chadyj

Great work guys! I think you hit the nail on the head with the template style being the best approach for easily putting together emails with clean code. HTML email editors are in a terrible state and that is why I have created Sendicate (http://sendicate.net)

For more reasons why you should ditch the traditional WYSIWYG style approach have a look at:

1. http://www.chadyj.com/post/21569743980/content-sections-as-p... 2. http://www.chadyj.com/post/21158280879/die-wysiwyg-die-lets-... 3. http://www.chadyj.com/post/20729167319/email-newsletters-are...

I am working on a content publishing app for email in the ESP space called Sendicate http://sendicate.net. If you have ever battled with the ubiquitous Mailchimp/Constant Contact/etc etc then you definitely understand the pain. I have just started taking closed-beta sign ups and am aiming to get the first test customers on the app next week.

For those interested in a little more details I have started blogging about some of the ideas and concepts behind Sendicate at my blog at http://www.chadyj.com

Or even better, use address book groups.

This is a timely article for me as I am just about to launch a email startup called Sendicate that adds tools to simplify and empower email-based communication. Another way of looking at it is like a content publishing app for email. For those interested here are some more thoughts on what I am building http://www.chadyj.com/tagged/sendicate

Email certainly has some issues but it is also infinitely flexible and powerful and drives a lot of our day to day interaction with the internet. I am surprised that there is such a drive to re-invent email when a few specialized tools that add value to email will solve many use cases without re-inventing the wheel.

Why Starbucks? Why not setup a barista in a street cart and make your own (and you will also be mobile to handle different areas and sell to foot traffic)? You can skip the Starbucks lines, increase your margin significantly, and work on a better coffee product.

Premium coffee is selling for $6.50 and is turning into a luxury item. Source: http://www.good.is/post/the-end-of-cheap-coffee/ (fantastic article!)

Everyone has seen Nmap used and might not even know it. It was famously used by Trinity in The Matrix, and has popped up in Die Hard, Bourne Ultimatum, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and more. http://nmap.org/movies.html

I wonder if Hollywood will upgrade.

This is a myopic article. I challenge any marketing channel to drive instant real world sales for a brick and mortar retail store. It just doesn't happen like the article expects with its naive assumptions.

It is too early to measure the success of the ads in a real world scenario. These pizza ads are very much about exposure (and not BUY NOW) but the article presumes that the only metric of success is people running out the door, getting in their car and buying pizza immediately after seeing the ad. This behavior isn't reflected in other media, such as TV, magazine ads, billboards, PR, etc, so why hold Facebook to a higher mystical immediate marketing standard? Online ads can indeed drive immediate sales but that is for online businesses where there is buying intent, and this pizza store clearly isn't in that category.

Another aspect overlooked is that unlike a google ad or magazine ad where you pay per exposure/view/instance, these Facebook ads serve a lead acquisition strategy that can be used multiple times. Pay once to acquire the customer, then market as much as you like for free. Once you have the customer as a "fan" you can market to them every week or even every day making the original investment much more valuable. Marketing is about repetition and exposure so it may take X Facebook posts before the consumer receives sufficient exposure.

I have invested $70k, and spent around $15k so far over the last few months.

I am a unique case because I am also applying for a E2 Investor visa, and $70k was the number recommended by my immigration attorney to satisfy the visa application. If I didn't have that requirement I would have spent less on legal fees and hopefully would have launched the MVP for around $10k. I still haven't launched, but am about to start a closed beta program.

This is a good move. With the proliferation of Facebook apps there needed to be a better way to discover apps, especially ones that your social network is using. It is a social version of Apple's App Store.

Amazon has a large selection of Heirloom seeds, but there are many other niche clubs out there that trade the seeds globally. http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

Thank you Github! I was just hoping that the graphs would get updated. This gives me better oversight into who/what/where/when. Although perhaps a bug - my punch card graph is empty.

Very useful post, thank you. I'd love to see some charts in there too.

Earthquake is my favorite terminal based twitter client with streaming API support. Made with ruby. To tweet it is simply "⚡ Hello World!". https://github.com/jugyo/earthquake

Does anyone see the irony in referencing Star Wars in an article on taste. Not to mention the cinematic blasphemy of indirectly comparing Kurosawa to MS Powerpoint!

Thanks for pointing this out.

I think it is about semantics and perspective, but a delighted user is someone that just saved money, or saved from an arduous chore, or got laid. Delight is the sensation derived from the usage of the product, not from any particular feature.

I agree that lots of random sharing data can be useless, but I think it is only useless in its current form. There is a great deal of data to be intelligently mined there.

For example, I wish Facebook told me aggregate info, like 12 of my friends are reading X book, and 15 listen to Y song, and 5 have liked Z restaurant. To me this is a lot more compelling as I can see real trends in what my social circle is consuming.