iseff

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/perezhilton.com+techcrunch....

* SEO. Along with the fact that being too generic means you won't have access to good trademark protection, it also means that you'll never get anywhere in search results. A fantastic amount of people still type the name of what they're looking for into Google (instead of just <name>.com). So, if your bookstore is named "Books", you'll never be found. That's not a battle you likely need when first starting.

However, if you run a site that is going to depend on Google (search engines) for traffic, you also might want to think hard about including some terms people will search for into your domain. Search engines weigh domain names heavily, so it does help. You can overcome this by getting linked to early and often, but if you really need Google, you might want to think about this.

The flip side is that using a made up word will ensure you are the _only_ result in Google and don't have to fight for position. So, if you're planning on getting your traffic elsewhere, don't want to focus on SEO, and just want to ensure that you are at the top for your name, making up a word can be good.

* Spell-able. Making up names leads me into my second thought. If you make it up -- or even if you don't but it's not a commonly known word -- make sure it is spelled how it sounds. Think about Google. Correct spelling: Googol; but no one would've ever done that correctly.

Openomy was the perfect example of what not to do. No one has any idea how to pronounce this word correctly, let alone spell it. Links would get botched, people couldn't get to the site, every time I talked to someone about it they would ask "how do you pronounce it", etc.

3. Don't be afraid of prefixes/suffixes. With domain availability running thinner every day, you will have to be creative. This will probably mean some combination of splicing words together (NetFlix) or using prefixes/suffixes. Don't be afraid of this, just careful. Some suffixes I like are -ly, -ware, -ish, -ize, -er, -it.

4. Talk about it and sleep on it. The way I came up with my latest project name is by writing down all the words that I could think of which were either directly or indirectly related with the field, as well as all the prefixes and suffixes I could remember. Then I went to town coming up with combinations of these things until I found a few I liked. I took that short list to my partner and we decided on one. We preemptively bought the domain name, but we didn't necessarily settle on it. We kept using it as our "name", making sure that even a few days later we liked it. Sleeping on it and using it as if it were real, without being religious about it, helps ensure you actually like it.

Then I started asking a couple friends/family about it. (1) Did they like it, (2) could they spell it for me, (3) what did it mean to them? If you can pass these tests, and you're happy, you've probably found a decent name.

If Basecamp/Freskbooks were $25/year, would you rather pay for the entire year up front, or would you continue to pay monthly?

If you'd pay for the entire year up front, at what price do you consider it to be too much? Where's the crossover point for you?

Open Terminal, type "emacs -nw".

But also things I would hate to support.

For instance, I would NEVER want to have to support making a one-off change to MySQL as Facebook has done, to enable them to open a new data center (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=23844338919&id=...). What happens when MySQL is updated? They can no longer just pull the latest version. They have to pull the source, modify it appropriately, test, and then deploy. And if there are bugs, things could get very tricky, very fast.

And this memcached scaling seems like another example. Really cool concept, changing many low-level Linux things. But, really, do they want to be in the business of supporting those things? I wouldn't.

I realize they have massive scale. And I realize that at massive scale, standard solutions may not work. But perhaps they should find ways to do things at a slightly higher level, in a layer they fully control. This may also allow them to focus more on their core competencies and not waste precious developer time.

UPDATE: To make matters worse, from a mail on the memcached mailing list about this post:

<quote>

I think the results speak for themselves, but I don't know that a merge can actually occur.

The tree the published is entirely unrelated from the trees the rest of us are working on. There's no common ancestry or even similar directory layout. As published, it sort of puts us in a position to either reimplement everyone else's work, or reimplement the facebook work.

If anyone at facebook is listening, is it possible at all to add this work onto the codebase where everyone else has been working? We've got a lot of bug fixes and features we'd really like to not throw away here:

http://github.com/dustin/memcached/tree/rewritten-bin

</quote>

For instance, it would have a few algorithms built in, you could choose which you want and with what parameters and then it would monitor how it performs. Also available would be the ability to see how this algorithm would have performed in the past (to see how it worked in bad markets, etc).

It could also have a generic API to allow you to run your own algorithm on your end and simply make calls to BUY and SELL certain things.

(In the future it could even allow _real_ trades, etc. One other cool way to make money off this would be to actually invest in the best performing strategies as they occur over time.)

