark Zuckerberg became the world's youngest billionaire at age 23, everyone wanted to do an interview with him and sell a story around it.
Really, the reason everyone pays attention to Zuck is because he's the exception.
> This is why natural ability is such a hard thing for me to accept - I really believe that I can be good at anything, and I believe that is true of other people as well, but if they don't believe it, how will it happen?
To me, what you can do in life all comes down to a Henry Ford quote:
"Whether you believe you can, or you believe you can't, you're right."
You're pointing fingers in the wrong direction. You can hate PayPal all you want, but the government is taking every action imaginable to deny a press outlet it's constitutional right to free speech. Going so far as to intervene with the transactions of a third-party private business to cut off it's funding.
gReader is a really solid 3rd party RSS reader, that I've grown completely accustomed to. I'm not sure I really need / want to switch to the official one now.