How to Kill a Great Idea
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How to Kill a Great Idea
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#2Great article, and a good moral.
It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already knew.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#3This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam.
So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam from their folders, because it would take a couple of minutes to open each message and discover it is spam.
The article talks a lot about business decisions, but the business side does not really matter that much until you get your web site to work.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#4My favorite bit of the article.
[Abrams] was particularly vexed by the company's apparent obsession with partnerships. "At the board meetings they would say, 'We should do a deal with AOL," he recalls. "And I'd be like, 'Guys, the site is not working." He never got anyone's attention, and in 2005 he was stripped of his chairmanship.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#5This was a pretty interesting read. I think the important lesson from the demise of Friendster as well as the subsequent demise of MySpace (which some people try not to admit) is that engineering actually matters. Friendster failed because it did not work. It was too slow, sometimes pages would not load at all and it was too easy to spam. So it got to the point where people had to take forever just to delete the spam…
That's a great take-away I think. I think that is one of the reasons Facebook was so successful. I've been a member of Facebook since 2004 and I can't remember a single piece of spam I've ever seen through it.
In 2004 when I joined, it was a pretty simple, no-AJAX standard PHP site and worked very quickly. From there, it just took off and they were able to hire some of the best engineers and server architecture people out there.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#6In contrast, here's a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose at the height of the companies growth explaining what Friendster is.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#7Great article, and a good moral. It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already knew.
I knew almost nothing about Friendster and I found the article captivating. Maybe you already knew the important bits?
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#8Great article, and a good moral. It does fail lesson #1 of journalism though: put the important bits at the beginning, not the end. It was tedious to read through a history I already knew.
Some stories are written in newspaper style like you describe. This is written in a storytelling style - much more informative for most of the audience who know very little of friendship.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#9I think this is a great warning for those who think that VC funding immediately equals success. Eating your ramen noodles for a while gives you time to get good foundations in place before things start moving too fast.
It made me feel much better about bootstrapping Gridspy
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#10The print friendly version is hard to read due to unbroken lines. The normal version has too many pages splits.
Does anyone know a good javascript commandlet that will apply good style to plain text?