cowboyhero's comments

Love the idea, but the demo is hanging on me. Looks like it's choking on urls.api.twitter.com.

It's a good post and it reminds me a little bit of those old tv commercials from Qwest and AT&T about how you'll be able to "watch any movie ever made in any language" in a dumpy roadside motel or 'send a fax from the beach' that were run in the 1990s.

But that's not really science fiction to me. That's just iterative and incremental improvements on a global network.

There's not a whole helluva lot functionally different between Windows 3.1 and Windows Whatever (in that they're all WiMPs).

There's not a whole helluva lot different between a Mac Performa and the iMac I'm using to type this message (drive bay, hard drive, ram, cpu, etc. Similar designs and similar interfaces).

Yeah, Google Maps and GPS are neat but a real "the future is now!" moment to me would be man walking on Mars or being able to fly from LA to Paris in 45 minutes.

> The content producers should be ecstatic about this.

The problem playing out now is that the studios don't consider you or me to be their customer. Their customers are Walmart, Blockbuster, and cable companies. (Things get trickier when you have "Cabletown" situations, where content providers merge with content delivery.)

Right now, Netflix exists at the pleasure of the studios. I liken it to early cable: Cheap, ad free, accessible, and not long for this world.

They had a paywall on the site originally years ago. Frankly, I never understood why they removed it. They're a publication, like the WSJ, covering a specific industry to something of a niche audience that will gladly pay for subs.

To me the more interesting story is that someone like Nikki Finke can come out of nowhere and one up them with free content.

I had the same experience at first -- reached for my mouse to handle inventory, etc.

Once I found the "help" button (which was actually useful!) and the keyboard shorts ... I found I preferred the game mouseless.

Primarily because it brings back memories of playing games like this on IBC XT PCs in the early 1980s, or funneling quarters into the arcade equivalent (eg, Gauntlet).

So while usability is important, consider this post a vote to keep the game keyboard only.

Oh man ... it's a little cruel to post something like this on a _Monday_ morning when I can't play it!

(Excellent work, though. I love rogue-likes and this one looks like fun).

Speaking of brands .. if I were the guys running Engine Yard I'd be reaaaaally pissed right about now.

IANAL, but I believe this also allows the cops to set up random DUI roadblocks (ie, untargeted, no warrant, no individual suspicion, public good, etc).

Four stars for that latex-gloved logo. =D

Except in the third graph of the original Gamespot piece:

> However, Kinect had no problems identifying a third dark-skinned GameSpot employee, recognizing his face after a single calibration.

That's an odd rant. The same argument could be made for any popular author (King, Rowling, Peterson, etc).

The eBooks are priced that way because the estate is afraid of devaluing the Bond brand. (Publishers know that eBook pricing is a race to the bottom and they don't want to get there too soon.)

Bond is like Batman or Holmes. Three generations going and his adventures are still published and republished in hardback, special editions, omnibuses, and variant cover paperbacks. There's also a lucrative secondary market of neverending sequels and spinoffs.

The estate doesn't want to screw Penguin on pricing by offering an electronic version at $2 when the dead tree version is $15. That undercuts the publisher across the entire line of Bond products.

The "Phil" he's talking about in the first paragraph is Phil Sturgeon, and the original blog post is here:

http://philsturgeon.co.uk/news/2010/10/what-happens-next

You make a good point about the social-in-the-bar aspect of iOS apps, but I think you're off the mark about gaming.

This is an area where the Mac has been weak for more than a decade. Imagine an environment that allows you to purchase a multiplayer networked version of Civilization: Revolutions (or Quake or Plants vs Zombies or a dungeon crawler version of Dragon Age) for $20 and you can play it while sitting at your desk, on the couch with your iPad or out in the world on your phone.

Given the popularity of cheap apps and casual gaming, I expect the App Store turns into a Jobsian version of Steam.

Very cool and extremely useful.

First thoughts:

The site is slow for me.

There's no feedback indicating the system has captured user input.

