connortomas

Who would you expect to receive a message from? Presumably this happens more often than you think, and the company protocol is to get legal to deal with it. I think you've misinterpreted this as in any way "aggressive" - this is just a company trying to tie things up as efficiently as possible. Sure, you'd like an informal response, but when a company is operating at the scale of Mailchimp, that doesn't seem realistic.

I was also quite impressed by the tone of the message from Mailchimp legal - probably the clearest, most polite takedown request I've seen.

Google has employees. Some of them are gay. If 15.4% of the San Francisco population identifies as GLB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United...), we could probably assume that a significant minority of Google employees are gay.

This is an issue of direct relevance to many of those that work at Google. I think it's fine for corporations to take a stand on social issues that directly affect their employees.

I'm not sure "honest mistake" is really acceptable. This is a multi-million-dollar Triple A game. I think it's reasonable to expect their legal team should have double- and triple-check the rights to all arts assets. Ye, there are a lot of assets used in a game of TLoU's magnitude, but the subway map is so prominent I can't understand how it would have been skipped over. If they had time to include the asset, they should have had time to secure rights.

The screencap used to demonstrate the theft constitutes fair use, by the way. Cameron's using it to make a point to support his argument, which is totally legal.

I explored the possibility of using a bank safe as a replacement symbol in the original piece. A bank safe is very difficult to represent symbolically, particularly at the scale of a small icon, so I think we can probably rule that out. A folder symbol is an even worse candidate, as folders are already used to symbolically represent levels in a hierarchical file structure.

Any replacement for the floppy would need to be immediately recognisable and not already tied symbolically to another concept. My argument, simply, is that I don't think there's anything better. The floppy is a unique shape and conceptually tied only to "saving". The effort required to move away from a commonly-used symbol isn't trivial and I just don't think there's much to be gained.

I'd agree with that. But why couldn't the abstraction for "save" be the floppy disk symbol?

Just pretend the floppy disk never existed, and that the floppy-save symbol is just a completely abstract symbol. Doesn't it still work? As long as a symbol is unique, easy to identify, and easy to reproduce, it does its job. I'd argue that floppy symbol has stuck around because, on a purely visual level, it's hard to beat.

I'd argue that "better designed" is subjective here. Hacker News is optimised for high content density. Designer News has lower content density, but there's more space between posts (and visual signposts in the form of "badges") which makes the front-page easier to scan. I appreciate both approaches.

This seems to have a huge chicken-or-the-egg problem: the site is only valuable to consumers if they know their requests could have some influence, but companies will only listen to requests from Pvsh users if there's a critical mass (say, thousands or millions of votes for one feature).

Is there some way to re-jig the concept to get around this? Perhaps by focusing more directly on one particular product category and expanding outwards? Or by working with particular companies that are actively soliciting feature requests (in which case I'd know I'd be listened to)?

From the stats Kickstarter have released previously, situations like this (in which a project just barely doesn't reach its target) seem extremely rare. Kickstarter works because the model is simple: a hard deadline, a hard target, and go. It sucks that they were so close, but I don't think it would be in Kickstarter's interests to tweak the system to assist almost-made-it edge cases like this.

Agreed in general, though I'd dispute your point that hacking can't do permanent good. Sure, in fifty years, you likely won't care about the web app you built, but maybe that app helped somebody achieve their goals or inspired somebody else in some way, and that is what you'll remember. The work itself is never important in the long run... it's how that work helped others in some way.

I can see your point, but, taking a longer-term view, what happens when we hit hard limits to global growth?

In a world in which every country is developed and wealthy... where in the world does that material wealth come from? I can't conceive of how such a world could exist without some kind of significant technological breakthrough or massive social change.

I find it hard to get from, "Food, water, and energy shortages, exacerbated by climate change, could lead to instability and violence and the forced migration of hundreds of millions of people in the future" to, “Yet the probability of a more peaceful world is increasing." Food and water (and to some extent, now, energy) are base needs, and if those end up in short supply, it doesn't matter if we're "winning" or "gaining" in other areas. Fundamentally, a sustainable supply of food and water trumps everything else on that list, and if we end up losing at that, we've lost at everything... just worth keeping in mind.

37 Signals generally create web apps for small businesses, so I suspect an email client/service would be a little too general for them. Jason Fried also says, "This new product eliminates the hassle of one thing in particular", which suggests that there's one huge pain point they'd like to solve with their new product. I can't think of what one particular pain point would be with email - a solution to email would probably involve solving a lot of tiny problems.

It's puzzling, because Jason points out that "the other products are totally free". Most web apps marketed to small business users, though, aren't free. Perhaps this product is targeted at a broader demographic.

Though this doesn't totally solve your issue, the design is responsive, so if you're on your Mac, you could narrow your browser window to make the body text a little easier to scan. I mean, you shouldn't need to do that, but...

Would there be any reason to use this over, say, a Mailchimp auto-responder? I don't mean that at all in a snarky way, just curious. I'd be interested to give this a go, but can't quite justify shifting my auto-reponders from Mailchimp just yet...

Could it be worth including a few stories or "case studies"? For example, "John has just moved to Melbourne and he'd like to know what hidden gems exist on the way to his new job, so..." If you've already had beta testers, I'm sure a few have compelling stories about how the app has led them to hidden gems - if I can understand how the app has "changed their lives", I'd be compelled to give it a go.