I'm guessing this is all available to the big firms, but haven't ever heard of anything geared to the hackers who want to try things out.

Does anyone know if this sort of thing exists? Would anyone else think this is neat?

Unfortunately, these tasks do have to be done at some point, and they aren't the goal of your startup, so they do take you off-course. Minimizing the time they take would be a good thing, I think.

By this measure, TC is not well-suited to survive the downturn.

Reminds me of a quote I read from John Mackey, founder/CEO of Whole Foods: "I would say that entrepreneurs are only a step up from panhandlers because you've got to go out and hustle money, and you're mostly selling dreams and enthusiasm."

(From a really great/long interview here: http://time-blog.com/curious_capitalist/2008/06/former_house...)

1. "It's not evil." Okay, because it asks if you want a different default search engine, it's not evil. You're entitled to your opinion.

2. "It’s fast, minimalist and clean." Right, but it's not that much faster, it's ugly, and it doesn't look native to Windows. Why?

3. "It loads up quickly." I really have never had trouble loading Firefox. Plus, I do it so infrequently that the startup costs just don't matter.

4. "It seamlessly and quickly imported my bookmarks and passwords from Firefox." Every browser should do this. And I believe most popular ones do.

5. "I love the 3D, industrial Chrome icon and logo." Okay. But seriously, if the logo is one of the top things you can say about a browser, the browser might be in trouble.

6. "You can open a window in incognito mode, just a right click." Incognito is fairly neat, but really, it doesn't make a huge difference to me. I'll never use it.

7. "A quick right click on any area of the page and selecting 'inspect element' allows you to see the code behind it." As you say, Firefox has this. One thing that might make this better, which I haven't checked, is if it shows the _actual source_, rather than a reversed-engineered source based on the DOM like Firefox does.

8. "On startup you can set it to open multiple homepages" Firefox also supports this. Not a new feature.

9. "Choose a new tab and you get option to select from your most visited sites." I do like the visual representation -- good feature. Perhaps other browsers haven't done this because they haven't had Incognito? This feature might actually necessitate Incognito.

10. "Task manager pretty cool for the multiple window & tab freaks." Honestly, I can't even figure out how to open the Task Manager, so I really have no opinion on this other than it might be neat if I could figure it out.

My guess is there's a lot of Google kool-aid being drunk on this one and that if it were developed by anyone else, it would be shoved to the bottom of the news and never talked about.

My opinion? I'll stick to Firefox, thanks.

Always maintain a hunger for learning and good things happen to those who do, not talk.

Google really excels at building technical solutions to challenging problems, while Digg has done a great job building a community-based solution to a challenging problem.

It seems to me every time Google attempts community, they more or less fail (Dodgeball, Jaiku, the new Lively hasn't done much, etc).

(video)

Two striking examples: 1) Last week my girlfriend, by far not a hacker or nerd, said she wanted to join Twitter. She's joined, and found many of her also non-technically savvy friends on it as well. It's becoming mainstream now. Once it starts hitting critical mass, it'll be much harder to slow.

2) Out tonight with a bunch of geeks, and almost every single one has started to use Twitter. Only a few didn't. These are Amazonians, Microsofties, startup folks, etc. That is, these are early adopters. I was shocked by how often Twitter came up in conversation. However, not once did anything about Twitter's downtime come up, and not once did anyone even mention FriendFeed.

So, on one hand you have Twitter beginning to go mainstream, and on the other hand you don't see the early adopter types leaving.

Trust me, I've been bitten by this problem myself. It's so easy to get really worried about the number of hits you're going to take. It's also so easy to get really excited about the scaling challenges.

But, quite frankly, the chances of you getting featured on yahoo.com are miniscule! First focus on getting there by creating something cool. Then focus on scaling.

See the following for locations: http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/usaoffices...

If your tests define what your program _should_ do, then your tests can become (a) more understandable and (b) more valuable to new folks familiarizing themselves with your code.

It's a subtle but important (IMHO) distinction.

Every single one of my friends uses Facebook, yet I'm one of the few who use (and even know of) Flickr.

If anyone has the chance to listen to him speak or teach, I highly recommend it. (Also, if anyone has the chance to see him perform jazz music, I highly recommend that, too!)