+------------------+
                                       |                  |
                            +---------+|    Job Queue     +--------------+
                            |          |                  |              |
  +---------------+    +----+-----+    +------------------+    +---------+--------+
  |               |    |          |                            |                  |
  |  Client App   +---+| Web App  |                            |  Worker Daemons  |
  |               |    |          |                            |                  |
  +---------------+    +-----+----+    +------------------+    +---------+--------+
                             |         |                  |              |
                             +---------+     Database     |+-------------+
                                       |                  |
                                       +------------------+

$ ls Dropbox/sites/picturesharingly.io/Photos

1.json
familyvacation1.jpg

$ cat Dropbox/sites/picturesharingly.io/Photos/familyvacation1.jpg.json
{
  'doctype' : 'Photos/v1.0',
  'created' : '2011-02-14 21:58:13',
  'title' : 'Us and the kids swimming',
  'album' : 'Family Vacation 2011',
  'filename' : 'familyvacation1.jpg',
  ...
}

$ ls Dropbox/sites/news.ycombinator.com/Comments
1.json

$ cat 1.json

{
  'doctype' : 'SocialComments/v1.0',
  'created' : '2012-04-01 12:34:53',
  'parent' : '2131295',
  'body' : 'Chocolate milk is rather delicious...',
  ...
}

Obviously these are just quick examples that I came up with in 2 minutes. You would have to put a decent amount of thought into the standards. Maybe it would be better to store data and metadata separately, for example.

The basic ideas are.

1. Anyone could be your “Cloud Drive” provider. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. You would OAuth your preference when you sign up for a new service.

2. Sites would store data in pre-defined standard formats (“Photos”, “Comments”, “Votes”, “FriendsList”, etc).

3. Sites could normally only access data they wrote to your drive, but you could optionally give them read-write or read-only access to other site’s data.

4. Sites would still store their own additional data themselves and keep their own copies of your data — or at the very least cache your data for performance/simplicity.

There are some obvious objections anyone would have to this idea, the value is so great to users though that it should be possible to overcome them.

Someone smart will need to figure out all the details. Personally I think Brad Fitzpatrick is ideal person to do it, he seems to have a knack for this kind of thing. It looks like he’s working for Google these days.  Hopefully Google or Dropbox will get on this.

In it he chokes up when the reporter asks him about some of his heros “casting stones” in his direction.

User bane posted this nugget on Hacker News:

There’s a time, a sad time, when up and comers ping on the radar of their heroes and find them to not be the men they imagined.

It shouldn’t diminish the respect they have for their heroes, but it is the sign that they should now move out from behind them and chart their own course…except now they are on their own…there is nobody to guide them.

That means that he could launch something totally lame and some small number of people will actually use it. I’m not saying Oink was totally lame, but I think it’s fair to say it was not totally awesome (yet).

It’s very possible Oink could have been built up into something big. Almost certain in my mind. It’s solving a real problem (finding good Things at local merchants). It would have taken 2+ years probably to bear fruit.

My guess at why he decided to close it down is because he’s just not passionate about it and that is the single best reason to kill a startup idea.

Passion is a prerequisite. You can be passion about the idea or even just passionate about the idea of running a company. Either way seems to work.

For someone like Kevin Rose though, he probably needs to be passionate about the idea. He’s already got some cash and has already started a company. It’s a given for him that he can have his own company. Investors will give him a million dollars per year every year until he tells them to stop. So he need an exciting idea to get him out of bed in the morning.

The easy thing to do would have been to keep Oink alive on life support. Just assign one or two junior guys on the team to keep working on it. He didn’t do that. He took the harder route. He knew he’d take flack for it too.

I’m just disappointed at how much flack he seems to be receiving. As if he did something wrong or evil.

Some of those chastising him are using the idea of users getting hurt as the reason. The ol’  ”think of the children” chestnut. Users will be perfectly okay. Oink wasn’t an integral part of anyone’s life yet. No one is getting hurt.

One of the biggest differentiators of The Silicon Valley Way is the reduced consequences of failure. Kevin Rose should be praised for doing the right thing — not admonished.

He’s a notch up in my book.

Two days ago I had an amusing idea, inspired by a thread on HN about PG’s latest essay on property.

