thinker

There are plenty of niche networks that are interesting and useful (HN, Quora, Reddit). As long as creating friends isn't your primary activity, you're good.

This reminds me of the FML-style websites out there.

Your logo is a train crash right now. I hope its meant as an anti-web-2.0 joke otherwise there is no reason you needed to get Frank Gehry to design you a logo.

I am @fahdoo

So far I'm liking it. Besides just being really well made, its great to have a place where I can get feedback on designs and works-in-progress, and to talk shop about design and development. I'm hoping it'll become my hq for all design related links/questions/inspiration.

Valid points. I was thinking of people like my grandfather (born 1920) who speak English fluently without a british accent, and wasn't influenced by American tv.

I'd agree with the analysis that English is closer to how its spoken in the US today accent-wise. If you look at how people speak English in British colonies, the pronunciation isn't heavily accented to how its spoken in the UK today. For example, South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh).

Looking at your demo, you definitely have a launch-worthy v1. Do it now!

I think you're sufficiently differentiated from Blippy and Swipely, and even if you aren't - so what? How many people outside of HN and the Valley know of these two startups? There's a ton of users to acquire and engage and you are by no means behind in the game.

I really liked your gallery implementation - did you build it from scratch?

I've got a few invites - message me with your email for one

Quora's been great for finding about under-the-radar startups because of the strong community of entrepreneurs and VCs

http://quora.com (invite-only right now)

Shameless plug - but worth checking out to solve your problem - we've built a website called Thinkpanda which lets you save notes, links, files, rss feeds and even etherpads in "collections". All your collections are a click away and we even aggregate content from all your collections (and those you are following) into one meta-feed.

We're starting off targeting the academic market (students, researchers) but have found it pretty useful for organizing interest-based links and having general discussions as well.

Check it out http://thinkpanda.com and any feedback is appreciated!

We've been working on a productivity app for researchers (currently only have a web dashboard). We're finding it great to organize notes/links/files within our own startup as well. Would be awesome if you guys could give it a try and give us some feedback!

Check it out here: http://thinkpanda.com

I'm new to this myself but I'll attempt an explanation. Then someone can correct me if needed :)

The basic idea is that data is stored as key > value. You can sort of relate it to the MySQL practice of denormalization and storing a bunch of data from different tables as an array in one cell.

You don't want to (or can't) do joins because data is not normalized, but instead have to process the results you would want separately in a batch process called map/reduce.

It all boils down to this one fact: NoSQL is write heavy in order to improve read performance. Because your data is in multiple places and you are doing batch processing to get the right format/calculated data then you are saving time when the user requests it from you. This is one of the reasons its good for scalability. The other reason seems to be that denormalized data is easier to scale out then normalized.

You should also look up CAP theorem and NoSQL.

A few links that I've been saving to teach myself: - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1189911/non-relational-da... - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170152/nosql-best-practi... - http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7579/1.html - http://blogs.computerworld.com/15510/the_end_of_sql_and_rela...

For those who may have missed this a couple weeks ago, Twitter also considering Cassandra - http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/407159447/cassandra-twitter-...

There's also http://ietherpad.com and http://piratepad.net