161–170 of 195 posts
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make fun of twitter, and you get down-voted. I know, I know, Google will buy them for 4 billion in 2011, but that is the only exit strategy they have. No biz model there, sorry.
Have you seen this? - http://business.twitter.com/
Consider adding a revenue stream immediately. Let users pay to see what others have said about friends. Charge 1 facebook credit. Also let users pay to block that access: 10 credits. Also pay to let others ignore the block: 100 credits. Etc... You'll need to redirect to a facebook page to use credits because they aren't available off facebook.com yet. They don't have many good examples of offsite apps using credits,…
I'm not sure all your users are familiar with Facebook credits; I'm not sure you want to set up barriers before you know what you have.
Certainly this hasn't been proven with apps off of facebook. It's an excellent experiment though.
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Twitter's been profitable since their Google and Bing search deals lit up around last November.
yeah, "profitable". Let's say at break even. And yet somehow they needed 200 more million, for a total of 360 million sunk into that ship. Do you have a clue of how profitable a company in which 360 million dollars were invested needs to be? Do you really see them ever getting even close to being that profitable? How?
Profitable companies often raise money... I don't see why this is out of the ordinary. It lets you scale and make more money more quickly. Another startup I worked for did the exact same thing as soon as they became profitable.
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Can you help me understand how this helps with scaling? I prefer this url format myself and noticed it's used rarely by the big guys. If there's a scaling advantage it provides, however, it's not obvious to me.
DNS is much easier to scale out than HTTP. By having full FQDN for users, you have the capability to easily scale out without needing a load balancer in front of say, threewords.me. So in your DNS zone you can tell it to route all accounts that start with the letter 'a' to server with IP 1.1.1.1, letter b to IP 2.2.2.2, etc. Server with IP 1.1.1.1 will not only run a headless web app but also route SQL queries to a d…
Adsense. With only about 10k hits a day, my bedtime calculator http://sleepyti.me brings in $10-$20/day. At the rate you're getting users, you could probably bring in a significant load of cash. Good luck!
I don't know if you read the "Sacked by a Google Algorithm" article from yesterday. http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/11/columns/guest/winter/ind... The comment you make on the results page sounds dangerously close to what got Adsense to boot him.
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I'd say it has a high chance of being c. At least where die == level off/decline. I see a lot of parallels to formspring, whose pagivews/month graph looks like this: http://www.quantcast.com/formspring.me So you either want to sell as it nears the that peak, or you have to be ready to stick out the trough of sorrow and invest a lot of time into finding a way to grow and monetize it. So if you have some great vision f…
Agreed that it looks a lot like formspring. But according to Crunchbase, formspring raised a $10MM series B just over a month ago (well after the decline was obvious). I wouldn't be surprised if some of that went directly into the founders' pockets.
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DNS is much easier to scale out than HTTP. By having full FQDN for users, you have the capability to easily scale out without needing a load balancer in front of say, threewords.me. So in your DNS zone you can tell it to route all accounts that start with the letter 'a' to server with IP 1.1.1.1, letter b to IP 2.2.2.2, etc. Server with IP 1.1.1.1 will not only run a headless web app but also route SQL queries to a d…
twitter has servers dedicated to high-volume users without having to use urls/dns like that.
That's why they need so many load balancers w/ failover:
twitter.com has address 128.242.240.148 twitter.com has address 128.242.245.212 twitter.com has address 128.121.243.228
Load balancers aren't flexible to work with especially when dealing with sessions. I imagine Twitter's front end nodes are doing nothing but routing URLs to backends, which are doing the real work. So the front end balancer takes http://www.twitter.com/unixy and routes the actual server-side request internally (where scalability is implemented).
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Have you seen this? - http://business.twitter.com/
how much money do you think they can make with that?
I hope Twitter makes a lot of money and lasts for a long long time. It will be good for the world.
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I'm not sure all your users are familiar with Facebook credits; I'm not sure you want to set up barriers before you know what you have.
If he isn't making money with an app like this, he has nothing. Ohh and millions of people understand facebook credits. I can tell you with pretty good knowledge that the 1-credit transaction is a good idea for this kind of application. Certainly this hasn't been proven with apps off of facebook. It's an excellent experiment though.
If you really want to grow even faster:
1) scrap the standalone website and build it as an iframe app (should be very little work). This will simplify login significantly and will keep people inside FB, which in my experience, makes a world of difference in the viral funnel.
2) replace the "share this link" with a real Stream.publish call. Consider adding like buttons for every single user's page.
3) Allow people to see which of their friends have answers as well.
Then, if you add the 1 credit transaction, you should do pretty well. Beware, however... Facebook has given out a lot of free credits to users and they do not give app devs any payback when free credits are used. These chargebacks can affect actual revenue from small transactions like this significantly.
That's why I use google appengine. It would have handled what you describe without even going over the daily free limit. Of course, you wouldn't be cool as rails.
You could be cool as Clojure, though: https://github.com/gcv/appengine-magic