It's all speculation, but I would say the search box getting larger (so as to look like Quora) does mean something, as in they might be pushing for search, which would be interesting.
Wow I was going to write exactly the same thing earlier today. So funny how people think the same thing at the same moment. I agree it's really annoying. I still can't familiarize myself with links with google.com domain. Nowadays it's mostly some guy's google+ post but it's really misleading. First thing that comes up to mind when you see a link from google.com is "is this an announcement from Google, inc.?", when it's mostly some dude's rant on Google+
You are missing so many things very obvious that I don't even know where to start.
1. Twitter is already doing ads, and they are not sharing revenue with their users.
2. Why would Twitter share revenue with users when they don't need to?
3. There have been a handful of companies that tried to do something like what you described.
4. Letting users generate revenue messes with the value of the network itself.
can you please explain further? You are making me feel like an idiot. I don't see anything wrong with the tree. What exactly is the joke in here?
Also, i'm even more confused because it doesn't even seem like a "redesign" at all. Not even sure if these two pictures are from the same location. The backgrounds are different.
What you described (recommended posts within a site), as well as someone else mentioned below (recommended posts from other sites) are already out there. If you ask me if the idea sounds novel, it is not. Just visit Techcrunch and take a look (For example, http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/28/paypal-cyber-monday-mobile-...)
You will learn if you start doing more market research, but I've found it's either of the two for your initial idea: 1. There is someone else doing the same thing out there; 2. You haven't done enough research.
Even if something similar is NOT out there after all your research, it is highly likely that it has been tried before and failed (and that's why you can't find them). Even these products you can dig up more if you do intensive research via google. You'll learn a lot while going through this process. Just don't be naive and think your idea would be novel when you haven't done any market research yet.
The key is in absorbing as much knowledge as possible in the field you would like to tackle, and later to be able to say "Oh I came up with this idea, and I am 99% sure this is a unique idea that hasn't been done before, because I 'know' all that's been done before"
By the way, Posterous started out as a niche product. The platform may be trying to do everything nowadays, but in the beginning, they were tackling email to blogging niche, which didn't exist before. Everyone thought blogging should be done by signing into your wordpress account, typing a title and content and reading the preview, and then posting.
Thank you. But I was more interested in YC's perspective. I've done enough research and am confident i can write a good application (I've written business plans and pitch decks and raised money with them too before)
However I was curious about why YC selected those single founder startups. Of course the application has to be top quality, but I'm sure there are lots of others whose applications are top quality but still don't make it.
What I'm annoyed about is that they seem like they are trying to commit suicide. I can understand they want to "leverage" their existing assets, but the sacrifice is too much.
As you said, there's no problem if you use IMAP and POP access with your desktop client, and therein lies the problem. Google is supposed to bring everything to the cloud. They used to be good at it. But they are now going backwards and making people become dependent on devices. I already see many people using the mail client Sparrow just for that reason.
I think they've lost their mind being too obsessed with Facebook and Twitter.
In fact, more and more I want to encourage my friends to stay away from gmail. Hell even I'm in the process of moving away from using Google accounts.
I can understand that Google is trying to collect as much user data in as accurate way as possible, but recently it's been increasingly annoying how they are trying to fix what's not broken.
I have multiple google accounts for different purposes, and recently Google started disallowing multi-user access to their sites. This is extremely inconvenient and annoying for me that I'm even thinking about switching to another email provider. In fact I have already started using ymail for certain purposes.
I might be a minority for now, but I see this annoyance will only accelerate in the future for even ordinary people as Google tries to fight against Facebook with identity.