pstack

This seems like an idea that could only come from Portland or San Francisco. Disregard for property and a brief personal self-esteem boost for tossing a ball of dirt and seeds somewhere, so you can feel like a game-changing rebel on your way to buy your next chai tea.

On the other hand, I would rather have this in my neighborhood (as long as it doesn't have any sort of invasive content that is going to drift into my yard that I'm going to have to deal with for years to come) than live in a neighborhood with a bunch of those annoying urban "I raise chickens in my backyard" people.

Of course you can pursue a startup or a business or an idea at any age. Just don't necessarily expect the same attention or opportunities to be thrown your way in your thirties as you would get if you just had a good idea and nothing else in your twenties. Expect to assume much more of the responsibility and fight up steeper hills much of the time.

The exception being, of course, if you are enough of a known-quantity that someone reading a site like this would usually know who you are or if you have enough cash and business experience that putting an idea into action (and especially hiring people) would be trivial.

You outsource that part of the job to Epsilon, of course!

Eric was actually talking about this the Rick Emerson Show (rickemerson.com) some time last week. I don't recall which day it was, but he shared the experience with the whole internet reaction to the email snip he posted that AOL subsequently responded to by claiming "oh no, we're not forcing anyone to work for free or be fired!" and then laid off the person who originally sent the email that was snipped from.

It was a sad and frustrating story to hear (though amusing and snarky as Eric tends to be, from my limited experience).

I'm a big proponent of doing what you love because you love it (like running a forum or BBS or online service or writing) rather than trying to suck every last penny out of something that you can. But when someone else is making every last dime on something while expecting your contribution to be entirely uncompensated, save for "but you'll see your name on a byline!", it is almost downright sickening.

Unfortunately, this is a trend on the internet. It seems that fewer places are willing to pay for writers or even photographers, anymore. You should be thankful that your work is going to be used at all and then you can use the fact that someone published your content as leverage to promote yourself into something that does pay, somewhere . . . unless those people want you to work for "ego", too.

It's very difficult to justify not paying content creators when you've just made a few hundred million dollars off of the "they should thank me for printing them!" model. Or . . . maybe that's exactly why it's so easy to justify. Why pay when they're giving it to you for free?

I'm grateful I never entered one of these industries. I grew up with dreams of being a writer. Then I had dreams of being a radio broadcaster. Then I had dreams of being a video game developer. I went into the world of enterprise software and unix and linux, instead. A world where there is competition, but people aren't practically throwing themselves at you to do the job for free, because it's "fun".

He'd probably continue the confusion he's caused with the existing TWiT network by rebranding it "This Week In . . . Cinema". Unless he could find a way to do some namedropping in the rebranding, too.

I work for a company with well over 100,000 employees, but if I gave my salary, title, and years experience (and as someone else noted, especially if I added my location), I wouldn't be anonymous. To my employer, at least. It would be trivial for them to narrow down the information to being provided by a very small number of people - if not the exact person.

I don't see this flying, where I work though. Even among the people I'm closest to, I don't think they'd take to this sort of information sharing amongst each other. Even pseudo-anonymously. I'm not sure if that's because they'd feel it's tacky or if it's because it has been drilled into everyone from corporate culture that you _never_ talk about it.

As an aside, I would actually much rather know not what the guys I've been working alongside for the past decade are making compared to me, but what new hires in the same positions as us are being hired at. Especially when you throw in all the hiring freezes and pay freezes over the last ten years.

If you ran a small service website and some person randomly sued you, it would be enough of a hassle and expense to respond to that through the legal system, as it is. Doing so as an individual with the full force and might of one of the largest multinational corporations on the planet which itself has the support (against intellectual property concerns, etc) of the entire government, including the president and vice president who have made ignorant and vigorous statements against what they perceive you to be doing is an entirely different situation. It is a situation that you almost surely can't win and can't afford to fight and most certainly can't afford to lose.

The problem here is that you also shouldn't go around making rap videos of yourself talking about how you're going to completely fuck Sony up and challenging them to "bring it on" while collecting contributions to your legal defense fund, when you know full well that you're going to roll over when the time comes, because you simply have no rational choice.

I know my comments questioning the background of parents for young startup successes was roundly criticized here a few days ago, but I can't help but bring up those points whenever I see articles like this which substantiate my assertions.

