goodkarma

A demo day in Boston, and then everyone flies to San Francisco for two more days of demos? Wow!

I don't think the technology makes a difference.

In my opinion, a startup is about idea + team + execution. You could do it in Rails or Python or PHP (or Arc or Lisp).. :)

I started working on this app in April for personal use. I had a very bare bones version working while I was at Startup School.

My friend @coryschop asked a question about Twitter a couple of weeks ago, and I sent him a note showing this app to him, and he got very excited about it and told me he had to work on the design for it. :)

He's been using it for a few weeks now, the design looks a LOT better, and we just launched today!

Total amount I spent to "develop" this app: $55 (logo)

Even if you include hosting fees for a decent box on Rails Machine (i.e. several months of being tested by < 5 users) I've spent < $500 on it so far.

EasyTweets is an app that I built that allows users to leverage multiple Twitter accounts to promote their web sites, brands, and businesses. I just launched it last night.

"Not so long ago an Internet venturelet like Otrib might have seen a swarm of venture capital firms, or at least some commercial banks offering high-priced loans. Nowadays such financiers want to see businesses with revenue, customers and a logo solidly in place before they commit capital."

Revenue, customers, and.. a logo?

It used to be "Two Buck Chuck" on the east coast, but then they raised the price to $2.99 (=~ $3) - hence the "Three Buck Chuck". Is it still $1.99 in California?

I've had great luck with < $10 bottles of wine - including the infamous $2.99 "Three Buck Chuck" Charles Shaw wine from Trader Joe's. :)

Why does TC keep comparing Twitter vs. FriendFeed as if one's success will bring the other's failure?

They are completely different services that do completely different things. FriendFeed is built for conversations - Twitter is built for short status updates of 140 characters or less.

"The judge and Viacom are the guilty parties here"

Are you sure? I swear Google was the one violating copyrights..

I think this is a commentary on the recent court case/settlement involving Mark Zuckerberg and a few fellow students from Harvard.

Affiliate marketing isn't really a "get rich quick" thing. It takes a lot of time and a lot of trial and error. But if you can hack and you are creative and you aren't too uptight you can make some great cash doing it.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236211

I am really enjoying these weekly posts, but I was hoping to hear a little more about the YC summer session. For example, who spoke this week?

Okay. I went through some of my favorite sites and tried to make a good list of decent affiliate marketing resources.

Notice: feel free to check out all of the links, or ignore them all. I have nothing to gain either way. :)

Recommended forums:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/

http://www.wickedfire.com/ (not for the easily offended)

http://www.quityourdayjob.com/forum/

http://forum.abestweb.com/

Recommended blogs:

http://www.shoemoney.com

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/

http://www.quityourdayjob.com/

http://zacjohnson.com

http://uberaffiliate.com/

Great articles worth reading:

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-much-money-have-you...

http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/04/08/the-1000000-experiment-w...

http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/04/13/10k-ppc-experiment-part2...

http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/09/24/pwning-facebook-how-to-t...

http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/05/16/as-success-grows-opportu...

http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/11/04/the-adsense-check-for-13...

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/theres-a-secret-to-ever...

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-to-properly-setup-a...

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-to-properly-setup-a...

http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/how-to-properly-setup-a...

Great free learning materials:

http://www.quityourdayjob.com/learning (he used to charge $50 for the "Quit Your Day Job" eBook - you can get it for free now)

http://www.theblackinkproject.com/

I agree that it is a stretch, but so is chasing down folks that may or may not have downloaded one movie from BitTorrent. http://www.shawnhogan.com/2005/11/loeb-and-loeb-mpaa-extorti...

Obviously the RIAA and MPAA etc. have a hard-on for this kind of thing right now. My hunch is that Viacom is trying to acquire as much data as it can to try to do the same thing.

The last "job" I worked was rotating shift work, and we went from working 7 12-hour night shifts in a row (6pm-6am) to working 7 12-hour day shifts in a row (6am-6pm) - with exactly 24 hours in between to re-adjust (6am Tuesday - 6am Wednesday).

