elad

We call it a "consumer exploration tool" - a quick way to tap into the wealth of information in social networks to get a better picture of what people are like. The target market is marketing professionals - brand managers in consumer products companies and such.

We tried to build a tool that's easy to understand and use - our hope is that you go to the website, and after just a few clicks you get it. We'd appreciate any feedback from the HN community on that point.

Oh, and it's absolutely free for now, so if you can use it to get some insights into the market for your own startups, that'd be awesome! - Let us know if you found anything interesting.

Personally, I never ever give my email credentials out. I totally agree with Jeff Atwood on that.

However, while you're at it, why not ask people for their facebooks/myspace credentials? You'll find many more "friends" there than in my email contacts, plus facebook is far less sensitive privacy-wise. If someone got hold of my credentials, the maximum they could do is deface my profile and send some stupid messages to friends. If they got hold of my gmail account, they could access almost every other account that I have through "forgot your password" links...

Not that I'd actually give you my facebook credentials though :)

It would also mean that your level of protection depends on the amount of air in your tank.

As someone who chronically forgets to fill-up, I wouldn't like that idea...

What people seem to be forgetting is that the US ad market is the biggest by far, and thus the opportunity to make money isn't in the global market.

Ask Peanut Labs (formerly xuqa.com) how much money they made as the biggest social network in Turkey, and why they changed their business model completely...

Good points. Especially no. 1. However, the eventuality of it makes it unlikely IMO. The web is about here and now. Why not just use a wiki?

Maybe part of the explanation is that it's very light-weight - the car in the photo looks tiny, it says it's made of fiberglass, and my guess is that the engine must also weigh much less than a comparable internal combustion engine (you don't need as much metal to contain the combustion...).

Of course, that probably comes with a heavy price to passenger safety. Fiberglass won't give you any protection in a crush. That may be the reason why Tata is involved and not some European manufacturer. The Euro market has some serious safety regulations.

Which makes the phenomenon even stranger - nobody here seems to be able to come up with a good explanation of scribd's success, yet somehow they do succeed.

Really, if you have an office doc that you want to put online, then why not export it as a pdf?

So let's see, students submitting papers and receiving scores. Sounds familiar?

It should strike everybody as an idiotic way to evaluate potential business success. If anything good's gonna come out of it it's that we may come to questions that same process that's used to evaluate academic prowess.

Palm actually did have the distribution in place - through palmgear (interestingly, it still exist) which was THE go-to place for Palm apps.

Regarding advantages to the software developer, having just one place where you distribute, and that place being controlled by Apple, isn't a good thing at all. It may mean that it's easier to start selling, but also that you have no negotiating power if and when your app becomes a success.

The stupid music companies managed to hand over the keys to their distribution to Steve Jobs, but they're not exactly happy about the fact that he now has so much control over their fate. Apple's great at creating consumer electronics that actually appeals to people, but they don't seem to be a very nice company to deal with as a business.

Very nice and useful idea. I may actually come back and use it (which happens very rarely with new apps nowadays).

Problems:

Way too slow. Spend more on hosting :(

The "meat" is in the flickr, youtube etc. search results below. The tag cloud should appear blow it IMO. Also, limit its size, and let users enlarge, sort it etc.

How about letting me filter results to just some of the sites you're crawling?

Who develops desktop applications anymore anyway (except maybe game developers).

If in the past you used to build apps for windows because that's where the installed base was, nowadays you build web apps.

I learned Delphi and VB back then when I wanted to hack together simple utilities with lots of UI. In the last couple of years I learned Django and Rails for the same purpose.

That and more: Apple's platform probably won't be adopted by anyone else, so even though the user base is attractive right now, down the road it would look diminutive compared with the user base for an open platform that could gain support of multiple vendors.

7-8 years ago I used to develop mobile apps in both Palm OS (closed platform, just one vendor) and J2ME (open, widely adopted). Palm had the more attractive installed base back then, but as their fortunes changed, that investment is now worthless. Compare with J2ME, which kept growing thanks to support by most vendors.