SendThemYourMoney.com

In less than 20 minutes after posting the idea in a comment I registered the domain and put up the page. Then I had to wait a bit for the domain to finish processing so I could submit it to Hacker News. That’s all I did.

Stats

Stats after 24 hours:

Reddit front page (1416 comments)

Hacker News front page (132 comments)

Sites linking in: ~400

Tweets: ~1500

Facebook likes: ~2900

Visitors: ~250,000

From an amusing little idea, 20 minutes worth of effort, and a $9 domain an idea can spread to a quarter-million people in less than 24 hours. Pretty eye-opening to me to get a such a clear benchmark of just how powerful the web has become.

The Idea

A very small number of people seem to have taken the idea a little too seriously.

I only meant it as an amusing idea. A little friendly internet trolling against some not-so-nice behemoths. Teasing the RIAA & MPAA? Can’t pass that up! At best I thought it might be thought-provoking and keep people thinking about the continuing fight against things like SOPA & PIPA.

I know the analogy the site uses is flawed and the language is imprecise. Even I don’t agree with it.

It still makes me chuckle though — and that was the point.

“We weren’t happy with the time tracking integration in Classic. It was usable, but it wasn’t great. We want to take our time to either come up with a better built-in solution or an integration with another tool or something else.

This is a big part of why we’re keeping Basecamp Classic around for a very long time. Basecamp Next was not going to launch with all the features that Classic already has. So it’s OK that it’s not a perfect fit for all existing customers on Day 1.
The iPhone didn’t have copy’n'paste for a while, either. There’s just so much you can do for launch, if you want to ship.”

jballanc chimed in with this:

“The iPhone anecdote is such an important one. Probably the most important lesson I learned working at Apple was: people don’t remember that a feature was missing once you implement it, but they remember broken features long after you’ve fixed them.”

Comment thread

This is the kind of thing I have a ton of sympathy for. DHH is creating a new product the correct way: releasing a minimal (but useful) version 1.0 and beginning the iteration cycle.

To do iterative development you have to build up a thick skin for exactly this type of negative feedback.

Users will suggest obviously-good features, like time tracking or copy/paste(!), but for whatever reason it’s not going to be your highest priority. Either there are simply too many more important things to do or there’s no good way to implement the feature yet.

One impulse to this kind of legitimate feedback is to let it control you. Users are complaining! And you agree with their complaints! Quick —  whip something up!

If you do that though, you’ve probably made mistake: by implementing something that’s less important than other things, or by doing a half-assed job.

There are definitely times when you have to do things like that. Sometimes your judgement is wrong and users are shouting until you listen. But most of the time you have the clearer picture — you can see what decisions will have the biggest pay off for the most users.

Apple seems to have the toughest skin of just about any company. Sometimes they even take it too far, straight into denial. “The antenna is fine — stop acting crazy!”

It’s tough to develop software in public with real users. Sometimes their feedback can be negative and correct, but you can’t do anything about it yet other than accept it gracefully.

You have to be responsive to feedback and able to stick to your guns — and know when to do which one.

I thought Microsoft bought Powerset, not Google?

Hacker News Comments 

Y Combinator Demo Day Brings The Future To Computer History Museum

It got me thinking. I’ve never thought of Y Combinator as a species of conference, yet the parallels are fairly striking.

They accept applications from startups, coach them, and help them pitch investors on stage. The biggest difference between them and conferences is that they also invest and take equity. In addition they spend 3 months coaching the startups instead of the 3 days or 3 hours that a conference would.

They’re sort of like a very expansive and very intensive conference. They’re on the startup’s side during the entire process: they handle incorporation, introductions, product advice — pretty much any kind of help they can.

The goal of all of that work though is ultimately to turn those startups into something VCs will find worthy of investment when they present it to them on Demo Day.

Even the name, Demo Day, is necessarily similar to “DEMO Conference” which was the first major startup launch conference.

Just imagine if they charged every investor $3000-$5000 to attend (they wouldn’t mind). It might reduce YC’s costs to almost nothing.

I don’t think I’m belitting YC or its value by drawing this analogy. It’s far from perfect, and at some point analogies like this always break down — I was just surprised at how far this one goes.

People have always struggled to label YC. They’ve been called an incubator, VC firm, angel investor, and accelerator. They’re really a cross between all of those. I think you could add “conference” to the mix and would make for an even more accurate description.