whopa

There's a lot of CPAN activity, but my impression is that a lot of it seems confined to only a handful of problem domains. There's tons of choice with date libraries, or OO frameworks, or unit test frameworks, but other languages have solutions for that too.

For all the talk of CPAN being so killer, there actually isn't much there that other languages don't also have. There may be more choice in implementation of a fairly common concept, but that's the Perl way. The "aha, I'll use Perl because this CPAN module implements exactly what I want, and nobody else does" moment rarely happens.

One success could mean you got lucky, more than one is meaningful. Blogger is Evan Williams' only business success; if Twitter actually makes enough money to justify the amount of money invested, that would be meaningful.

I think it's too early to pass any judgment on Square.

They also raised $200M in May 2009.

In the past few years, the vast majority of commits to core browser code is by Mozilla paid staff. They mostly ignore outside contributors at that level.

Tabs aren't threaded in Mozilla. All tabs are managed by a single thread, and are cooperatively multitasked. And it sucks, since for example, one webpage doing a frequent setTimeout can adversely affect others. They've talked about moving to the Chrome model, but they don't seem to have the resources to do so in a timely manner.

A lot of what their doing is catch up to Chrome. They sat around not really innovating in a way that's really meaningful to a normal user for a long time.

Don't fall for the Mozilla marketing. Mozilla has >200 people on staff, and the vast majority of actual browser development is done by Mozilla staff. Getting Mozilla to actually respond to any external development community questions and feedback is like pulling teeth. There's a reason you hardly see anyone building on top of Mozilla anymore.

Mozilla's problems stem from their management simply being over their heads, and not having the chops to run a development project of that scale. A good chunk of Chrome developers used to be Mozilla developers, who probably weren't exactly thrilled with how Mozilla was being run. And talk to any third party who has tried to work with Mozilla building on the code base, and you'll hear all sorts of frustrations.

Mozilla has enough money in the bank to not disappear for a while, but they'll likely fade into irrelevance sooner, because it doesn't look like they can escape their institutional problems.

So the legal ramifications of using GrooveShark are still unknown for the most part, contrary to what iamdave said.

I feel like you missed listing a big change: with the rise of UGC sites, the boosting of results of anything on an "important" domain doesn't seem valid anymore. Just because something is on twitter.com doesn't mean it's highly relevant, since anyone could've posted it. But it's fairly easy to google bomb someone's name by just registering a Twitter account and listing their name as owning it.

Similarly, stackoverflow.com doesn't have very good answers for a number of technical topics, but it's often on the first 10 hits, even when the answers are useless and there's much better answers ranked lower (like project mailing list archives).

Where's the source for the other labels doing a deal? The source you linked only talks about EMI, and a cursory glance around the web doesn't find anything to corroborate other labels doing any deals.

Brand advertising efficacy is notoriously hard to measure. Where does the data come from to support the notion that FB excels at it?

No, they were not better than the closed source alternatives for most businesses. They were cheaper. Cheaper trumps better often. Cheaper drove adoption.

> I don't recall either gaining any traction until they were better in some way, either for developers or implementors.

No, when they got traction was before they were better, but after they were good enough, which means you could run your business on cheap Intel/AMD hardware.

Gruber ignoring cost when it's often one of the strongest benefits that fall out of openness strikes me as disingenuous.

And yeah, cheap doesn't always win if it really sucks. You could make an argument that Theora sucks that bad, especially when you consider the lack of hardware decoders. But that isn't Gruber's argument at all. His analysis here is really off base.

As the parent said, e.g. MySQL and Linux weren't as good or better than the closed alternatives when they gained traction. They were however cheaper, and open often has the quality of cheaper, since it's often simply free. Cheaper often wins over better. Hell, MySQL still isn't as good at the big closed databases.

And this applies to HTML5 video: Theora is cheaper than h264. So Gruber's argument doesn't seem to hold.

All but the last 3 can't be used during take off and landing, and the last 3 all existed before airline magazines.

There's still an audience there.

To a point. It never hit the mainstream in a big way.

Rapper mentions and urban demographics didn't save the T-Mobile Sidekick. I don't think it's a meaningful indicator of larger things.

> The iPhone already supports that kind of multitasking (Phone app, iPod app, Voice Memo app) but only Apple can use it. I see no reason why they wouldn’t extend that to all developers sooner or later.

