41–50 of 53 posts
Man, you guys are harsh. Even if it isn't a service you yourself would use, why bash a service useful for others? The first goal of many Y Combinator startups is to make something people want, and Scribd clearly fits the bill if millions of people are using it.
Yes, millions of people are using it for reading pirated ebooks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly doubt comscore is claiming to be tracking embed/widget traffic. Those numbers are supposed to be for the site itself. They are quantified, and quantcast shows the vast majority of their traffic is to their destination: http://www.quantcast.com/scribd.com see scribd.com vs The Scribd Network
True, so people are linking instead of embedding. But the point is the same... If one person makes the decision to link to scribd instead of the pdf, and 100 people follow that link, it doesn't really mean 100 people value the service.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True, although I think things are speeding up. Chrome, firefox, safari, emergence of the iPhone as a browser... HTML5 is definitely heading in the right direction though. WebSocket will be awesome when it arrives, making comet a thing of the past. and tags will pretty much put flash out of business, etc etc
I agree things are speeding up, but think it's largely because Microsoft is now realizing that they need to keep IE up to date and standards compliant. They still have 70%market share, and it's not shrinking fast, so the onus is entirely on them. IE7 is kind of a sucky browser but a step in the right direction in terms of compliance, and IE 8 will be much better.
The surprise is how well chrome is doing these days - usually beating Opera and Safari, and sometimes beating IE6.
I think most of the push is coming from firefox,chrome,safari and opera. People using the new wave of webapps aren't using IE, because it's ridiculously slow (Even GMail now deter the use of IE).
I'd say it is shrinking very fast in webapp early adopter circles, and that's a key area of growth for browsers. IE better up its game with IE8, or get left behind.
I realize that someone, somewhere, is running webtv and would love a service like Scribd. That person is not able to use it because it's a flash and javascript nightmare. The rest of us, who have regular PCs with the modern software that scribd requires, have document readers for all of the various file formats. The very worst of these readers is faster and more pleasant to use than the best scribd rendering. Lastly,…
About the speed issue - how is a 20 MB reader (Adobe Reader 9) plus the cost of downloading the entire pdf faster than a 200 kb swf file and having the document streamed? That makes no sense.
Man, you guys are harsh. Even if it isn't a service you yourself would use, why bash a service useful for others? The first goal of many Y Combinator startups is to make something people want, and Scribd clearly fits the bill if millions of people are using it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a user point of view, why do you care if it has a real socket connection, or a emulated connection that does exactly the same thing? I'm not sure any user anywhere would notice the difference. There is no noticable difference in terms of latency, negligible difference in terms of bandwidth. I have thought about the possibility of using it where available, but I don't think it'd really be worth the effort and pot…
The real place I could see Flash being great for mibbit is it would allow you to build an embed that could be used on sites like Myspace which allow Flash but not Javascript content. Let me know if you ever want me to show you how to get a sane Flash dev environment set up - I have the war-wounds from writing most of Justin.TV's Flash code ;-)
I will be charitable here (you can tell I am not a huge fan either!). I have seen a couple of people use the site, and they use it to publish short stories and such. They could always post it to a blog, but I think Scribd gives them nice search engine optimization. Even for this legitimate use case, the flash player is a bit of a turn-off for me. But the reason I am not a huge fan is the sheer extent of copyright abu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
About the speed issue - how is a 20 MB reader (Adobe Reader 9) plus the cost of downloading the entire pdf faster than a 200 kb swf file and having the document streamed? That makes no sense.
Not a fair comparison: you need a viewer for swf files too. Downloading is not a problem. If it takes 0.3 s on scribd vs 0.8 s with pdf, then I'm willing to wait to have a viewer that allows me to scroll with my scrollwheel.
Not to be pedantic, but the Adobe Flash Runtime is tiny compared to Acrobat or Word, and effectively has a 0 startup cost.
I will be charitable here (you can tell I am not a huge fan either!). I have seen a couple of people use the site, and they use it to publish short stories and such. They could always post it to a blog, but I think Scribd gives them nice search engine optimization. Even for this legitimate use case, the flash player is a bit of a turn-off for me. But the reason I am not a huge fan is the sheer extent of copyright abu…
Guess you are anti-ISP too?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree things are speeding up, but think it's largely because Microsoft is now realizing that they need to keep IE up to date and standards compliant. They still have 70%market share, and it's not shrinking fast, so the onus is entirely on them. IE7 is kind of a sucky browser but a step in the right direction in terms of compliance, and IE 8 will be much better.
70% might be true in some places, but it's changing a lot. For example, Mibbit gets about 19% IE usage on the main client. On the widget as you'd expect that figure is higher - 30%. The surprise is how well chrome is doing these days - usually beating Opera and Safari, and sometimes beating IE6. I think most of the push is coming from firefox,chrome,safari and opera. People using the new wave of webapps aren't using…
That's the problem with browsers, you're always stuck with the lowest common denominator.