FWIW Facebook tore through my college in a couple weeks way before they had any type of inviting mechanisms. So PM fit was definitely there and virality was all word of mouth.
Demand generation vs demand fulfillment. Once people are looking to buy something search ads are a great way to connect with them, but it's hard to reach them if they aren't yet searching.
I see his point more as acting angry because social norms say you're supposed to, rather than you're actually feeling angry. It takes a lot for me to get truly angry, but I think I've acted out in anger before to fit in with expectations or get something I wanted.
For example, if a friend accidentally dents my car out of carelessness, I may blow up at him to convince him that he should be more careful. I'm likely not all that concerned about the dent, but just brushing it aside as no big deal doesn't do much good for either of us (or the next person he hits).
At the Daily Bruin all interns were unpaid. Typically after 6-12 months of part-time work (in any editorial department) there was opportunity to move up to senior staff positions and earn a stipend. That staff would put in 40-80 weeks on top of a course load, earning $2-3 per hour. I think it's very fair to bring on an unpaid dev intern and then let them work towards the stipend just like editorial positions. I wouldn't be surprised if the paper also employs a full time sysadmin/dev, for a real wage.
While many of these companies are facing slowing growth, or even slight declines, I'd argue what carried them up is still making them very profitable businesses... and they'll be around for a long time.
It'd be interesting to have the discussion about flash-in-the-pan companies that truly did collapse due to their original model.
nice work, it's fun to get some of the best stuff out there that doesn't seem to be made up like tfln or fml
1) Add tipjoy functionality, encouraging users to tip the best/funniest/helpful tweets.
2) charge referral fee to users who you scrape. Each new follower they get from favstar.fm costs $0.10 (seems like many of the people you are featuring are self-employed or creative types who would probably like more followers)
3) sponsored favoriters... allow brands/users who want their profile pic to show up as if they had favorited a tweet. pay per impression or click basis (they could get creative with the profile pics to grab attention)
4) promotion of top favorites across the web. build plug and play modules that people can add to their own sites, my yahoo, igoogle, their facebook page, etc. (or maybe just an RSS feed). Anyone can post it to their own site for entertainment value, but the only tweets that are eligible for the module are ones from paid accounts. Trouble is, the best/funniest twitter users probably wont want to pay for that distribution, they don't need it.
I know TC said names of people who interviewed for "senior level positions" are included... wonder if the lower level positions are somewhere in there too.
Anybody interview and don't want their current employer to find out?
Tried logging in... Twitter said somebody already used that token. Then it loaded a page with "OK, you've denied Tweetsip access to interact with your account!"