andre

The "sample" is there so readers won't get confused that it's just an example. I threw it together pretty quickly, I'm not afraid that somebody is going to steal it, I'm actually trying to share it with everybody.

Please post more details as to who you are looking for with what kind of qualifications.

I think what steve was driving at is how many visitors were generated by each service.

If you get 1% conversion of 50,000 visitors from digg, it's still better than if you get 5% of 500 visitors from NYTimes

it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission!

on a more serious note, (i'm not a lawyer). I would look to see if you're competing with your employer, if you are not than there's not much to worry about, if you think you might be, check with an attorney.

Interesting. Rock on!!!

I'd love to see a follow up in 90 days to this story, maybe with how much money the site made, etc.

Tips for outsourcing like Guy did: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=26310

All the companies rage about developers and third party development, but it looks like Yahoo might actually step up and open up their system when Google is keep a closed shop.

With the hiring of the new female it might help actually.... The thinking might be, "Be cool, get into computers and you'll have hot babes like that too."

But from what I hear from some friends of mine that are in CS majors, it's not pretty, they are learning all kinds of crap that is totally useless and will never see after getting out of college.

Good point. There's like no elaboration at all. Even if he doesn't want to use Twitter, he can use other companies out there.

That's what came into my mind, why not just use Wikipedia content.

A great solution is to give them an incentive to give you their real email address, like you're going to send them an important report or something else that is of high value so the visitors have no problem giving up their email address.

Alex covers this subject pretty well on how he handles different traffic:

http://alexking.org/blog/2007/05/22/monetization

If a company has no terms of use or any other kind of policy on their site, what are the issues in scraping the content? any way to prevent it?

1) Tell myself that it's ok, and that the cell and net will be back in less than 24 hours

2) Catch up on sleep

3) Read all the books that are stacked up and not being read

4) Buy homing pigeons for lost distance communications

This has been occurring with my univ network for days now, sometimes down for half a day at a time.

Test drive it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=24516

From GIGAOM: "Now Zuckerberg says you can serve ads on your app pages and keep all the revenue, sell them yourselves or use a network, and process transactions within the site, keeping all the revenue without diverting users off Facebook."

This sounds interesting.

Now, that would be crazy. How do you make money with that?

Good point too! To me this feels like signing up for a franchise instead of starting your own business, you have control, but not full control. For some purposes or ideas it's a great.

the only question I have: How are the developers protected from facebook launching similar products when their product proves that it makes money or draws a lot of traffic?

Edit: Fixed

It all depends on the definition of the "spam".

Predictions of what's to come:

1) New version in 4-6 month

2) Adsense/Adwords for feeds

3) Integration with Google Analytics

4) Google taking over another portion of your life

I think there's two hidden forces involved here:

1) It started out free when everybody else was charging something.

2) Social psychology, where people want to connect with other people, in communication, physical and emotional levels, so without restrictions it prospered.

This is like throwing a nickel into a homeless hat.

That's why everybody should TEST different price points and everything else about the offer. Apply direct marketing knowledge to this problem.

It's a good article, but I doubt most people will ever do something like this. Most people don't even write down what they need to do, they don't even keep a list of tasks to be done.

But this is a different crowd here and I'm sure that it'll be useful to some people, the one change that I would make is in the evaluation criteria, and make it more personable to the individual.

Everybody is using myspace and facebook

that site sure EXCRETES confidence out of every orifice :)

lol, I think this one applies IF 1) you know their address 2) the address is within driving distance and 3) having an "assault" on your criminal record is just another notch in the belt. :)