wolfrom's comments

I'm not sure if vocabulary size matters once you reach around 25,000 words. The words I didn't know were in part because I've never had any need to know them; if I had run into any of them while reading anything written in the past 80 years, I'd be angry at the author for showing off.

When I was young, I thought that if I wanted to be a writer I should have a huge vocabulary... but now, when choosing words/synonyms I dismiss most options because they're much too obscure.

Windsoc uses App Engine for our Unified Social API, and while it has many benefits, we've always had our minds on how to move off of it someday. SSL is a big issue for us, and another is the support model (which should be changing soon from what I've seen).

So what we have now is a product that runs both on App Engine and on DotCloud. Since DotCloud is awesome, too, and we know that we can talk to a specific person when something goes wrong, it's currently a front-runner for us. We're also looking at Joyent, too, as opposed to EC2.

But even if we switch large parts of our product to somewhere else, I wouldn't be surprised if we still used App Engine for some things.

Jason's point is valid no matter your opinion of Mahalo. Reputation may soon be the most important determinant of the value of content, as opposed to social indicators and in tandem with interest- or location-based relevance. We already do this manually today. When I access Google News, I choose specific news sources over others based on my understanding of their reputation for accuracy and thoroughness.

Please elaborate.

His arguments are related to interstellar travel as an endeavour that is undertaken as a gravity well to gravity well transit. My argument is that planetary colonization and travel from Earth to the close orbit of Proxima Centauri or any other star is not the only method by which humankind will reach beyond this solar system. Does that not address his arguments?

I agree with the notion that no human society will purposely invest money in a trek to another solar system, but I strongly disagree with the notion that humanity is stuck in this solar system for eternity.

There seem to be two common misconceptions about the colonization of space:

1. People will colonize other planets. The notion that future generations will desire to burrow into other planets is as strange as expecting people to build a new city by digging caves in a cliff wall. Just as we now build apartment blocks and ranch houses, we will someday build custom habitats that aren't continually ravaged by earthquakes, tornados and spring floods.

2. Reaching the next solar system will be momentous. People will populate neighbouring solar systems just as our ancestors moved from Africa to other parts of the world... gradually from one generation to the next, each one drifting a little further into the Oort. One day a habitat that has its own artificial star within will move from the most recent piece of raw material to the next, not realizing that the one orbits our distant sun while the other orbits another star entirely.

Barring catastrophe at home, this future is likely. It's just the same story that's been happening since Lucy's family left the Great Rift Valley.

One big issue for me is that I only have one name. I think it's asking too much of people trying to connect with me to have to choose between four Twitter accounts or 2-3 Facebook profiles.

I think the first generation don't need to be as technically sophisticated as most people think. Get users in quickly (social logins), and let them pop out just as easily, even to the point of closing their profiles out until they get back. I think things like proximity detection or automatic social graph relevance algorithms are add-ons for later.

I was earning approximately $10-15k annually from affiliate marketing from 2002-2006 (formerly giftsforaguy.com), but I didn't spend the time I needed to stay up-to-date with my search rankings.

When I tried to start over with a more general gift affiliate site in 2009, I found that the game had changed so much that it would likely take over a year to get back to the earlier level using organic SEO.

So I've put it on hold, hoping to relaunch using social discovery for customer acquisition.

I think this explains very well why in my situation with my co-founder, I don't feel like anything but 50/50 would work, but yet I still agree that such a split is inherently risky.

While my co-founder and I have the benefit of knowing each other well and working together for twelve years, the strength of that relationship would make it impossible for one of us to have an overruling power.

We do have sectional overrules, however, where as "CEO" I have certain areas that are "mine", and as "CTO" there are areas that are up to him. But neither of us can overrule on the bigger questions like selling, shutting down, moving to the Bay Area, etc. It's not the 50/50 that prevents that, it's the pre-existing relationship. No differing equity split would remove the damage that unilateralism would cause.

So I don't think we ever had an option on how to split. But that's not the same for everybody.

