jobenjo's comments

I agree with you about the Q&A wars shaping up, but I think you should include Fluther, which falls smack dab in the middle of this fray.

It's also worth noting there are a number of other large incumbents like WikiAnswers (which is now bigger than Yahoo Answers by some accounts), Answerbag, and Yedda, to name a few.

I agree that there is a movement of next-gen Q&A companies going for something special (because I'm one of them), and I know it's a complex field of companies to navigate. But I'd be careful not to oversimplify the pool "major players" to just the few companies playing silicon valley publicity game. The actual Q&A space is much more vast.

Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Fluther.

Yeah, I tried to address that in the end of the post. You'll notice links to two other site's data where the chunking is present but not nearly enough to make a horseshoe.

Without Google's chunking it would look different. but it actually makes it easier to see what's happening. Everyone will see a 1-log like function here (without chunking), what matters is the rate of decay, and that is well-captured in the chunking.

Well done. I've been craving this kind of tool forever. All the previous implementations I've seen failed by having stale data. If you can solve that, this will be a hit.

Fluther.com is looking to hire someone with backend/architecture/database/python experience.

(You will be employee #2).

[email protected]

Any way I can do this in Django? (Or--how hard is this to do by hand?). Seems really promising.

We've been using MogileFS for the last few years to host all our avatars. It's fast and powerful, and has had very few issues.

It's definitely a solid system, though was certainly overkill for our needs (if I could do it again, I would just use s3).

I was just thinking about this. Slicehost hasn't changed their prices in the 3ish years we've been with them, but the price of computers and memory has dropped considerably.

As their profit margin expands, I hope Slicehost will lower their prices, too (and if they don't I suspect that'll be a window for someone else).

Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin and Hobbes).

He created an epic masterpiece, never sold out, and left at the top of his game. He achieved fame without being drawn into celebrity, and his ideas have permeated our culture in a deep and wonderful way.

Thanks!

Not sure why it's posted here, but this is one of my favorite stories by Woody Allen.

In high school, I used it as a Humorous Interp piece for my debate class and ended up winning state.

Even with his flops (I couldn't stand Whatever Works) Woody Allen is one of the few artists who's made an incredibly vast series of excellent works and managed to effectively move between different genres without sacrificing his own vision. Can't say that about many people, and it's certainly something I aim for myself.

Fluther is hiring for employee #1 (full-time).

We're looking for an awesome backend-engineer/curious-thinker/olympic-whistler with sys/db knowledge, but many hats will be required. Dabbling is good. Python/Django/MySQL is a plus.

Our office is in SF in the Mission.

jobs at fluther dot com.

We already run a XMPP server for direct user notification.

I'm not familiar with Growl.fm, but I can say we're not at all ideologically opposed to using an open source web service. In general, we're looking for: - Good UI/install for end users - Minimal hassle to setup for us - Sensible authentication

When you think it's ready for primetime, shoot me an email (ben [at] fluther.com) and we can talk about setting something up.

This looks amazing. We've been waiting for something like this that we can directly plug Fluther notifications into, without having to build and maintain our own desktop notification client.

Keep up the great work.

Django at Fluther.

Not sure we'd trade these, but here they are:

quippo.com

helpcloud.com

I think the mechanism is a bit different than what you described... if it's a user who wants to answer a question, why would http://www.mahalo.com/answers/education/does-anyone-have-any... have no answers?

From the same page: Did you ask this question via Twitter? We create a Mahalo account for everyone who asks a question via Twitter.

So yes, the tone of the blog makes it sound like Mahalo is scraping from the web, because Mahalo's pages make it sound like they're scraping from the web.

It's really not an issue about copyright as it is about plagiarism.

We're not saying that other people can't ask or answer those questions elsewhere... we're saying that copying questions verbatim, and simply removing the attribution link, is not okay.

Certainly lots of different people will ask the same questions all the time. But this wasn't different people. It was the same people's questions, copied.

I agree completely. That's why this is so frustrating--on Mahalo it looks like the question is asked by a Mahalo user, not the actual Fluther submitter.

And since they strip out the link, it's very hard to find attribution.

Yeah, fair enough. This is really more about Twitter's TOS than ours.

We're not trying to start a legal battle, but this feels like infringement.

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe if you scraped all the Q&A sites to make a massive database of questions, that would in fact get you in a lot of trouble.

Honestly, I don't know if we have a case here, but I'm curious to hear what people think.