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I think it's pretty obvious that often tables are better and more intuitive to use for layout than CSS. The problem is that we've been told for so long that tables for layout are bad that it makes one feel kind of dirty using them.

Web page layout should be simple it shouldn't require months/years of experience to work around CSS limitations and browser quirks to get some text and pretty pictures to display right.

Sometimes I spend (waste) hours working on a CSS layout because it makes me feel clever, but lately I've been shrugging my shoulders, going the easier route, sending an invoice and moving on :)

It really bugs me that extjs is never on these types of lists. It blows the competition out of the water!

All of the businesses you mention solve real problems that other business people are willing to pay to have solved.

The way I see it social sites need to climb a very steep peak before they have any chance of making money from ads - how many facebooks (which is still a long way from profitable) can the web ecosystem support? - If you do reach the top of that peak which only has room for 2-3 big players you have a chance of banking millions.

B2B services on the other hand are much safer. Business people understand that products and services cost money - and they are used to paying for the services they use.

My advice to developers looking for a product is to forget about the 1 in a million chance that they will develop the next great social app and cash out rich. By focusing on customers that are willing to pay, your venture has a much greater chance of becoming profitable and sustaining itself.

This is really obvious advice, but people need to hear it. There are loads of developers working on the next great social consumer facing product that will revolutionize the way people interact yada yada yada - the only downside being that they have no idea how they will monetize.

Wow this has lots of grammatical errors - made it hard to read.

Sounds a bit optimistic too: "if you put heart & soul and are with the right team there is good chance you will succeed"

Even if you're with the right team and working on a valid problem chances of success are very slim (<5% at a guess).

I think the author makes a very good point.

"the fact that offering free, advertising-supported services to millions upon millions of people is not a lean and- mean undertaking"

and

"They figured that the revenue and profits would come eventually but clearly that was putting the cart before the horse"

I see lots of people on HN building great products who have clearly not asked (and answered) the most important question: How will my service make money?

It should be becoming painfully clear that layering advertising on top of a useful service does not work.

Adsense works because it puts relevant ads in front of people who are already searching for something.

FB users are connecting with friends not looking for products.

"By the way, are Facebook's numbers even public? How do you know they're losing money?" -

http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/07/technology/hempel_threepoint...

"[FB] Revenues for 2008 are expected to be about $275 million this year, according to several sources, and it is still not profitable."

it's common knowledge that none of the recent major "web2.0" players have made any or significant profits.

How will they make money? They need to make a LOT just to repay investors. The path to profitability is far from clear from my pov.

A business does not choose to run at a loss. They are currently running at a loss because they have failed to monetize. Investors keep giving them money because they assume (have faith) there will be some way of turning a profit in the future.

sounds great. how will your service make money?

Monetization will make or break Facebook. If they can pay investors back along with a healthy margin and continue to bring in revenue then they will stay.

Personally I don't think there is enough advertising money available regardless of economic conditions to keep this behemoth afloat. I'd love to know what alternatives those clever FB MBAs are cooking up.

How will FB Connect help pay the bills?

One day facebook will have to work out the monetization issue. They have accepted loads of investor money, and all those investors will one day expect a very healthy return.

I think their success in getting more investment money comes from the mindset that something this big can't fail.

I'm really curious to see if they come up with a working solution.

Allowing developers to create their own semantics as they see fit does not create a more semantic web.

The whole point of having semantically meaningful documents is so that machines can better understand them. Having a system where each developer creates their own "meaning hooks" is worse than useless - its a waste of time and bandwidth - and leaves us in the same position we are in today where a machine ignores markup and tries to infer meaning from context.

Standards and convention are important.

The only way to create a truly searchable and meaningful web is for us all to use an agreed upon set of tags that add meaning.

It's good to hear people talking about creating value. Hopefully the days of useless social networking, sheep throwing, farting phone vc fueled exit strategy bullshit will be over for a while (until the next bubble).

Today's universities are yesteryear's technical colleges. Universities used to produce intellectuals now they are primarily geared towards producing worker ants for modern "factories".

I'm a CS graduate. I don't consider myself a "Computer Scientist". I'm a factory worker who taps on his keyboard all day.

The fact is that a degree is now often considered the minimum qualification necessary to join the workforce.

"it's not a physical good that we ship that we're "giving away", it's a utility with a small marginal cost per user"

you just contradicted yourself. You're saying you don't give anything away and yet there is an associated cost to providing the service.

The holistic approach is nice, but "making people happy" doesn't pay the bills, and if you're ever looking for investors (not saying that you should) then this argument will get you laughed out of the board room.

I'm not criticizing your service - I think its great, really useful and polished. What bothers me is consumer mentality. The idea that "I'm willing to take advantage of a useful service but not willing to pay for it".

In a sense though all the free web services out there are feeding the perception that web sites are free by giving away too much. Have you ever heard of a free plumbing, or child care or any other service?

Bandwidth, storage and most importantly developer hours cost money - stop devaluing your own services!!

Personally i think that a focus on small business or enterprise software gives a much better chance of long term success (which i measure as dollars in the bank, not smiles on faces).

Love your product as well as the great tech that you have created - if I was a user I would definitely be a paying one ;)

It depends which sector you target. If you make software for business users there is never an expectation that a service is free.