"I was surrounded by tech everyday for so long that I gained a natural interest for it," said Daniel Brusilovsky, an 18-year-old from San Mateo, California, whose upbringing by a software-manager father and Oracle Corp. veteran mother led him to found two startups before he was old enough to vote.

We tend to forget that most of the successes where the "founder" is very young seem to be attributable to parents with significantly more resources than the average person or who are in the industry and have resources and/or also connections.

I don't intend to dismiss the accomplishments of people like this, but these reports often try to present a case that young people are succeeding left and right in ideas simply because of technological advances and easier access to a computer. They don't often seem to make more than a glancing nod toward the fact that the parents are there to provide financial resources to get them started. Or in some cases, connections to get them started and skip ahead of the hurdles other children that you don't hear stories about would encounter.

I'd be more interested in stories where the kid isn't from a family where dad is a wealthy lawyer and the kid has a sure thing at a prominent university ahead of him and where the kid's mom and dad aren't professionals in the industry that are available to encourage, advise, support, and assist on behalf of their child. I'd be more interested in the seeming lack of stories where the kid with an absentee dad and a mom on welfare or toiling in a minimum wage job to provide for them and their siblings while attending a mediocre public school who has no mentor or support or resources creates the next Facebook or Windows or Angry Birds.

Dealing with ads seems like a small price to pay for someone who could truly benefit from the device and not otherwise own one, but if you can afford $114 for an e-reader, you can probably afford $139. If it was free (and once they get enough sponsors, perhaps it will be), it could potentially benefit a great number of people and at that price, it's hard to argue with it (even if you and I would not personally want to trade $139 in return for advertising).

Because, it'll eventually have enough sponsorship that it can be free and once it's free, public schools can utilize it and even get discounted text books for the students.

This chapter of General Earth Sciences is brought to you by Monsanto -- Growth for a Better World!

I held the top spot for search terms relating to my service and site for more than a decade, until I shut it down. I never spent one second of my life worrying about SEO. I focused on usability, generating word of mouth (far more valuable - how do you think people found out about Facebook and Twitter?), and content.

The nature of a search engine is to derive the value of your content from the content. Therefore, focusing on your content is a far greater return in value than focusing on trying to draw the attention of a search engine to tags, meta data, or URL paths. Not saying that those things don't contribute, but I'm not certain that the ROI is worthwhile.

Think of it like a resume. If you have the talent and background to put on a resume, you'll get consideration. You don't need to spend hours upon hours refining it to add just the right trendy keywords or ordering things in the most appealing way to automated resume readers. On the other hand, if you have little to offer and you are concerned that you'll be weeded out quickly as a result, you can substitute your background and experience (content) with keywords and other tricks to try and get beyond the initial weeding out. Kind of a tactic of desperation and lack of confidence.

I do have a strong bias against the whole SEO thing. I won't pretend that I don't. I'm put off when I hear people focusing on it rather than content and it makes me think of greasy, scummy, snake-oil salesmen. Guys on late night infomercials trying to convince you that you can skip everything and get right to becoming rich and famous by thumbing through their special book and employing their special techniques for flipping property with only two hours of work per week.

This is probably a very unpopular opinion to share around a group like this, but what can I say?

I know that it's entirely irrational and counter-productive, but I can not bring myself to do this and find out things I'd rather not spend the rest of my (hopefully not too short) life obsessing over. I'm already busy enough focusing on the obvious things, like being overweight. If I discovered that I'm certain to end up with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or something, I might have a pretty difficult time coping.

It makes no sense. It's entirely irrational. I love information. Knowledge. Informed decision making. And yet . . .

Oh, sure. I'm sure we used to say that about the bison, too. :)

How far will anyone make it through watching them, before they all start showing "Available until a date two weeks from now", like 20% of my queue almost always does?

I'm no astronomer or physicist, but isn't the mass and weight of the moon sort of vital to maintaining stable life as it is now on Earth?

Looks like we were doing the math at the same time (see my post elsewhere, here). You'd be looking at 15 of these servers, but then I have no idea how much the expense of maintaining them would be. That's also the cost of storing their current data plus redundancy. It may be the cheap solution, today, but I wonder if it would scale on the order of a seriously high end tape system (I linked one in this thread that potentially stores 91 archived petabytes).

I couldn't find pricing information and since this isn't something I ever deal with, I don't know what the industry standard would be. I would not be surprised if the cost of setting up a very high capacity tape system would come out as the better deal in the long run. Perhaps the BackBlaze solution would be cheaper with half to a full petabyte, but over the long term, the high capacity tape systems might beat the multi-petabyte pants off it.

