samgro

"I tend to loathe meetings even more than 37signals."

Not trying to be the grammar police, but after reading this sentence, I chuckled because I thought the author was expressing his hatred for 37signals :)

Oldie but goodie. Point #7, "Leverage Event Delegation", was particularly helpful for me.

I guess that makes sense - pictures can have geolocation data. Still could improve the messaging for the permission to explain that. Maybe say "Dropbox wants to access your location and photo library".

There is probably close to zero technical cost or risk associated with your social network. I have no idea what stage your concept is at, but from my brief flirtation with building a social networking concept, I would urge you to consider the following if you haven't already:

What problem does this solve? Who are your first 100 customers? You'll be surprised at how little time even your best friends will spend humoring your service. Who are your first 10,000 customers? Why would any of them spend their precious time on your service? How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? Most social networks won't be interesting until they have millions of users. How do you keep people engaged before then? How do you make money? If you have a general audience, unless you have hundreds of millions of unique visitors per month, don't say advertising.

Very well written job description. I hate the tradition of writing an absurd list of "requirements".

Great illustration of one of the many reasons why developing for iOS is easier than Android...no need to deal with buggy hardware driver edge cases.

I believe Path is what you are referring to with the emoticons. That was the first feature of Path that I found really innovative - it encourages greater participation because it's faster than commenting, like the "Like" button, but allows you to convey a greater degree of emotion. But I still comment on photos in Path - having real conversations are valuable in most situations.

Hard to answer for your particular site without knowing more detail, but why not just use Disqus? They're likely to be better than what you hack together yourself, and most early adopter types are familiar with it which will probably increase your engagement rate.

It seems we're at an impass.

I think it could be interesting for another startup founder in some niche area to find community websites in their niche. Is that the target audience? If so it's a really small niche that's probably not going to pay you a whole lot.

Also, calling it a "social network" search engine is misleading. Twitter and Facebook are social networks; the other 898 are online communities around special interests.

I'd think long and hard about what problem you are solving, and sell the benefits rather than the features on your homepage. Watch this video from the Instagram founders: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2738

My gut reaction is that this is a solution looking for a problem.

It would be interesting if app stores worked like retail stores. Developers sell apps to the store at their desired price, and the app store sells it to a customer, usually with an added markup of 30%. If Amazon wants to sell a popular app as a loss leader Walmart style, they are free to do that without screwing the developer.

The garage is definitely a step in the right direction. It needs to be better publicized internally. I had heard whispers of it when I was at Microsoft but it was not mainstream.

Agree that enterprise software has different requirements, but Windows Live is specifically Microsoft's consumer cloud product. Sharepoint and a few other products within Microsoft are targeted at enterprise, and for those it may still make sense to be on the 3 year product cycle. However, the hosted version of the enterprise services like Sharepoint and Exchange, targeted at smaller businesses, could be a great place to experiment with new features in a way similar to Google Labs (on an opt-in basis).

I agree that IE is a bad product, and that this marketing campaign may even have been counter-effective. I still don't see how a bad product or a bad marketing campaign are "evil". That being said, my life as a web developer would be better if IE disappeared off the face of the earth, but I don't forecast that happening any time soon :(

How does Firefox's tax status have anything to do with Microsoft's business objectives? I hate IE as much as the next guy, but I don't see how Microsoft marketing their business is morally questionable just because their competitor gets tax breaks and doesn't pay dividends to shareholders.

Why is that shameful? Buying AdWords for competitor searches on Google is standard practice, why should Twitter be any different?