heinel

This is a good example of what copywriting does in the web. The interesting part is that even though the first page says that the site is temporary, in actual fact it's not. It is a complete portfolio. It has everything a CCO needs to know about a hire. It illustrates the author's personality, and as it happens illustrates how commentors here don't get sense appeals. The comment quality and popularity of this submission is so disjointed.

If I am to write a title for this HN submission it'd be:

A CV of a text designer.

Not exactly apple to orange, but more Facebook to LinkedIn?

A social network's content is its people. I think Tumblr did well targeting the casual crowd. Posterous blogs that I come across, on the other hand, are very "merit-arian," so to speak. Lots of industry focused minds on there that is famous not because of Posterous, but because they are also high in some other circle. In this case, Posterous is only providing them with the tools, with a small Posterous ad attached.

I wouldn't want to see them sacrificing that just to beat Tumblr.

Of course Posterous is just another blogging platform. Have they tried to be anything else? The way you described how you use tumblr does seem to suggest that Posterous is actually a better fit, but it appears that you just found tumblr first and didn't bother to switch.

The Posterous switch campaign awhile back was targeted at users like you. That's how they were trying to set themselves apart. It might not have worked well, but the intention is clear.

There is only so much a utility product can do to diversify itself from competitors. A condom is a condom is a condom. As long as it doesn't leak, it works. Would you complain that Trojan's products are not sufficiently different from Durex?

I think the point is that the article itself is not making sense, not the news it is trying to report.

When I read the article I also thought about just normal browsing page load times. That is already so fast that a 60x increase is hardly noticeable. That just makes the news trivial and the chromium team look like freakish geeks with nothing better to do than crunching numbers that only a machine can read.

That is until I looked at the demo video, which I missed on the article and only found about here. I can see that, particularly with that photo wall and the painter thing, snappiness is what would make them work.

http://www.tumblr.com/directory/erotica (NSFW, FYI)

I guess you could argue erotica isn't porn, but yes, they like it. The notion actually extends beyond sexually explicit material, as many popular tumblelogs in the directory has porn or something that alludes to porn in their title even though they have nothing to do with sex.

They do not advertise that feature as much though, and by using email, wouldn't you miss out on at least some of their main social networking selling point?

A lot of what makes them popular can only be found on their site. You don't get any engineering vibe from them, they project a very sensitive image that appeals to the heart. By not visiting their site, you are not participating.

I think the posterous offering is not diluted by email posting, and it would at least appear to me to make more sense if more people on posterous use email posting.

Is it just me but isn't it a bit too early to say Twitter is trying to wall itself in? Are they taking down the APIs?

From what I can see here they just want Twitter.com to be a viable (and profitable) business. Why wouldn't anyone want that? In fact, I think it's about time Twitter finally stepped up to define just what kind of a service Twitter really is about. If anything it would be a nice stepping stone to introduce to people who don't yet get it's structure to try it out.

Yes, there are third-party developers who have created their own platforms and in a sense helped define the medium. There are many such choices, but really many of the functions they provide overlap. Do we really need that many different Twitter clients with minute differences? If Twitter were to provide the basic functions itself, then I'd say that this is a good time for third-party developers to think up new ways to diversify themselves. Wasn't there just not so long ago someone posted a HTML5 tower defense game up here that has a Twitter scoreboard? Why not expand on that?

Yeah, and another one I like (that's probably not new by now) is ThinkGeek. The beauty of this is probably how drastically different they all are :)

Yap. Especially in the case of Groupon, many of their articles read like poetry--very daring imagery and voice. They are doing as much service to the people who subscribe to their emails as to the brands who have the honor to get the Groupon face-lift.

It is a very refreshing model compared to most other startups where as far as I can see, paid no attention to copywriting.

It would be nice if eventually there will be an option for groups to be public so people can discover new things.

That would make the service Meetup like, but Meetup's privacy settings fail worse than Facebook so I think there is a space to fill.

I actually somewhat empathize with lotus's view that Gmail should just be Email and that's it. I think it is bad UX if people who just want email and not these confusing new "social" business have their software change in their face with disruptive noises.

I think Google is moving in the right direction when they introduced that account page / dashboard thing that acts as a hub for Google services. Unfortunately there isn't much besides just the list there for now. What I'd hope is for Google Me to expand on this idea and actually show people how they are related to the data Google has about them, and more importantly, what they can do with it.