Small costs can quickly balloon when you reach figures of a million plus.

The SEO is certainly a plus, however this exposure still needs to turn into dollars in the bank if you want to keep the lights on.

Great article. It really surprises me how many people are building products that rely on the "get huge then make money from advertising" model. Personally I couldn't imagine investing years on a project without a reasonable expectation of getting paying customers.

Giving a (web) service away and having no reliable way to turn users into paying customers is a losing game.

A product that I think is great, but which confuses me is Weebly. They have some excellent technology and offer a really awesome service, but their numbers are terrible. 1Million users and 1% paying customers! What other industry has 1% of customers supporting 99% of the rest?

I would rather have 1000 paying customers than 1Million eyeballs that are just there for the ride.

I couldn't care less whether the small fish get media coverage or not. What buoyed my spirits is that there are market players that make a comfortable living from web app development - which means there's a chance for the rest of us too ;)

Except that there are no interesting links on digg any more. It is close to 100% blog spam. Sites like this have to stay small to be useful - it's sad but the same thing will happen to HN if it gets too many readers. Luckily these type of sites are easy to set up so if HN ever goes bad an alternative will appear :)

Personally I am completely baffled by people who think it's an achievement to increase their rank/karma etc.

wow what what a pathetic waste of time!

looks interesting. I like the way it promotes good coding practices and your idea of relative routes is cool. Don't know about including routing info in controllers though. I wasn't able to tell what the benefit of doing it this way is over having a routes config file. Seems that the routes would get hard to manage in a large app (even with the route browser tool).

+1 for not having to register to DL

Would be nice to see ExtJS on the list too. Not sure why it always gets left off lists like this - its an amazing UI framework.

Wow! great device looking forward to seeing it at my local store one day :)

There's a big difference between web app and web page. Common web app controls (accordion, tab panels etc) allow developers to convey lots more information on screen and well thought out use of AJAX can make a complex application perform more quickly than the static equivalent.

As the complexity of web apps increases users will need to get used to the idea that they need to learn how to use each app to get the most out of it which is how it works with desktop apps. Try to compare the UI between desktop apps such as a music editor, 3DSMax and MSWord. Each uses different UI controls (sliders, knobs, text input etc). Each app is complex and has an associated learning curve. If people consider the app useful they will invest the time in learning how to use it.

I recently had to learn how to use Aftereffects. The UI and work flow were completely foreign to me - none of my existing knowledge was transferable, but I learned how to use it because I needed the features it provided.

Ultimately the market will decide. My guess is that the line between desktop and browser will continue to blur and will one day disappear.

good game - reminds me of Flashback an old Amiga game

Batch uploading a folder worth of photos to flickr is easy - 3 clicks 1. hit browse button 2. Multi-select all files 3. Upload.

I don't think you're solving a problem that makes people's lives difficult at the moment. There is a huge resistance to change, so getting people to jump from flickr to cloudfire would require you convince them that a problem exists in the first place.

Maybe this product would appeal to a real power user who is uploading lots of photos/videos on a daily basis, but how many of these are there? How willing would they be to swap to a new service (especially given they have probably invested considerable time to build up their existing profiles)? How many are happy to install software and share data? How many consumers are happy to sign up for an ongoing fee?

Maybe your niche within a niche is big enough to build a business - I hope so because despite all the hurdles you have in front of you it looks like you have a nice looking product.

All the best.

Memory usage is amazing in chrome. I've recently been comparing footprint on exactly the same tasks with my own web app. Chrome < 30mb, IE 7 fully patched XP > 160mb, FF ~80mb. I'm still using FF as my default but may be switching soon ;)

I'm jealous of the next generation of web developers who will (hopefully) work in a web environment with lots of competition and not so much of a browser monopoly!

I am a high school teacher and I whole heartedly agree with the sentiment expressed in this article. I don't know anything about NFL so I don't know if the comparisons are accurate, however the observations about good teaching are spot on.

There is no denying that those studying under a good teacher learn more than those studying under a poor/average teacher. There has been a lot said about "withitness" in the literature over the years and it is a quality that one either has or doesn't have.

There are lots of conclusions you can draw from observing teachers and it's quite awe inspiring to see a truly excellent teacher do their job.

@Tichy: Nothing in this article had anything to do with 'establishing the "fascist" school of perfect teaching, that all future teachers will have to rigidly adhere to'. The good teacher qualities that were mentioned included questioning, providing direct responses to student questions and treating learning as a team effort (teacher and student learning together). These are qualities that every good teacher exhibits and all poor teachers struggle with.

You guys really have an excellent product here. Extremely easy to use, great features and looks great too.

I'm sure you will get lots of users. What type of pricing will you be looking at?

I think you could work on optimising the page updates. Simply swapping the image in the header resulted in a full page reload which added up to almost 1mb! This makes the site seem (slightly)slow and makes it completely inaccessible to dial up users (yes they're still out there! hehe).

I like your idea. My personal gut feeling is that there is still lots of room for innovation and money to be made in the local online market.

I think you need to find a way of getting people to come back to the site even before there are many(any) others using it. Some tool that is useful in its own right that will encourage people to sign up and keep visiting. From then on the community aspect will become a bonus as the site grows.

Also the design is quite unappealing - maybe paying a designer a few hundred dollars for a PSD would be a good idea.