I think this is an interesting concept. I have a few questions, though, which I suspect could be commonly asked:

- What's the incentive for me to use this? Why not simply switch my phone off? It seems as though the core benefit is to answer the question, "Why isn't X answering their call?", but there's no clear incentive for X to share this. In fact, if X is busy, it's unlikely they will have the time to update their status.

- How do you explain to a non-technical user how this differs from Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare? How do you respond to a user telling you "I don't have time for another social network"?

- Have you thought about how to prevent "feature creep"? I see simplicity as the core selling point of this app, but I can also see strong pressure from investors to build this out until it turns into a generic social network.

Anyway, it looks visually stunning and I'm excited to see where you take it.

I presume one reason (as suggested in the video) is that Maily wants to promote "kid-friendly" email replies. I imagine kids (particularly the very young) would find it more fun to receive a visual reply than a standard email reply.

Well, yeah, noreply emails are useful for the business, and I understand that. They're not very useful for the customer, though.

Customers want to feel as though there's a real person they can contact directly. They don't want to feel as though they'll simply be shunted endlessly from department from department. My opinion is that the customer shouldn't need to learn how your company is structured simply to make a one-off complaint or ask a question. The onus should be on the company to receive the support query and then pass it along to somebody who can answer it.

I'm aware this a less obviously scaleable approach to support. For some companies, it's not really tenable. In many cases, the value of a single customer may be so low that providing good support isn't worth it... it may be more valuable to simply ignore that customer until they leave. But for companies in which every customer is valuable, or could be valuable (Mailchimp, for example, or Zendesk), this kind of "inefficient" customer-centric support makes sense.

I tentatively disagree. If the service isn't leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, I think this could be a huge flop. However, if they can actually deliver, I can imagine this generating a huge amount of interest. "The return of MySpace" is a fairly compelling story, after all - if they pull it off.

Let's wait and see. Keep in mind, the video is pretty frenetically cut. The video is designed to provoke awe, but I suspect the interface is less "out there" in practice.

I loved that too. There's a good sense of humour there which was lacking from the last "My______" redesign/rebrand.

I don't think you're the average user. When I temporarily removed sharing buttons from a site I work on, we received a number of support emails complaining that it was "no longer possible" to share the content on Facebook. Many people simply can't be bothering opening Facebook, copying and pasting and link, and clicking "Post". For many, if a site doesn't feature a "Like" button, it simply can't be shared.

Unfortunately, your solution of enabling the user to install an add-on is not tenable for the vast number of users who don't even realise what a "browser" is. Apple's Mobile Safari solution works because it makes sharing simple and frictionless for the majority.

I think it's possible to scale a personal approach to support.

Maybe, as Quibb grows, Sandi doesn't actually manually send each message. Maybe she sets up an autoresponder with a default welcome message. However, it's still possible to send automated messages in a personal way. Instead of the email coming from noreply@quibb.com, or even support@quibb.com (better), maybe Sandi continues to have the welcome emails sent from her personal company email. Maybe she continues to use a tone in that default message that suggests approachability. As you scale, there are always tricks you can use to make customers firmly believe you care.

Also worth considering: sure, Facebook don't personally interact with every new user, but you can be damn sure that they take a more personal approach when dealing with advertisers.

The game looks fantastic, and I'd just like to say: I love the idea of MGWU. Coming out of an iOS game development course (aware that you don't offer traditional "courses", but still) with a polished iOS app seems like a great deal - even better when your profit is tied to the success of the apps themselves. Love it.

Really? Personally, I think the more people recognise that hard work can actually be enjoyable, the better. I don't think that recognition devalues the achievement of those who accomplish amazing things.

At an old job, I used to deal with a co-worker who'd complain continuously about the work they had to do. I figured they were trying to, in an odd way, impress us ("Oh, X hates their job - it must be really difficult"). I really do think some people would benefit from recognising that it's possible to achieve great things while also finding some form of enjoyment in the work involved.

And I honestly don't think the Olympian cares what the viewer on the couch thinks!

The issue here seems to be that Apple have developed a reputation for producing polished "finished products" that doesn't gel particularly well with rolling out "perpetual beta" web services.

I assume their hands were tied here, and there was no way for them to roll out a "New Maps Beta" for interested/adventurous users while still bundling the Google-powered Maps app as the iOS default (the same way they rolled out Messages beta as an optional download for OS X users while still bundling iChat with the OS). Certainly, the fact that the new Maps isn't billed as a "beta" (as Siri still is) doesn't match the tone of Apple PR's message.

That's true (or may be true), but unfortunately nobody is comparing Google Maps circa 2005 to Google Maps today. They're comparing Google Maps today to Apple Maps today and finding the latter wanting.

The difference, as far as I see it, is that Pocket makes being free a selling point, whereas Instapaper users are used to paying for features. Instapaper can continue to exist without substantially shifting business models for the foreseeable future - Pocket can't.

Unless I'm missing something?

iOS 6 is not unique to the iPhone 5, so it wouldn't make sense for Gruber to review the latest version of the OS as a "feature" of the new phone. It makes sense to distinguish the hardware from the software.

Though this is oft-repeated: nothing is "free". Pocket plans to make money off you somehow, whether directly or indirectly. Instapaper is simply more up-front about how and when you will pay.