Not a journalistic investigation, but a while back I decided that I need a new gmail account. I signed it up using some different credentials, including a different name. However, I did not mention my old gmail account in the entire sign-up process. After I activated my new account, I got an email on my old account referencing the new address I just signed up for and a verification code "in case something happens."

From this it seems to me like this is not a deliberate maneuver to deceive, but rather just an oversight.

That reminds me of a show, where in each episode, the host interviews a celebrity in an upscale dinner setting. Beside the very enticing gourmet meals, the topic also focuses on various aspects of the interviewee's life.

I think a good way to fix the I'm-not-sure-I-want-to-watch-the-next-episode-because-I-might-not-care-about-the-topic problem is to have one aspect of the talk focused on a specific theme, so that people can have expectations.

InsidersTalk - Meet people with stories to tell.

Wow, but I guess this doesn't work on file sharing sites like mediafire and some such?

>> but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it. <<

Except in the article it read:

"Gameplay in FarmVille, FishVille, or Café World is based almost exclusively on what social-game designers call a "compulsion loop." Players perform basic tasks — clicking on crops to harvest them, clicking on stoves in restaurants, clicking on fish to feed them — earn fake money, enhance their farm or restaurant or aquarium, and repeat. In Zynga's hands, the art of snaring users with such gimmickry has become, quite literally, a science: Pincus told Time magazine last year that Zynga employs a behavioral psychologist."

I think the absence of something in addition to the compulsion loop is what people are objecting to here. The loop itself is not value, it's exploitation.

On Chinese dictionaries. I actually don't think there is any difference from English ones, at least in the way I use them. When I use an English dictionary I use the word's spelling. I don't check how the word is pronounced when I do this. When I use a Chinese dictionary I use the number of strokes that make up the character, which puts all the characters in a sort of order not unlike an alphabetical one. I also do not need to know how the word is pronounced when I do this.

There is no such thing as "turning Chinese into a tonal language." Chinese is tonal to begin with. For native speakers, a different tone does sound as distinct as a different phoneme. The problem the poem exemplifies is the sort we run into when we reduce the language into only the phonetics -- a problem I'm not convinced is unique to Chinese. In fact, just the post above pointed to an example of such in English.

I actually do not see SEO as the be-all and end-all to success. I actually had thought about this same problem myself, though I am not nearly as invested as you are.

It looks like everyone agrees that in order for people to visit, they need to know what to expect. Like when people visit a physical store, the store itself might not be particularly interesting, but the goods it carry is of interest to the visitor at a particular moment. However, people visit more than stores. We visit our friend's homes too, for instance. What do we get out of that?

Why of course it's a relationship. It doesn't really matter what you do together at home. Maybe you do not even offer water to them when they come (bad). They come because they have an interest in you as a person in one way or another.

Blogs are the same. If you depend on search engine traffic then yes, you need to be an authority on some subjects. Do remember, however, that everyone is an authority about him/herself. Does Google Bot care? Maybe not (yet). Do people care? Yes! Why fight with a robot when your goal is to be read by people?

For this reason I think it is not helpful to rely on SEO if you are running a personal blog. Find where people are, like online communities, social networks, and engage with real people. I'm sure you can find a circle that can be your starting point. From there, you may even get feedback that help you gauge just how popular or interesting you truly are, and build your character up so eventually, even Google Bot will love you.

I actually see this as a strength of Twitter-like microblogging services. If you have no more contributions you fade gracefully into the background while the collective move on uninterrupted.

I think Leoville is misguided for treating microblogs literally as a lite version of blogs. I guess the term is a little misleading but the platform really isn't a place for any random blogger to find a cult following.

Individuality is not that big of a deal. Trends are. I wonder if this is a contributing factor to Twitter's success in Japan, which has a culture favoring the collective over the "me" mentality.

But you do acknowledge that you are a user in those networks, correct? You check those sites, and by reading (even without active commenting) you are a participant. Some people project themselves, others observe, that was how social interactions had always been.

Old news. Though if fan pages really took off with places like suggested then time is really running out for Google Me. Unless there's some super cool feature that really blows Facebook out of the water, but it is hard to imagine how anything could be.