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Similarly, one of the most important words I was taught never to use was "guarantee".

Meh... who cares?

Bubble, recession, natural disaster, war, whatever... there is never a "perfect" time to start a business.

If you have a good idea and a repeatable model with an output that costs less to produce then to sell... start the business right now.

Forget about mysterious bubbles that other people are telling you about, get off of your couch and do it. Now.

This article is very interesting. However, while reading, it sounded like a late night infomercial. There may be real value in this style of teaching Math, but as my first introduction, this Times article feels like the sponsored hooks used for products such as those baby reading flash cards and acne medication.

I hope that the Jump system is real and that it solves the problems outlined in the article.

Really? We're surprised by this?

Camera phones with video recording capabilities are almost ubiquitous. More then that, they're cheaper and solve the primary usage case better then the portable Flip cameras do. Flip cameras provided better quality portable video and now that embedded mobile technology has caught up to that quality, justifying the price to carry around another device is difficult.

Thanks for releasing the invite codes here on Hacker News, Dave.

Hmm... yeah, after about a half hour clicking the buttons, I don't think that I'll use your app more then once.

It really is a nice way to cull my followers. I'm trying really hard to keep my Twitter account topical and interesting. However, spending the time to go through each and every user more then once doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

I like this - a lot.

Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow.

Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better.

I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.

The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.

A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.

The argument presented in the article blames MySpace's decline on "staff, architecture, and business plan".

While I agree that these things are contributing to the decline in MySpace's influence and traffic, the underlying problem is the engagement of the community. MySpace is a Social Networking site that rely on a community of users.

People want to be at "the coolest party". They want to talk to the coolest people and engage in the coolest party games. In a separate, but similar example, musicians need to reinvent themselves in order to maintain their mass-market appeal.

MySpace's failure is that it hasn't re-invented itself to stay cool. Their recent design change was too little, too late and relied far too much on the past. The redesign was like "the old guy at the party" trying to make conversation - everyone feels a bit odd that he's there.

Facebook will suffer the same fate unless they eventually reinvent themselves or truly transition into becoming a Social Network Platform. Something new will come along that has slightly cooler tech but more importantly, draws the coolest collection of people.

Something I learned from business and retail:

Groupon and their clones only need to pull these types of shenanigans to scale.

If they refine the model to compete largely with themselves, in the end, the company will win.

In order to do this, Groupon (or likely a smart clone) needs to break itself apart into niches and dominate the smaller markets that they are engaged in.