I think non email based notification, or customizable notification, would be a killer.
116 karma · joined October 10, 2010
Will post more details on http://wpmu.org when we have it, at the end it just sounds like a stupid fail of policy (we've all been there) - but it's a shame it had to get to this point to change it.
We've been happy customers of their for years, hopefully now we can continue to be.
they could at least have called us!
Back in the day we figured that it would probably be cheaper and more extensible to use Amazon... however given that things weren't broken, and the amount of time and effort we'd put into our SB setup we decide that it wasn't worth switching.
We're lucky enough to have one of the best SysAdmins in the business, I wouldn't trade him for his weight in gold, but even with him and his assistants working flat out at that the cost and time of moving to another setup would far outweigh the other cost benefit... after all we're pretty freaking big:
http://www.quantcast.com/edublogs.org
So previously that's how we've figured it out... if SB agree that they won't do something like this to us again without first at least making sure they call and speak to us, then we'll probably continue... it just makes sense.
With a bit of luck all this publicity will make them realise how important it is.
So, as long as they agreed no to do this to ya, I'd heartily recommend them... I'm hoping that we hear that from them shortly too.
Happy to do any Q&A here too.
Funny recommendation there:
"If you are an authoritative administrator of t.co and you have solved the abuse issues you can write to us at dbl-mmxi@spamhaus.org from either abuse@t.co or postmaster@t.co and inform us of the actions you have taken to clean up the current spammer URLs. Please also inform us of any steps you have taken to prevent future abuse of your shortener/redirector. We will review your request and, at our discretion, remove the listing or respond to your request."
:)
There's a whole barrage of educational literature and research that backs this up, it's how we all learned to crawl, walk, talk and yadeyadayada... but all to often we beat ourselves up for being wrong, getting things messed up and not achieving perfection.
When in fact we should be celebrating it, I'd love to see a whole conference based around exactly this kinda thing, love it.
It'd be nice to have a page + comments somehow.
Having said that, I'd rather get myself strung up in a Judas cradle than work for or with him :D
The domain name makes the $s through hosting referrals (although you'd imagine that the wp.com self-hosted referrals have long since blown that outta the water) - no idea how or if that rev is distributed.
Automattic, despite being 'barely for profit' (makes me chuckle that, everytime :) would, by my guess, make the vast amount of it's cash through adwords - they used to not show to FF users as they clicked less but they may have changed that now... regardless, they're managed in such a way that bloggers at wp.com will rarely, if ever see them.
Genius, from back in the day: http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2007/11/21/making-money-with-ads...
However, they have also been aggressively monetizing some of their other offerings like http://akismet.com (go try sign up there for free, also genius), VaultPress (kicked us off a few ad spots that one did!) and, of course, 'upgrades' to wp.com accounts.
And then there's the jetpack trojan horse into self-hosted WP installs:
http://wpmu.org/why-jetpack-reallypacks-a-punch-and-the-futu...
VIP hosting etc. has always been a moneyspinner from day 1.
Anyway, if you want a model of how an open source project can be effectively transformed into a money-making beast, while at the same time retaining (if not enhancing) your humble geek GPL cred, look no further.
You might not necessarily like it, but you can't fail to be impressed.
[not really a disclaimer, more FYI, I'm the CEO of http://incsub.com - we have more than a few WP interests...]
In my view, that's where FB falls over most of all, they're only fundamentally attractive to agencies looking for 'in your face' rather than 'purpose based' ads... pointless for a highly niche relatively small budget crew like us.
And why goog will kill them in the end :)