I see a reason. Apple may want to give iTunes a competitive edge over other music apps by keeping it the only music app that can work in the background. This doesn't seem out of line of Apple's character as of late.

In my experience, Yelp's open hours data is inaccurate often enough to be entirely untrustworthy.

Bing being merely as good as Google means the Bing team haven't done enough. That means they have to compete on brand, and that's really hard since Google has a stronger brand. Yahoo's search results have been on par with Google for most people's purposes for a while, but that hasn't helped them.

To compete with Google on search you have to do to Google what Google did to AltaVista: be noticeably better, consistently. As you said, Google is nowhere near good enough yet.

So this is what Google is scared of, and that's why it's in their best interest to keep innovating, because otherwise someone somewhere might beat them to the next real breakthrough.

Bing so far has failed by not making any real technical progress, and only reaching parity. That means right now they have to compete on brand, and that sucks for them.

That's raw API traffic, not user numbers.

An app that polls Twitter every minute is of course going to generate a lot of requests. But if only 10% of Twitter users use 3rd party apps, the web metrics are still more meaningful than API use.

Google developed Chrome because making the web as a viable application platform is in their best interest. They tried working with Mozilla for Firefox 2 development, but realized that Mozilla is a dysfunctional project with questionable leadership and insular development practices, so working with them really wasn't tenable. Hence, Chrome.

And honestly, process-per-tab, a proper security model, and plugins running as a separate process so the buggy Flash plugin doesn't bring down your browser are things that Firefox is considering copying from Chrome, not the other way around.

Where is there concrete evidence that a significant chunk of Twitter users use 3rd party apps?

Desktop apps have horrible conversion rates, and I don't see why Twitter apps in particular have any reason to buck this trend. Whenever there are articles like these about Twitter's traffic numbers, people always bring up 3rd party app traffic making up the difference, but nobody ever provides any references to back that up.

But you reinforced lukifer's point instead of rebutting it. In the 80s and 90s (pre-OS X), Macs had crappy market share, and when they improved them (OS X timeframe), you saw much more developer interest.

They have the Blackberry App World.

It's horrible because the platform views the web as an afterthought, so there are no modern APIs for dealing with it. The Java version is ancient as well, and you have ridiculously small system limitations, like number of open files and such. I could go on, it's so bad it's almost comical.

This is why there isn't a really healthy app ecosystem, only people who are paid enough by their employers to offset the pain develop apps, or people just pay Blackberry itself to develop something for them.

OS X didn't exist in the 80s and 90s.

Blackberry is the #1 smartphone, yet the app ecosystem there is pretty dismal. Clearly there is another dynamic at work there, and pure installed base isn't as compelling a factor as it seems. One reason could be that the Blackberry platform is absolutely horrible to develop on.

Taco Bell is also pretty successful, and that contradicts the article. Other contradictory examples are Olive Garden and The Cheesecake Factory, both of which have extensive menus and are wildly succesful, the latter also having the same scarcity dynamics and lines as In-N-Out.

Articles like this are annoying. There are multiple ways to success, and presenting one as clearly better than others when there are so many counterexamples is disingenuous.

In-N-Out has a simple menu, above average ingredient quality, and treats their workers pretty well. All great qualities. But it's pretty evident, especially when it comes to food, that you can be bad in all those areas and still be successful, and perhaps even outcompete those who are better than you, if you focus on price and consistency, even if the thing you're consistent at is being mediocre.

> But every In-N-Out I've ever been to has a line out the door.

That could also be explained by the fact that there are far less In-N-Out locations than Taco Bell, so one store has to handle demand from over a larger area than Taco Bells.

If In-N-Out has the same density of locations as a Taco Bell, the per-store revenues will be quite different.

Facebook is in the same space as Twitter, but is bigger than Twitter. Why does Twitter deserve more respect than Facebook?

Twitter is entirely unproven. It's a big mystery what Twitter's actual user engagement numbers are, so nobody really knows how sticky the site is. How do you know Twitter's approach is working? It seems entirely too premature to say.

Honestly to me it seems like either Twitter's user engagement numbers are really bad, which is why Twitter doesn't talk about them, or Twitter's analytics are so poor that they don't know how their users behave, which doesn't really reflect well on them either.