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aaronpk_tv
I noticed that a few people keep asking about whether one social network or service or another will be a good competitor to Facebook. They simply don't do any critical thinking and I find I just don't have time anymore to consider these claims. Here's a hint: let's say your new social thing is hot. Well, then it'll need bigger datacenters than Facebook has. Now, how is your new hot thing going to get, say, $4 billion to build said datacenters? Not to mention that Facebook has thousands of engineers, most of whom are paid more than $100,000 a year. You think your new thing is gonna be able to take on Facebook? Ask Google how that all worked out. Yeah, I know you can use Cloud Computing, but you ready for Instagram's AWS bills? Even Facebook is looking at those with a fine tooth comb now (they are in the millions, I hear, every month, and that number is old). And, how are you gonna get your logo on every taco truck in the world? Medium right now is burning my phone up with notifications. So, how is your service going to filter out the crap? (Hint: filtering REQUIRES you to share something about yourself. In other words your system MUST gather private info about you). I just turned off Medium because the notifications no longer are mostly of interesting things said by interesting people. How is your service going to make money? Oh, really, you aren't going to have advertising? That's nice. So you are gonna get a billion people to quit using Facebook and move over to your thing and, say, pay $10 a month like I pay for Spotify? I don't think so! Finally, how is your service going to get the best content developers onto it? A friend of mine buys advertising for Kia. She just paid a famous Instagram user $50,000 for ONE PHOTO that had their car in the background. So you think that Instagram VIP is gonna move over to your service that pays a few cents per 1,000 views? You are nuts. Until you can figure those things out, leave me alone. Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, NextDoor and Twitter are in the power seat. Don't bother me until you have a REAL alternative. Thanks. Finally, I won't even mention these new things by name. Why? I only hate things I respect. Why? Because I know at least 10% of you disagree with everything I write or video. You are here just to hear the other side from where you are. So if I hate on something those things get a nice audience for free. I won't do that anymore. Have a great weekend! That all said, I joined WeChat this week and have hundreds of messages already (although Messenger is better here, and has far less spam). So you want to compete? Go to a market that matters, like China or India. But keep in mind that Mark Zuckerberg already is focused on those two markets too. Translation: if you know how to code why don't you do something else with your skills?
It unintentionally (I promise you) exploits a bug in the human OS that says that if someone says 5 wrong things and 2 right things, it is very difficult to get across 'Those 2 things are objectively right, but those 5 things are wrong, and so this person is, ultimately, wrong' without folks going 'But those 2 things are right.' And others going 'How can you trust this person who is saying things are wrong, when we know those two things are right.'
retrying responses is much improved. it retries *all* URLs, works harder to find candidate URLs (including syndication URLs), and you can page through old responses so you can retry them for finding your user page: along with remembering your accounts when you log into them, it now also lets you type your username, full name, or domain instead of user id in the URL (for silos where it needed that before)
"All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea -- the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgments, acts, and efforts," Hock says. "An organization's success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability, or management competence, important as they may be."
The trick here, though, is to make sure that each limited mechanical part of the Web, each application, is within itself composed of simple parts that will never get too powerful.
In total, this gives us an infinite source of useless journalism, available at no cost. If I remember correctly from economics class, this should drive the market value of useless journalism down to zero, forcing other producers of useless journalism to produce something else.
This isn't how the internet is supposed to work. As we continue to consolidate on a few big mail services, it's only going to become more difficult to start new servers.