Of course, that kind of depends on how quickly spinning drives expand in size and drop in price, which could feasibly account for the difference in cost between the two options over time. The important variable there is in whether their data accumulation outpaces the drop in prices on spinning drives.

No matter what, cloud hosted solutions seems pretty much off the charts. Even if the storage was reasonable, I'm guessing they have to transfer several terabytes a month to the backup which would be pretty painful on a lot of networks.

This isn't my area of expertise, but when you factor in redundancy, you're looking at a petabyte of data just for what you have now. You'll need it to failover plus have at least one full backup at a separate location. Commodity hardware almost seems prohibitively expensive. You'll have the hardware, 600+ 2tb drives just to start, space, electricity, cooling, maintenance (with that many drives, you'll probably be replacing them often).

If you went with the solution that BackBlaze rolled for themselves, you'd be looking at 15 of their servers (for redundancy), without even adding any more data in the future. Using the solution they came up with, that would run almost $120,000. I have no idea what the monthly maintenance expenses would be.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-h...

You are undertaking a nearly herculean feat, here. I don't think any of the professional data storage solutions out there will be any cheaper, either. In fact, a petabyte of storage (especially if you need doubles of all hardware to place at another location) would probably run nearer a million bucks or more.

It might even be worth, as someone else linked, considering BackBlaze themselves. At least find out what they could do for you. They offer a business plan at something like $50/computer for unlimited storage. Obviously they're not going to store 0.5-1.0 petabytes of data for that price, but on the scale that you need, you might be able to negotiate something that surpasses what you could accomplish at any reasonable price -- and you have the added benefit of any catastrophe being their problem; not yours.

If you truly only rarely need to access your data and speed of that access is trivial to you, then as others mentioned, Tape could be completely feasible. I have no idea how much money it would cost, but you're talking a TON of cartridges and some sort of rotational system. If you expect the amount of data you need to continue growing at a rapid rate, you might even end up considering something like Spectra Logic offers. I have absolutely no clue how much their solutions are, but they can store up to 91 petabytes of data which I imagine would do you quite well for a long time to come:

http://www.spectralogic.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=products.di...

If you told me the idea, I'd say it was needlessly entering an already crowded market, but when you actually see it laid out -- it's fantastic. You have a great concept and a slick presentation. If I ever have multiple people working on one of my projects alongside me, I already know where I'll be looking for this service.

Congratulations on this. I have no doubt that it's going to be big!

What an important point to note!

Money is good, but you can work around financial needs much of the time. It is almost impossible to place a real value on advice and connections, though and it's difficult to know what you don't know (if you did, you could figure it out for yourself). Even if you stumble upon the right questions to ask, it's sometimes impossible to find someone who can truly answer it.

Personally, if presented with the option of cash injection or access to an adviser, I'd choose an adviser, every time. Hell, apply this to all aspects of life. The older I get, the more I realize knowledge and experience are the real commodities.

I'm sorry for responding to such a simple question with such a long ramble. I got carried away. This isn't something I've really ever discussed before and while it's not exactly germane to the overall topic, maybe someone out there will get some use out of it?

Short answer: No, didn't sell it. Yes, had offers. Why? I was a misguided(?) idealist.

I started coding the project on a whim before I was old enough to drink. It was actually just my attempt to teach myself Perl (which was probably a poor choice of a first language, the way a 160mph Ferrari is probably not the car to learn to drive in). To facilitate my learning, I took an existing open source engine and played with it a bit. I pointed a few friends to it for kicks and didn't think anything of it again, for a few months, when I went back to delete everything. Except, when I went to wipe everything, I noticed that the access logs were really active. So I logged into the admin interface and saw that people were actually using the service. I never expected that.

Very soon after that, the limited software and its flat-file database had trouble keeping up with the user demand. It was a great opportunity to dig even deeper and learn by undertaking a big project -- dumping the open source solution and writing my own from scratch, which taught me all about Apache, SQL, Perl, etc. I didn't realize what I was getting myself into at the time, but in the end my first real Perl project (my first real coding project at all) was eventually a large 15,000 line program with a full accounting system, threaded hand-written forum system, authentication system, private messaging system, transaction system, etc.

Since I never expected to make money from it (I had the same spirit most BBS sysops of the previous decades had, which was that I just wanted to do something for the love of doing it and providing something I could watch people actually find useful), I didn't look at it as a commercial venture. I never advertised it. I never placed advertising on it. It was free. It was clean. It benefit users and not my pocket. (Just my ego).

