This is awesome! But in this case, instead of introducing the human element, wouldn't it be (relatively) easy to make the entire apparatus self-driving and programmable? As in, mount this thing on a Roomba-like robot and give it a coarse driving path?
This is a very convenient service for the users, but it might raise some issues if any of these terms are ever argued in court. Defending that you read the ToS;DR and not the terms of service might not hold much water.
I think that the pattern of making software as easy to use as possible refers to the amount of work users need to put in _before_ they actually start doing what the product is intended for (e.g. entering personal information). However, the users should definitely be doing work when it comes to the content of the product, as the article states. I think that, for example, the amount of work people put into uploading and commenting on photos on Facebook was part of the reason the switch to Google+ wasn't as big as anticipated -- users had too much of an investment in FB already.
I don't know, I am a college student and I find myself getting the most event invitations from Facebook (that being said, it might change drastically in a work environment).
Pretty strange that this needs to have a workaround, though, as this would make hangouts much easier to join and get people into G+ as a whole. And if the workaround is this easy, it can't be that hard for Google to incorporate this as a legitimate feature.
Just bought one. The technology listed makes it totally worth the money alone. Not to mention that if this thing has as many developers making (partially free) games for it as does the Android market now, it seems like this won't be outdated for quite a while.
This seems to be a trend in recent political workings -- lawmaker introduces naive and ignorant piece of legislation to support some part of his/her constituency, faces enormous online backlash, quietly backs off. For some reason these legislators still get reelected, though.
Does it really take an API to determine the outcome of a slot machine (generate a random number)? Sure, Betable might create a nice payment gateway, but there are other services that already do that, and it seems like the value-add is minimal.
I'm surprised the article makes no mention of the semantic web, a brain-child of his that he's been promoting and working on almost exclusively for the past several years. It would be the solution to the "closed-data" problem that the article talks about.
Awesome tool. Kickstarter has proven that a crowd sourced model like this can work, and it's good that the model is being specialized into certain niches like this (see indiegogo). I'm sure that you will have success with it.
As for critique, I can't tell at all what the big colorful title says. It's cool that you are targeting two different audiences (bands and fans), but consolidate your two mission statements on the front page -- they seem a bit redundant (maybe make each shorter and more pointed?) I would also go into some more specifics on the "How it Works" page, for example by including some details from the video (if somebody does not want to watch).
Since this is already an automated account that finds all these tweets, instead of just retweeting for publicity/humor's sake, they should add a sentence telling each of the victims why this is bad. At least make sure they themselves don't make that mistake again.
Anyways, PayPal has been due for an update for a couple years now. As for why it doesn't change when you log in, the main reason PayPal's doing this is to compete with startupy new companies like Square and Stripe in terms of new customer acquisitions. Those new customers won't leave PayPal after tying in their bank accounts, etc., so PayPal isn't as worried about retaining them.
The style is a good change of pace from reddit, but I think RES (http://redditenhancementsuite.com/) can pretty replicate the functionality (infinite scrolling, showing top comments, etc.) Nice work though.
Not surprising -- it came out of a hackathon project, didn't have much potential for actual growth, but Facebook just wanted to showcase one of the cooler projects for a day.