The 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?
How to Kill a Great Idea
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#12The 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?
You probably want this awesome little thing:
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Makes most any website really, really, _readable_. One of goals when I build my own sites is to make it so I don't want to switch readability on when I'm using it.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#13Great story and a perfect illustration of why old people shouldn't shoot for the stars. Old people do not understand tech trends. They try to, but it is beyond their ability. Friendster was a site created by old people, run by people, and filled with old people users. Anything that starts from the old will never migrate to the young. Old people are not leaders. They do not determine the trends. Facebook got it right from the start by restricting it to colleges. I'm sure people wanted to open it up sooner, but the talented young leaders of Facebook knew that the next big thing would be determined by how young people choose to adopt it. Old people would follow like cattle later on, which they did. Facebook even made sure to hire young talent at the start because any bad hire would hurt the company when it was small. If you haven't made something of yourself by 30, don't think you're gonna quit your job as a career software engineer and come up with the next big thing. If you wanna do a start-up, you're only chance is to create a lifestyle business or maybe have a mild exit, which is still pretty good.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#14Great 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.
Having not followed Friendster and its history, I found this a pretty compelling read.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#15Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#16Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.
Friendster launched circa 2002; I don't have the etymology of "Web 2.0" committed to memory, but it's safe to say the silly naming really kicked in much later.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#17This 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 peopl…
I've gotten 5-10 pieces of spam through facebook in the last year or two, but it's all been from non-techie friends who had their account phished. So at least I was able to help them clean it up and (hopefully) learn how to avoid it in the future.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#18That was an amazing read. And it shows that the winners get to write the history books.
Re: How to Kill a Great Idea
#19In contrast, here's a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose at the height of the companies growth explaining what Friendster is. http://bit.ly/9EAhU9
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/1229
FYI: URL shorteners are neither required nor preferred on HN.