I'm surprised by the negative reaction that this post has received. I thought the actions were more "cheeky" than overstepping. But maybe that's more an indication that I am afflicted with the same easy morality.

Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, but I've never been checked on my way out of the US. My first thought on this was to enter Canada and go home from there (detouring around the US on your return flight).

I've actually called US Customs and Immigration before to discuss visas and status. As you're not identifying yourself in the call, you might be able to get a feel for whether or not you would have trouble leaving the country and then getting sponsored.

Have you spent any time at places like http://www.fanfiction.net/ ?

My wife is always saying that there are many authors on there that ought to focus on getting non-derivative work published (if they aren't already).

I imagine authors could use pseudonyms for their fundraising?

We actually have that very tool developed (alpha-ish, I guess you'd say), but we found that no one seemed to pay much attention when we talked about it. That, plus the difficulty in monetizing has put it on hold in favor of the Windsoc API.

The Windsoc Social Client aggregates activities and includes the concepts of Circles and Channels. Circles are collections of people just as you described, actually, while Channels work to split contacts and services (and someday individual activities) into separate subject areas. This is because usually I'm on startup mode, but when I'm relaxing I like to change over to my other interests.

I may just be over-sensitive, but this post seems a little too cavalier about the Libyan crisis to me. In addition, I had the impression that this piece might be about some kind of "hack" for humanitarian purposes, or something like Google's work to help people in Japan to connect after the earthquake and tsunami.

I am no stranger to writing somewhat more compelling titles to blog posts, but I feel like this attempt has misfired.

We are wary of the issue of dependency as well. As you point out, there are ways of mitigating the risk, and we are making it a top priority:

1. Stability and security will be maintained by a gradual roll-out and a user-driven testing phase. We're still working out the details on this.

2. A standard documentation format is a key requirement for each documented API call; no call will be released for general usage until it has all included information (parameters, possible success and error results, example response).

3. Pricing / service contracts. We are looking at providing guarantees on pricing stability and uptime, and we're thinking of not charging in advance, but after service has been rendered.

4. Source release pledge. It's too early to know how to proceed with open sourcing, but we do expect that at a minimum our client libraries will be open source. And we will pledge to release all code if there were to be an impending service shutdown, with three months minimum for transition.

I think that's all we can do when starting out to show that we aim to be a reliable component. The real evidence probably can't come until we earn a reputation over the coming months.

We are definitely looking at startups for now, expecting that finding success with startups will naturally lead to interest from larger enterprises.

What I'm hoping to emphasize (and maybe I haven't done that enough) is that startups who are heavily integrated into social services and will see high usage would have a monthly charge, but startups just using Twitter once per user to grab a list of followers wouldn't have to pay more than the $50 license fee unless they had a very large number of users (I like to say a million, but it all depends on the specific API calls).

That's a good point. We're trying to disrupt the existing API platform market by being leaner and faster. Putting some Windsoc code on Github hasn't been ruled out, either. I think that assuming that for-profit vendors would never consider supporting and leveraging the open source movement would be just as dangerous as an assumption about open source being unreliable.

I think there are important differences between libraries and platforms.

1. Libraries are static, with versioning and upgrades, whereas platforms are real-time.

2. Libraries are based on a one-time usage, whereas platforms depend on providing constant value to maintain users.

3. Libraries do not generally offload any work to other servers, whereas platforms can provide efficiencies.

4. Libraries are platform, language, and version specific, whereas platforms can be built through protocols like REST and JSON that are known to most stacks.

That being said, open source libraries aren't always free when it comes to support and technical costs, and not all platforms are closed-source.

I've always imagined that this is why Quora mentions the voters for a question. Another aspect to that display of votes is that it shows up in the list of a users activities. Clicking on a profile could display the articles and comments that the user upvoted/downvoted. This would cause users who consider their reputation to be important to think twice before upvoting something less appropriate.

I wonder if there's a point where the talent wars in the Bay Area could actually affect pg's view that the Valley is the best place for a startup. I know that Jason Calacanis has talked about how it might now make sense to do your development somewhere else.