“Where Google’s services represented things I care about — discovery, curiosity, and transparency — Facebook represents that I don’t care about — narrowing, nattering, tribalism, etc. More than not caring, these are mostly things for which I have active contempt, as they represent the antithesis of curiosity and openness, things that Google (mostly) facilitates, and that Facebook (mostly) doesn’t.”
“[Amazon] started selling diapers in the summer of 2006, just a year after Diapers.com debuted. When Quidsi launched Soap.com in July, adding an additional 25,000 products to their lineup, the site was strafed almost from the minute it went live by price bots dispatched by Amazon. Quidsi network operators watched in amazement as Amazon pinged their site to find out what they were charging for each of the 25,000 new items they initially offered, and then adjusted its prices accordingly. Bharara and Lore knew that would happen. ‘If we put something on sale, we usually see Amazon respond in a couple of hours,’ says Bharara.”
What Amazon Fears Most: Diapers
The Diapers.com story is one of my favorite startup stories.
Growth of Internet advertising in its first fifteen years vs broadcast and cable, via IAB.
Interview with @ev, @jack and @biz in Dec 2006 when Twitter was operating inside of Obvious Corp
i smiled during the part when Jack says that he now has 90 followers.
Almost four years later and it sounds like the number of features they’ve removed (separate friends list vs those you’re following, nudges, 20 less characters) is similar to the number they’ve added (retweets, lists, search, now link wrapping). Such a focused product. It’s funny to me that they talk about how it’s not useful and that’s what makes it fun. Now it’s so useful I think they’ve forever changed information consumption.
“He was on his way to a party, and he didn’t remember where the address was stored. Was it a Facebook event, or in an email, or in his calendar? It was a pain to try searching all these things from his phone.”
Paul Graham quoted in The Other Half Of Search: Greplin Is A Personal Search Engine For Your Online Life
This is one of those ideas that you can’t believe doesn’t already exist.
“Most UGC sites try to spend time converting lurkers to contributors. Don’t. 90% of all users will never contribute anything to your company. They are there to ingest content.
I wish Twitter understood this better. If they did then they would run marketing campaigns to let users know that “it’s OK to turn up and just consume content. Twitter’s great for that, too. You don’t ever need to send a Tweet to love Twitter.” I never understood why they don’t communicate that more broadly because I think most people’s fear of Twitter is that they don’t want to tell the world what they ate for lunch.”
New on AnyClip
We have been working hard at AnyClip to let you find and relive any moment from any film, instantly. And last week we made things even easier. We eliminated the need to save a moment before watching and sharing it. Now you will be able to go directly to any moment, view it, name it, and…
Check out the latest updates to the site!
