hunterwalk

agreed - would be interesting

i'm glad this is resonating with others. thanks for taking the time to read my our journey (still in-process of course)

thanks so much for sharing your journey!

hi! my problem is with situationally granting anonymity in press articles, not with criticism overall. Although I generally believe people should stand publicly behind their opinions when making specific accusations about other people, pseudonymous systems are very important/valuable for a variety of reasons.

Also, while now, later in my career, I'm certainly better connected than I was when I started out, I'd like to think I've behaved consistently in this belief.

they seem to have used a file photo from 2007 NYT story that has a toy robot. Hmm, bit tricky - to average person I think the photo suggests THIS is an example of the robots he's working on, no?

http://hunterwalk.com/2013/12/03/andy-rubin-poses-with-same-...

yup - the Apple way works well on hardware and even on operating systems. My post is more about my own experiences on how they'll either embrace different styles (or not) for software application development.

ha! well, it was only an hour w two people for both sides to mutually figure out I wasn't a good fit. Probably would have taken longer if it went forward :-)

Facebook's experiments with wifi in Bay Area coffee shops encourage you to both login w your FB acct and check in to the location publicly on FB timeline.

it's the former CTO of Facebook. My guess is no rep needed.

Jay - i think Boston has some strong entrepreneurial talent but as a startup ourselves, we're trying to focus on critical mass in a few geo areas to start.

appreciate it. the world of institutional LPs was completely new to me when i started this process so was actually perversely fun figuring it out

we ended up with pretty standard terms. our lawyers had lots of info on data from other funds they helped raise and our LPs gave us their feedback as well. the reality is that if you're looking to make money being a smaller VC, it's really about raising multiple funds over time, so the opportunity to work with the best backers trumped any small concessions we could have gotten from less sophisticated investors.

Yup, this is a commitment hack meant to strengthen obligation. In most cases, interests are aligned. When they're not, at least you have a foundation to discuss upfront why they're differing.

I think of it more as creating professional obligation rather than friendship. It's a commitment hack, no?

hi, i wrote the post. As many engineers try to decide what's a "side project" vs startup, i thought it would be interesting to share one team that just made the decision.

great points. I can't put myself inside the heads of FB execs, but I always got the sense there was a notion of "we will be the largest graph and anyone who wants their product to be social, will see the value to build on top of our graph."

yeah, although I bet if you asked Facebook they would have thought a Facebook Connect driven app would have seriously challenged LinkedIn by now, but anyone who tries it fails. I think it's because people don't associate the Facebook brand with their professional identity and thus want to keep separate.

I wrote the post. Curious on feedback. What do you guys think?

exactly! my point is these are human factors we need to design around.

my hypothesis is that (a) no one likes "noise" (b) everyone has a different notion of what "noise" is and (c) these systems are designed to amplify noise (but there are ways to create noise dampeners).

Personally I find my direct usage of some mature social networks decreasing for the reasons that Mike and I outlined.

Really? That's certainly not my experience. I'd be curious to hear from other folks on this thread. I bet your view here is pretty unique.

The question of "is this assumption even right for most people" is certainly a fair one. My observations which were driven from personal experience as well as various data/user research suggest that at least SOME meaningful percentage of people find utility decay in social network design.

My main point is that just restarting these systems won't solve this problem for those who have it, because we'll rush towards this same race condition. Rather my product suggestions allow for release valves without fundamentally altering the value that a Facebook, G+, Twitter, etc deliver.

i had heard, and don't know how credible this is, that early on there was discussion at Twitter about hiding follower/following counts from public view. The notion was they were designing a system w constraints (140 characters) and were willing to buck convention. Would love to hear from Jack or Ev on this one day.

of all the services, Twitter makes it the easiest to unfollow albeit at the individual level. Try severing a LinkedIn connection w someone - astoundingly challenging.

right on! thanks for sharing

yeah, duh, fixed that now. You should be proud that thousands of other people didn't catch that. Or maybe we should be scared thousands of other people didn't catch that :)

thanks for adding this to hacker news. I wrote it and happy to discuss if folks have comments