After about five years, we had received some coverage in scene magazines and I began to receive inquiries from some established businesses. One of the best offers came from a company that has a chain of stores in malls for a demographic not too unrelated to that of my site's community. Think of the mall outlet that caters to mopey kids and its sister outlet that caters to plus-sized mopey kids . . .). I was never talking millions of dollars, but it would have been enough to buy a really nice house out-right in my early 20s.

But . . . I had my principals. I felt that letting a commercial entity take over the site would devalue the community. I didn't know what they might do and I didn't know if I could count on a new owner wanting to serve the community altruistically. Don't get me wrong -- I could have been bought, but I wasn't going to sell-out unless it was for a truly crazy amount of money (which didn't seem to happen as much back then as it did a few years later, when we started to see the Myspaces and Twitters pop up).

So, I turned them down. I also turned down the offers to sell my code to other people who wanted to run similar sites (mostly because I would rather have made it open-source one day, but being an amateur coder, I never felt secure enough to throw my mess of spaghetti out into the world and embarrassing myself).

There was one time when I considered trying to make money from it. I provided most of the services for free, but had some additional features for something like $10/yr. I had 2,000 paying subscribers in the first five days. Not bad right out of the gate. It was just a test and I made the community aware of that. My thought was to use the cash flow to expand the site and service. Perhaps to other niches and perhaps to expand to other elements of this niche community (beyond the user to user transactions). Maybe a sort of media empire that catered to this sub-culture. It wasn't long before I felt like the money wasn't necessary, though. Maybe it was just a poor estimation of self worth. That my time wasn't worth it and that I should be grateful anyone wanted to use my service and that trying to make money off my "hobby project" was somehow dirty. I no longer recall my precise rationalization, but I did eventually stop the paid service. More, I refunded 100% of what members had already paid.

The site continued on for another six years beyond that, before I started to lose interest in it and feel burned out.

At that point, I let the site linger on about two more years. Longer than it should have. It reached the point where I could not keep up with the sheer amount of work needed (primarily mediating user to user problems and responding to emails which were in the hundreds per day). Just the thought of even opening my email made my stomach churn. I stopped participating in my own forums. I essentially disappeared. I felt like I created a monster and was now at its mercy. The only reason I kept at it, at all, was out of a sense of obligation to the community. I knew people had vital friendships from it and either were or had in the past made a part of their living from it. I didn't know anyone trustworthy enough to hand the reigns over to, either and I figured commercializing it would destroy it eventually, anyway. So the only option in my head was to continue and make myself suffer or finally end it all.

After a year of working myself up to the point that I could say "goodbye" to it (by this point it had consumed literally 30% or more of my entire existence for my entire adult life and was like ending a very long relationship with a girlfriend), I posted a notice that I would be shutting things down in six months, with an explanation that I needed to regain my life so I could focus on other things. Work. Personal life (I only finally got around to buying a home after shutting it down). Not to mention, other projects. I was so focused on this project for over a decade that I didn't allow myself time to be creative and pursue other projects that I might have gone commercial with.

And, when the day came, I powered it down. That was almost exactly a year ago. The community has renewed itself via a Facebook group, apparently and I've been taking a much needed breather. Now I'm keeping my mind open for "the next cool project". Only, this time, with the experience under my belt from this former altruistic project. I may not have exploited it for the money it could have made and it may not have been a commercial success (though it was still a success in as much as it was heavily used by a ton of people) . . . but I gained a lot of value from it. Value in the way of experience. Of knowledge. Of things I can apply next time. How to better manage a community. To avoid taking everything on by yourself. To having specific goals in a project. To allowing yourself to set a price for your service and not feel obligated to do it for free "just because".

Note that I could have made money if I made that a priority. Either by going commercial over the long term or by selling out in the short term. Not "Web 2.0" money, but enough to make life a bit different. However, the way I started it up and maintained it and the expenses and investments involved are definitely relevant to any modern startup, I feel. If I could keep something this complex going for so long with so many people for what comes down to about $100/mo, then someone starting a site with less complexity than, say, an eBay -- should be able to do much more for possibly even less. This is why I am always baffled when someone requires millions of dollars to startup a site that . . . oh, I don't know . . . relays 140 character text messages to a group of followers. A service that has very little complexity at the heart of it and only really needs to deal with scaling (no small task, of course). Or sites that need tens of millions of dollars to start a blog that posts stories every day. Something that you could reasonably start for a few bucks and a little bit of your time. (I suspect it's because those investments are for people who want to start a company and a business rather than start a service - because the technical aspects always seem to be the cheapest element of the whole project!).

