Recent submissions

Comment · 12 years ago
getting error loading bitfountain.io:

Response Error.

Technical description: 502 Bad Gateway - Response Error, a bad response was received from another proxy server or the destination origin server.

Comment · 16 years ago
Do you worry about people pirating your eBook, or worse yet - infringing your copyright by taking the information in the eBook, and publishing it as their own? It seems that by going with a publishing agency, one would have a lot more legal protection in that regard?
Comment · 17 years ago
at the same time, yahoo's design influenced google. google used to have an exclamation point in its logo, just like yahoo.
Comment · 17 years ago
I used to have a folding bike made by Kama. Can't say it was very convenient. To get it inside an elevator, it took more time to fold it, than for the other kids to fit their regular bikes in. And the small wheels made the speed a lot slower.
Comment · 17 years ago
this may be true. I lost my wallet today, and a very honest man found it and returned it to me. The wallet contained a large sum of money.
Comment · 17 years ago
I feel monkey island was the most captivating out of all those type of games (except maybe leisure suit larry?)
Comment · 17 years ago
Daniel,

Did you guys have the name twitvid registered as a trademark?

Comment · 17 years ago
If I remember right, based on his presentation at Stanford Enterpreneur Corner, Hoffman was about to go sell jumbo juice after college, not thinking about SocialNet...
Comment · 17 years ago
maybe one of the designers / programmers of twitvid.io is selling source code to twitvid.com on the side... :)
Comment · 17 years ago
Of course there is no single magic pill, but I'll try anyway. :)

Google - PageRank. Google was not the first with the product anyway, there were many other search engines in play already at the time - AltaVista, Excite, AskJeeves... Google's infrastructure is not easy to replicate, by the time others caught on to PageRank, Google was already growing exponentially, past the "start-up" phase. By the time others replicated the functionality, Google was a house-hold name.

Twitter - SMS, simple interface, API, brand. Would you rather tweet, or send jaiku's?

YouTube - progressive Flash download, reply features, similar videos actually worked compared to other sites.

Facebook - clean, organized interface, college accounts validation.

One point to mention though, none of these sites had direct knock-offs, icon for icon, like the twitvids. Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.. had all grown in popularity before they were knocked off. Or at least that seems to be the case, unless there were knock-offs that simply were not nearly the same caliber and just never made it past grandpa's blog as far as spreading use. What I am talking about are early-early stages of a start-up, like the twitvids. And looks like they have similar caliber potential judging by their features currently offered.

P.S. If you want to see a nice Facebook knock-off, take a look at vkontakte.ru. THE most popular site among the Russian internet users. Probably the only thing it's missing is the API, and the fact that it found it's niche with the Russian language.

There is something to be said about knock-offs, and that is why there is reason to be concerned about it. When listening to presentations of enterpreneurs from successful start-ups like Facebook and LinkedIn, they will often talk about "what keeps them up at night."

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