HN user
Sounds like you may be in a good position to do a startup that makes life easier for people in your profession. There's always need for good designers, too. Give your skills a go in the freelance world and see what happens.
I've been waiting for Google to "kill the fax machine" since their voice program launched. Sending faxes for free hasnt been a problem--at the least most public libraries will send a few pages at pennies (or free) per page. Most services to receive faxes cost 10 bucks a month to get your own number. I dream of giving people my Google voice number, and whenever a fax comes through I get it in my inbox as a PDF attachment. sigh Someday...
I think Myspace is actually much worse off than the stats say. Its lack of relevance isn't a question anymore. But, it has a huge number of links pointing to user pages (most of which have more information available their Facebook counterts). As such, I'd wager a good bit of these unique visitors are just "phantom traffic" coming in from search engines. The rest of the traffic surely couldn't be worth enough to keep the company alive.
Having a link to wikipedia for each dog listed would a couple of clicks. The UI was really intuitive, great job on that and the design/JS.
If you go with the touch screen on the table, it would be really neat if users could place orders from their table using the device, and see the progress of their order going through the kitchen.
Good online ordering and options for pickup would be really cool for the website. Also, put your hours and an HTML menu on the front page, right up at the top. 99% of the time, if I'm going to a restaurants page, I want the hours or the menu. Most eateries seem to miss that.
The tracking isn't exactly a revelation--same deal for using every scrap of customer data for marketing.
Oh yeah, I've seen some great shared hosts (medialayer, mediatemple, come to mind). Realistically though, most of them do suck pretty bad.
Shared hosting just isn't reliable. It could be his code, but if the slow performance times aren't constant, it's probably the host. You're sharing a web server, database, email, and etc with at least 50 other people (these days, you're lucky if it's just that) and it's all on the same computer. Each scripting language as many ./configure options enabled as they can, so it will fit the needs of the masses.
I'm not sure if you're attached to the ease of use of shared hosting, but it is advantageous to get a VPS and compile everything with just the options you need. I'm a happy liode customer, and many others here are as well.
Instead of settling for one or the other, you could write some jQuery that interacts with the forms using some predefined dialogue. Maybe have a half-dozen of these scripts made that rotate when the script runs out or the user reloads. Possibly add some humor in these scripts? just to get the user to watch the show a bit longer. When the user clicks in the chat, maybe relinquish control from the javascript to the human so they can test drive it.
FWIW, I think it's neat. But for some reason, my brain acted like a deer in the headlights when I saw the two chat boxes side by side like that.
I make it a point not to buy a domain I don't have a use for. There has been ~50-75 domains I checked in the last month that were nothing but godaddy parked domain pages. That being said, I usually just pick some words and phrases I like, and hit the thesaurus. If you're persistent and lucky, you'll hit a good+available .com
Same story here. Clickable link, btw: http://www.6colors.net/ipad_check/
If you're not interested in making more money, then asking people here what to do with may not yield many responses. ;) Congrats, btw.
I'm not sure of my WPM, but I'm fairly certain my brain is the bottleneck. I am still a bit slow on my special characters though.
There's also a subreddit you may be interested in http://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/