Thanks for letting me ramble. If you bothered to read the entire tome above, then I hope you took at least something tiny from it. One of these days, I should write some sort of a "learn from my mistakes" book for the web.

I enjoy watching other people's startups, but have never applied at YC, because I assume I am outside of their accepted demographic. I'm in my early thirties. I'm a solo-entrepreneur (I would love to have a partner, but I don't know a single person with the interest and ambition to be part of anything - they just want to work until 5pm to pay the mortgage and then go home) and, mostly, because none of my ideas have ever demanded enormous quantities of funding to get off the ground. Spending $10k or $20k on an unsure thing would ding me, but I'm fortunate enough that I'm in a career where I could cut a check for that amount if I had enough faith in my own project and enough necessity for the funding.

Also, I appreciate what YC does and offers, but my personal philosophy is that a lot of ideas which seek out funding don't need it.

I started a transaction (user to user) based service in 1998 and my only expense was $10/mo for hosting. When I needed more resources, I moved it to a community shared server at a colo for $20/mo. And by its fourth year, I was paying $100/mo for a 1U rack rental at May West in SF with a dedicated pipe. The cost never went higher than that. The only additional expense was around that same time when I custom-built a 1U heavy duty server (running primarily qmail, apache, postgres) with hot-swapping and redundant PSUs and storage. That was a one-time $5,000 expense that lasted the rest of the project's life.

With no more cash investment than the above, I grew it over twelve years to more than 100,000 members and millions of transactions. It even had its own annual (or so) user-arranged gathering. People formed their own businesses through the service. I learned of many life-long friendships people made on it. I've even received thanks from people who were able to support themselves through tough times and -- some -- even put themselves through school.

And it was all funded out of my pocket. The real investment was my time (as the sole designer, developer, customer service person, marketer, etc -- I did everything from write the underlying engine to designing the interface, to mediating customer problems). So much so that, eventually, I had to quit last year, so I could have free time again to keep up with my actual career. And try to maybe have a life. And focus on my health, which deteriorated over a dozen years of 60-80hr work weeks plus 40-60hr weeks on this service.

I learned a lot from the experience. Mostly, I learned what not to do. Things I would advise others to be aware of. One of the primary things I learned, however, was that you can do a lot more with a lot less than people might think. That doesn't apply to everyone who might apply here, of course. But it applies to anything I have ever bounced around in my head. And I'm kind of stuck with this "if I can't do it on my own and make it support itself, then it's probably not worth my doing" mentality. I suppose that if I didn't have the technical knowledge, I'd have a different view since even the basic work would necessitate involving paying someone just to get things off the ground.

By the way, if I were to start this project in 2011, instead of 1998? It would probably cost far less and I would have had far fewer scalability problems (I never did any advertising, but as soon as people started hearing about the service, it quickly exploded and fell over a few times while I tried to keep up). Specifically, I would forgo the expensive hardware investment four years into the project and I would forgo the monthly shared servers and other standard hosting. I would go straight to a scalable cloud service (Amazon, Rackspace, etc).

Anyway, that's my far-too-long version of why I've never submitted anything to Y and why I probably won't at any time in the future -- but I'll always dig watching them help other guys with great ideas pursue things. With great envy at their successes, of course! :)

Edit: I completely spaced on the whole "value of advice/community/exerience" aspect of what YC offers, which of course is of great value itself. My comments above are related to the financing only.

I don't see how it's any less relevant to the discussion of "they should charge so the service is smoother". If we're going to have that conversation, then it's important to acknowledge that they already have a business model that addresses this. Google isn't hurting for money nor are their projects and when something like gmail encounters a hitch, it has nothing to do with funding. Giving gmail more funding or funding it by direct service fees over their existing model isn't going to make it any more reliable, since it is still susceptible to "things just going bad" from time to time. Really, if my comment is inane, then so is the whole submission (which I would kind of agree with - no slight intended to the submitter).

Google already gets paid for Gmail. It uses Gmail as a platform on which to serve very targeted advertisements on every page. Likely a greater overall value with their number of users than if they did away with the ads and charged for the service, instead.

