tomkarlo

59 ms·

571.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
While you may not want to comment on Google Play apps publicly, there's a lot of value for other users in being able to see what their actual friends said about an app rather than just random anonymous commenters. (And we've seen the issues
572.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Yes, but the implications of not consenting are grossly different. If folks don't consent to taxes and USD, they're essentially giving up on things like Social Security, the value of their homes (both in terms of security and transaction va
573.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Goodreads is not Zappos. They are at least an order of magnitude apart in size, if not two, and Amazon is larger now too. Making large strategic plays makes sense when you're talking about a purchase that is a large percentage of your own c
574.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Support is not a boolean atribute. There is a broad range of support intensity from user forums up to in person, on site support. Different services have different levels of appropriate support and the service provider has to decide what le
575.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
So should free Internet sites be illegal? The NYT used to be free, now it's paid. Is that evil? Is HN evil for not charging? Anti-dumping laws make sense when you're talking about hard goods with a concrete marginal cost of goods sold (like
576.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
You're talking about the actual user-generated lists. Amazon also has the data on what all of their users have actually bought over time. (Hundreds of millions vs Goodreads millions.) That's what they use to create purchase recommendations,
577.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
So I do share my Amazon account with my partner, but only so we can have a single Kindle library. Other than that, it seems like a disaster... obviously it's personal preference, but it's a lot easier to deal with security and data models w
578.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
I'm guessing Goodread's data set on book collections is maybe 1/1000th as large as Amazon's. They're more likely buying them for the community of heavy readers and the team.
579.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
It seems kind of paranoid to suggest that Amazon would manipulate an API that's so central to their business for the purpose of forcing an minor acquisition. Not to mention it would probably be cheaper to just buy the target for a few milli
580.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Well for one thing, it makes keeping gifts secret more difficult. Seriously though, you could also share a Gmail account but why do that when there's no incremental fee (households can share a Prime account)? It just leaves you with a more
581.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
It wouldn't make any sense to restrict what people list only to what Amazon knows they bought. For one thing, a friend could have bought a hardcover from Amazon and gifted it to me in person. Amazon's objective is to sell you more books, no
582.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
A large portion of violent crime (~75%) in the US involves either family members or other acquaintances ("nonstrangers"). I'm sure some of that relates to drugs, but most of it probably doesn't. http://bjs.gov/content/pub/press/vvcs9310pr.
583.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
How is this "Threadless for socks"? The whole point of Threadless is that they're crowd-sourced art that the community votes on. This just seems like standard corporate merchandise printing, like when you get your logo on a bunch of pens.
584.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Handling death in databases of living people is a big problem. You know it's going to happen to everyone you're tracking, sooner or later. But they never seem to update their info when it does.
585.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
The NRA has the advantage that it is aligned with the interests of a major domestic industry and everyone who works in it. The ACLU and EFF don't really have that kind of alignment, which one would assume makes it harder to raise funds, etc
586.
Microsoft backs away from Flash ban in IE10(news.cnet.com)
1 points by tomkarlo 14y ago|0 comments
587.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
No, but at the time, the Internet was also about 1/100th of what it is today and Altavista was still worth about $3bn. It's hard to picture now, but back in 1999 Altavista and Yahoo were towering giants online.
588.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
There are lots of free services that are sustainable, because the cost of delivering them is less than the amount they earn through advertising or premium users. There's no ponzi scheme aspect to that. (Google Search, Twitter, Facebook, et
589.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Reader generated a disproportionate media outcry because it was such a great service for news junkies - and reporters in general tend to be news junkies. The response was greatly disproportionate when compared to say, the shutdown of Poster
590.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
The same could be said when they started Google - at the time Altavista was dominant in search. If you're that easily dissuaded, you shouldn't be in startups. There's almost always an existing solution to the problem you're trying to solve.
591.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
I was one of those folks who contributed to the Firefox announcement ads, but I don't really believe that it succeeded because folks pushed it rather than it simply being a better product. Yes, some sites at the time worked better in IE, bu
592.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
If a product manages to be better than all the alternatives, it's hard to argue it's not a good product. At the very least it had to be better than "whatever everyone was using before" and "not using anything."
593.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
How is that arrangement a contract? If you came to Starbucks every morning and bought a cup of coffee, would you consider that to be creating some kind of contract with them?
594.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Isn't this the risk any time you build on top of someone's API? At least with Google Drive they have a clear revenue story - compare that to say, Twitter.
595.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
The issue at root is determining what "functionality that the browser handles" should be. Every less-used option and feature that a browser can offload to an extension or plugin is less code everyone has to download, and less code the brows
596.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Advocacy is fine, but in the end it was the product itself that got the 450M users. You can't grassroots something that's not actually good.
597.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
The road to UX hell is paved with minor feature requests.
598.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
That description also describes HTTP, SPDY, and a bunch of other protocols. Relatively speaking, RSS never achieved the kind of popularity. Back in about 1993, there were more Gopher sites than HTTP sites.
599.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
On what basis does it make Google untrustworthy? Was there some kind of announcement that this service would run forever? Or was that simply your expectation? It's important to differentiate between what other parties are obligated or have
600.
Dave Winer: Google shutting down Reader like UAL crashing a 747...(twitter.com)
1 points by tomkarlo 14y ago|0 comments

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