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> New York is the capital of food, fashion, music, finance, diplomacy, culture and news It's also full of humble and modest people ;-) I appreciate the fine r

> New York is the capital of food, fashion, music, finance, diplomacy, culture and news It's also full of humble and modest people ;-) I appreciate the fine rantiness of the post (and the one it's responding to, for that matter), but I have one serious criticism: > The big things (tm) in tech right now are social, mobile, and local. These work best when you have a lot of people and a lot of stuff all mashed together. It’s not a coincidence that Foursquare is happening in New York and not Palo Alto. The problem here is that you're building stuff that _only_ works in super-dense urban areas like New York. We need local and social and mobile stuff that works for the rest of the world too. If Foursquare's ambitions are limited to NY that's legitimate, but your argument is sort of specious: that Palo Alto is inferior because they aren't building applications that don't actually work well in places like Palo Alto (let alone all the still-less dense parts of the country). Oh, and New York's food carts have nothing on Portland. So there!

davidbalbert 16y ago
That's a very fair point. The argument is not that Palo Alto should be making Foursquare. It's more that with all of our iThings and Droids, we're at a place where these local/mobile apps are starting to matter more and it seems the most obvious place for these to spring up is in large cities. This is not a reason New York is fundamentally better as much as it seems that New York might be better for the times. I have no doubt that these types of apps will be used all over the country in towns big and small. It's just easier to get critical mass in the cities.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  > It's just easier to get critical mass in the cities. That's absolutely true. I have some personal experience trying to get critical mass around a local-social application, and I've seen a number of others, and it's very hard in most places. What isn't clear to me is how starting such a service in New York teaches you anything useful about achieving critical mass anywhere else.
delackner 16y ago
You are saying that NYC is an incubator for things that only work in super-dense urban areas, and Palo Alto is a very different environment where density-driven things don't work? I have an impression that most of the rest of the world (that has discretionary spending you might salivate over) lives in cities that resemble NYC density much more than they resemble Silicon Valley endless low-density sprawl. Let's find some numbers. I compiled the following list of the world's 20 richest cities as of 2005 (1) and next to each I have listed its population density rank and people/sqkm. Tokyo 50 4750, New York 114 2050, Los Angeles 90 2750, Chicago 126 1500, Paris 69 3550, London 43 5100, Osaka 38 6400, Mexico City 27 8400, Philadelphia 155 1100, DC 250+, Boston 176 900, Dallas 148 1150, Buenos Aires 46 4950, Hong Kong ~36 (not listed in same data sheet as it is a "country") 6349, San Francisco/Oakland 104 2350, Atlanta 203 700, Houston 149 1150, Miami 121 1700, Sao Paulo 25 9000, Seoul 6 16700, (edit: couldn't get these lines to break no matter what, so just comma-delimited them) As of 2000, Mountain View had a density of 2264/sqkm, placing it actually HIGHER than New York. What? You would spend half your life on Caltrans in Mountain View with no car. In NYC you would spend half your life looking for a parking place. I don't get it. Does anyone have more meaningful numbers? 1: http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/richest-cities-2005.html http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/richest-cities-2005.htm...
- kscaldef 16y ago
  It's a bad habit, but people (including me) often say "New York" when they mean "Manhattan". The population density of Manhattan is 70,951/sq mi (27,394.3/km2) according to Wikipedia.

davidbalbert 16y ago

That's a very fair point. The argument is not that Palo Alto should be making Foursquare. It's more that with all of our iThings and Droids, we're at a place where these local/mobile apps are starting to matter more and it seems the most obvious place for these to spring up is in large cities. This is not a reason New York is fundamentally better as much as it seems that New York might be better for the times. I have no doubt that these types of apps will be used all over the country in towns big and small. It's just easier to get critical mass in the cities.

kscaldef 16y ago
> It's just easier to get critical mass in the cities. That's absolutely true. I have some personal experience trying to get critical mass around a local-social application, and I've seen a number of others, and it's very hard in most places. What isn't clear to me is how starting such a service in New York teaches you anything useful about achieving critical mass anywhere else.

delackner 16y ago

You are saying that NYC is an incubator for things that only work in super-dense urban areas, and Palo Alto is a very different environment where density-driven things don't work? I have an impression that most of the rest of the world (that has discretionary spending you might salivate over) lives in cities that resemble NYC density much more than they resemble Silicon Valley endless low-density sprawl. Let's find some numbers. I compiled the following list of the world's 20 richest cities as of 2005 (1) and next to each I have listed its population density rank and people/sqkm. Tokyo 50 4750, New York 114 2050, Los Angeles 90 2750, Chicago 126 1500, Paris 69 3550, London 43 5100, Osaka 38 6400, Mexico City 27 8400, Philadelphia 155 1100, DC 250+, Boston 176 900, Dallas 148 1150, Buenos Aires 46 4950, Hong Kong ~36 (not listed in same data sheet as it is a "country") 6349, San Francisco/Oakland 104 2350, Atlanta 203 700, Houston 149 1150, Miami 121 1700, Sao Paulo 25 9000, Seoul 6 16700, (edit: couldn't get these lines to break no matter what, so just comma-delimited them) As of 2000, Mountain View had a density of 2264/sqkm, placing it actually HIGHER than New York. What? You would spend half your life on Caltrans in Mountain View with no car. In NYC you would spend half your life looking for a parking place. I don't get it. Does anyone have more meaningful numbers? 1: http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/richest-cities-2005.html http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/richest-cities-2005.htm...

kscaldef 16y ago
It's a bad habit, but people (including me) often say "New York" when they mean "Manhattan". The population density of Manhattan is 70,951/sq mi (27,394.3/km2) according to Wikipedia.