brianmckenzie

No Flickr, no MySpace, no social bookmarking here. The 37signals apps are the only really 2.0-ish thing I'm into. Geez, I don't even have an RSS reader. By all indications I should be the poster child for this stuff, so it doesn't surprise me when I hear that 50% of Americans don't use technology.

What I'm trying to do is figure out stuff I would actually use, and build that.

I am absolutely baffled as to how anyone could see YC as 'clubby', elitist, or whatever peoples' problem seems to be. Can anyone name another angel or VC firm that is more transparent than YC, or contributes more to the web startup world?

It seems like a number of people on here were staking the entire existence of their startup on YC funding - that's not an entrepreneurial attitude. If you have something worthwhile you'll build and launch it with or without YC.

Don't change a thing, Paul.

Make a word replacement filter.

If someone is causing problems just word-filter their name into something embarassing. Or take a word they use frequently in their posts and word-filter it into gibberish.

Netflix is the first example that springs to mind. They're not purely a web app, but they're the only thing I'm paying for besides 37signals.

I might pay one of these domain-name-brainstorming sites that are popping up, not sure yet. Buxfer.com also looks intriguing, not sure if they charge yet.

If you ever get into a situation where your site has over 50k users or so, you will see banned users switch email addresses to circumvent your security measures several times a day. I know I do, and my site only has 300k users.

The solution is to store banned IP's in your database, excluding massively-shared IP's like AOL, and check against this list during registration. I also keep a list of free proxies and prohibit people using those IP's from signing up.

I have the 20in. iMac, maxed out on RAM and HD. It's absolutely killer - the best machine I've ever owned. Next purchase will be a MacBook Pro.

I use InkScape for wireframes. It saves everything as SVG so the files are easy to send to people I'm collaborating with, and they can open in Illustrator if that's what they're using.

http://inkscape.org

So she's outsourced the development and is spamming blogs to get registrations. Doesn't sound like too formidable a competitor to me. If you can code, you can develop your app and launch in less than than the time she's wasting trying to communicate with Indian developers in the middle of the night. Her industry connections won't matter so much if you launch a better product first.

I wouldn't worry so much about graphics programs - after all, there are no graphics on this site and you use it, right? Start by learning how to do valid markup and get good at CSS. I second the recommendation of http://alistpart.com