On my first visit, I immediately started typing random function names into the search box ('strlen', 'htmlentities', 'func_get_args', etc).

I had no idea anything was going on and assumed that my search returned no results.

It's only when I tabbed out for a few moments and tabbed back that I saw the site worked at all.

When I saw the results, though, my reaction was something like "Wow, that's awesome."

Hmm .. not an expert, but I do manage one website that's got a little more twice your number of page views but brings in vastly more money.

First thoughts: Your ad placement is bad. Ditto on the colors. (I had to actually look for the things in order to spot them.)

You want the big 728x90 leaderboards at the top or the big square rectangles (300x250 minimum) in the sidebars or in the page content.

You also want to choose colors that pop off the rest of the page (black on gray is practically invisible).

Consider mixing up flash/image/video ads along with text ads.

Place them so they're highly visible but not obnoxious. Look to the bigger publishers (like Gawker, Wired, or Vanity Fair) to see where they place ads. You'll notice almost all of them place ads in a similar. There's a reason for that.

Start checking out sites like http://www.problogger.net/. You may not want to be that gung ho about monetizing a personal site, but it'll give you a lot of ideas to play off of.

Other posters here have the right idea too: It's not so much about AdSense or Amazon (at least not at first), but attention economy. If you can manage to become viewed as a content-area expert, you'll get more book deals and people will start hiring you for speaking gigs at conferences and tradeshows.

Good luck!

Remember that Netflix came around in a consumer culture that was renting videos and DVDs from corner shops for maybe $2-4 a pop.

Throughout their history, all of Netflix's pricing structures have been designed to stay within that range.

It costs Netflix pennies to stream movies. ("Akamai charges a customer like Netflix about 5 cents for an HD movie, compared with about 3 cents for standard definition." See: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_34/b41920385...)

I expect their prices to rise, though. If they want to stream first run movies (a la cable), they're going to have to pony up serious dough for the licenses. That means higher costs to the end consumer.

It's a valid assertion.

Not to start a whole thing about piracy -- but what always surprises me in conversations about Bittorrent is that most people speak as if it has no effect on anything, anywhere, ever. Somehow, it also seems to exist outside any real purchasing decisions.

I'm not attacking you personally, but honestly that kind of thinking (as I've stated it, not you) is delusional.

The existence of unlimited free copies of your product is going to effect your business and your ability to profit. No question.

Astute. I think you're dead right about the studio catalogue.

Unfortunately, the studios are still trying to protect what they view as their major customers: Retail chains (WalMart and Blockbuster) and cable companies. They understand those business, they've made money with them, and file sharing and secondary markets are negligible in those environments.

I've never thought about Netflix's agreements with third party distributors. That's a good question. Originally, I assumed some money was changing hands but maybe not. Maybe Netflix looks at it as a form of loss leader and a strategic advantage in the long run.

It seems like every company that comes out with a set top or mobile device now eventually includes Netflix. For consumers, Netflix is becoming a feature that's just not anticipated, it's expected.

Fair point -- but you'd think Winer would have enough experience to allow his apps to fail gracefully.

Printing out ugly error messages complete with file system paths in html is definitely a pants-dropping kind of move.

It's interesting in that it's not so much a social network as "your order history online, for everyone in the world to see."

It's off-putting that bands can create content but regular users? Not so much.

It's odd that I can tell people I'm going to a Cold Play concert (somehow) but I can't post pictures from that event afterwards.

But then .. I don't expect Ping to remain in this same place for very long.

Apple has a habit of releasing simple, feature complete products at 1.0 and then only adding additional stuff later when they can guarantee a first-rate user experience (eg, the App Store, cut and paste on the iPhone, printing on the iPad, etc).

So their one-point-ohs have the pundits and tech journalists writing big "Huh? But it doesn't have ____!" articles, but then in six months or a year later ... it's a wholly different kind of experience.

One prediction nobody is talking about much: Since this is based, presumably, on Lala, I expect it to have some kind of streaming service soon.