What worked for me was to stay up as late as I could so that I was really tired. When working the night shift (6pm-6am) I would usually be asleep by 7:30am or so, but on my swing day I would try to stay up until 7pm-9pm. (Sometimes I would break down and take a 30 minute nap, but I tried not to if I could, using whatever it took caffeine-wise.)

It usually helped if I gradually tried to stay up later in the mornings for the last couple days of the night shift just to get my body used to it.

I went to bed fairly early that night (usually before 9pm) to try to get a solid 8-9 hours of sleep that night. Occasionally took melatonin or a sleeping pill but not regularly.

I was usually beat after the first full 12 hour day shift but it reset my body clock pretty quickly. :)

There is a surprisingly large amount of copyrighted content on YouTube and Google Video.

If I search for something, and find it, and watch it once, am I really the one they should be going after??

After all, Google is the one with the BILLIONS of dollars.. and they are the ones hosting the content to begin with.

Or is this just a case where a big corporation like Viacom is going to try to go after a bunch of nobodys like me because it is easier to scare us with big lawsuits and the threat of owing them hundreds of thousands of dollars.. all because I watched a couple clips of Jon Stewart on YouTube?

It really depends on the site and the niche and what you are trying to do etc.

I'm not sure if a discussion of affiliate marketing is really relevant to "Hacker News".

There are a couple of eBooks I would recommend, but you can get most of that info for free if you read some blogs and forums. Just search for "super affiliate blog" and start your research there.. :)

While that may be true at this point in time, there is no telling how long Google's corporate leaders will be in place and no guarantee that their current philosophy and ideals will remain constant.

Once they have your data, they can mine it forever...

Okay - so now pretty much anybody can create a web site like Twitter. Do any of the open source apps have a full featured API like Twitter's?

The next step, it would seem, would be to "decentralize" it and get it to "just work" like instant messaging services.

Perhaps then Twitter could just abandon its web site all together and just focus on making its API as robust and scalable as possible?

I've tried to download the source and all I get is a page that says "It works!".

Has anybody found the source?

I've been doing affiliate marketing for about 2 years now. So far my best months have been five figures of profit (my best day was four figures of profit). But I know of other folks that are doing much more than that..

I found direct links to several of the APIs and data files and they all have .uk extensions.

I was confused by the .com web site as well, not quite sure whether or not they are affiliated with the UK government..?

What? No Qcodo?? http://qcodo.com

Direct links to some of the APIs/data files:

Neighborhood Statistics API: http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/Info.do...

NHS Choices API: http://www.nhs.uk/nhscwebservices/Pages/Webservices.aspx

EduBase School Data: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/advice/poi/edubase300608.zip

XML data file of "official notices": http://www.londongazette.co.uk/mashup/gazettesrdf.htm

I'm sure many folks will be happy to hear this news..

Up until now, Flash sites could not been crawled/indexed by search engines because there was no way for the search engines to extract the keyword content from the site. For this reason, many SEOs have recommended their clients either totally abandon flash, or making a non-flash site that could be crawled by search engines.

I don't understand.. why would he specifically want to bid up auctions? To boost GoDaddy's revenue?

If GoDaddy wanted to do that, why do they need him - couldn't they already have been doing that, before they hired him??

The guy runs http://dnforum.com - he is a very well known domainer. He just took the job not too long ago. There was a thread about it on DNForum.

GoDaddy knew this - it is probably why they hired him. By doing that they probably knew that he would continue his domaining business activities. (Which could, at some point in the future, create a conflict of interest.)

That said.. I don't think this is that big of a deal. So the guy won a few domain auctions - if he wasn't there someone else would have won them. He just happens to be the person that won in this case.

Ruby code is so damn elegant. :)

"Just like by not paying for a car you can't go home from the store driving it."

Not quite the same thing IMHO. By not signing the contract and doing what Microsoft wanted, since it was the de-facto standard at the time, you were pretty much kissing your PC sales business goodbye..