It's kind of a vague description, too. I'd be curious to know what is so unique about kiip. It sounds like just another advertising service that is essentially taking the mechanics of Farmville (which are all about advertising Farmville to your friends and leveraging them into playing the game with you) and using that to advertise an entire ad-network worth of content, rather than just gather more Farmville players.

I hope that people are becoming more sensitive to being advertised to, though. I block ads online, so I never see them. Haven't for a decade. I don't watch live television, so I haven't seen ads there for a decade, either. I don't get print magazines, so I don't get ads there. I don't listen to terrestrial radio, so I don't get ads there, either. The only ads I come in contact with other than out in the physical world outside my home are the one or two ads in every hour of certain podcasts that I consume.

As a result, I am kind of taken back by almost any ad that makes it through and gets time in front of my eyes. That's not necessarily a good thing, though, because any ad that I'm confronted with tends to irritate me rather than pique my interest.

I know that the Facebook crowd that is going to play the games in question here is very different, but it's only a matter of time before the shine of the internet wears off and they become sophisticated enough to start questioning things like privacy or advertising.

So what is this guy's story? I always have to question young success stories like this, because so often they seem to be the result not so much of some kid in high school striking out on his own as a kid with the benefit and resources of either a wealthy family footing the initial bill to get things rolling or a connected family. The problem with some "show" about this stuff is that it would probably overlook the fact that a lot of the success stories you've heard of came not from single parent families where mom is a fry-cook and you live in a tiny apartment in the ghetto, but where mom is a successful business woman and dad works at some big technology firm that gives you all the advice and assistance you need and offers plenty of resources and connections to use for your project and get it off the ground.

I would find a story about a kid who did it all on his own against plenty of odds fascinating. A story of a kid who had an idea and went to his dad who said "let me call Jim at the office and he'll walk you through the VC process and get you off the ground"...? Not so much.

Come on. Everybody knows that having a server and a bit of coding skill isn't enough to do anything. You have to sign a lease to an office in a trendy part of town and stock it full of free soda and Aeron chairs and hire an HR department before you can even think of getting your project going!

No sleep is a feat I could pull off regularly when I was younger. It was no problem to go 48-72 hours without more than just a catnap or two. That was a decade ago. In my early thirties, I struggle beyond the sixteenth hour, except for rare occasions.

Fortunately, I think it's a sort of bell curve. From what I understand, I'm only about fifteen or twenty years away only getting a couple hours of sleep per night. How productive sleepless nights full of trips to the bathroom will be, I have no idea. I guess I'll finally catch up on all that damn reading.

Or, like every religious book, we could round them up and stone them to death. I could go with either option, so lead the way!

If Facebook's messaging service was just their version of Gmail or Hotmail, I wouldn't see an issue with it. Providing a way to use the Thunderbird interface as a substitute to other interfaces for existing email protocols is fine.

But providing an interface to perpetuate that walled-off Facebook-User-to-Facebook-User experience seems counter-productive. And, really, what person is going to both discover and use Thunderbird if their primary interface with the world is Facebook? They probably find Facebook by typing it into Google every morning.

Worse would be if they were talking about actually making the whole facebook experience part of Thunderbird. That you could not only communicate through Thunderbird via the Facebook messaging service, but actually read and post "wall" updates. Talk about feature bloat.

(I know there's no reason to expect that they're going to do this - it's all speculation . . . though I'm sure if it's not going to be part of Thunderbird, it'll become part of Firefox).

When you get to the point that you're facilitating status updates on services through an email client, is it still just about communication? Twitter certainly isn't as much about communication as it is pimping your company or self (or persona) to the world. A rather one-sided "look at me" conversation.

At that point, I don't know how we determine what Thunderbird shouldn't facilitate. Should it provide a customized interface to updating your Wordpress website? Or your Drupal site? (I know some things have APIs that let you just send an email to a service and have the data added to it, such as the add-by-email functionality that pinboard.in has - but I think we're talking about specific added functionality beyond that in the client).

Where do we then differentiate the browser and the email client? It starts to sound like Thunderbird isn't so much an email client for email communications, but that Firefox as a "receive" device and Thunderbird is a "send" device.

I think the more valuable lesson is that you don't need to white-wash history to paint a figure as better than they were (especially if they were not particularly good at all in some cases), simply to uphold the value of the things we associate with them. Society doesn't have to confuse the two. A worthy idea or concept can stand on its own, even if we uncover unpleasant truths about the people involved.