marksbren

Snapchat's timeout feature is not just a novelty, is it allowing for a whole different type of digital communication. The sender does not have to worry about where their image might show up. It frees people to take goofy photos and act more naturally (as opposed to all the posed, staged shots on Instagram and Facebook).

Yes, when I read that I made sure to note the year. It is true, he was not far off.

I would love to see what else he said around this sentence, maybe he did recognize the huge non-commercial potential but this is the only sentence that got attention.

I agree that you should not immediately write off something, but there is definitely a need to lead/mentor people in the right way. When pg says, "I am worried..." he is doing the same thing as these quotes: expressing doubt.

That is what makes it so tough. As an entrepreneur you are hearing criticism often, sometimes it a super helpful and you need to change direction, other times it means you are onto something HUGE. It is difficult to decide which one it is.

This looks promising and is something that is needed. It is tough tracking whether a click actually led to a download through the appstore.

Thanks! It was pretty easy to make with Meteor and the Youtube API.

If you don't like the music choices, just create your own room by going to the homepage: http://dancepartydemo.meteor.com/

[On one of the reasons they have a 7 day payout period]

We were not willing to compromise on the experience of going to Stripe, deciding "OK, Stripe looks good, I will sign up.", and then can launch right there and then.

What a great, focusing vision for a product experience.

I have also been impressed with how responsive Stripe is to feedback. In the interview Patrick gets excited about a new webhook for payment transfers that the interviewer recommends. Knowing Stripe, it is probably already implemented.

Yeah, pain points and inefficiencies are a popular way to look find ideas.

However, I have found following a user behavior to be a little more useful for me. Sometimes the new idea or innovation is not easily categorized as a pain point, like in the case of Twitter. People were posting status messages incessantly in IM. Once Twitter launched, users had a service that aligned closely with that behavior.

Most people wouldn't recognize the status message feature of IM as a pain point or inefficiency, it was just a feature.

Good find. Here is a summary for those who don't want to dig though the Scribd document.

Here are the two versions: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/493143/ABTest.png (A = Old Page, B = New Page)

1. Doctor FootCare updated their checkout page to include a coupon code field (and a few other minor changes)

2. With the updated version, Doctor FootCare saw a 90% decrease in revenue.

3. Once Doctor FootCare took the coupon code out of the new version (B) the conversion rate of the page was 6.5% higher than the old checkout page (A). The new page without the coupon code field is not pictured.

That is a huge change, but I would not blindly assume that this result proves that the coupon code field should not be included in your checkout form. I would also like more data about the test.

With the fragmentation of mobile operating systems, this move will take quite a while. As long as Apple, Google and RIM do not allow cross-platform messaging outside of SMS, SMS will still stay strong. I will always have friends who are using Android & other platforms and SMS is still the only way to communicate with them all.

Great job with the site! This space is definitely in need of some innovation. I actually immediately thought of Plancast, but WhereBerry seems to be focused even earlier in the decision process (I want to do this, but don't know when). My current solution is a trusty Google Spreadsheet called "Things to do in SF", but that is not social at all.

I have thought about this type of service for a while. The problem with Facebook and Twitter is the signal to noise ratio is too low. Your status saying, "I am going to be here, who wants to join" will only be seen by a fraction of your friends & is not necessarily limited to your current geographic location. There is just too much noise.

No. I would not need it from day one. On day one, I would expect to have no connection to development tools. I could just enter a milestone when we release it and your tool would insert that milestone into our timeline. Going forward, it would be great to do automatically.

We currently use Google Analytics, Git & Pivotal Tracker. If those were merged it would be awesome. I could see the trends of usage (via Google Analytics events) with the information about when key updates were pushed (via Git or Pivotal Tracker).

I like the wireframe and have been thinking that a tracking tool like this would be useful (tracking all the site changes on a timeline with key metrics). Oftentimes I find myself hopping back and forth between our change logs and the analytics data to find what happened when & the result. Are there other tools that do this? Kissmetrics? Mixpanel?

When using Groupme, usually the owner of the group has to enter the phone numbers of all the group members. I made Textmob so that you could share a link and those who wanted to join could add themselves.

Thanks. I have never heard of TXTMob.

[edit] - after reading that I do remember hearing about this while reading about the beginnings of Twitter. Unfortunately when brainstorming domains I did not recall TXTMob.

Thanks. Yeah, I created this over the course of a few hours. It is hosted on Google App Engine and uses Twilio to setup the Groupme numbers (by sending an SMS)

To clarify, I am not going to use the phone numbers in any way. I do send them over to Groupme (to add to the group) so I cannot speak for them. This is more of a pet project currently and am not going to be spamming the phones or anything. I just wanted to see if people like it.

I agree. I should throw up a privacy policy. Any easy policies to throw up?

[Edit] - I posted an explanation as a placeholder Privacy Policy. No legal language, but it at least clarifies things.

Yeah, I would like to make the replies much smarter & possibly include who is there ("Welcome Mark, Brian just got here"). Additionally it would be nice to proactively text people ("Mark, where are you? 3 of your friends have already arrived and are waiting for you"). I think there are a lot of fun things to add.

I tend to agree here, although I don't think it is limited to the HN community. This article could have easily had the headline, "60% of Groupon merchants would do it again". I think that would have been the headline a few months ago.

Awesome. I have been working on a very similar product and have been looking for people to bounce ideas off and possibly work with. I think there is a big opportunity to provide an easy way to discover and organize events nearby. It solves a real problem (what's going on around me?). Drop me a note if you want to chat.

These are great tools. I am particularly interested in how affective check-ins are at bringing in new customers. Foursquare has the data to show who the real social influencers are. Some users may not help, but some could bring dozens of friends with one check-in.

That is interesting and I think Pickemfirst could be useful for beginners. However, from the video I got the sense that the product was tailored more for the hardcore crowd (those who have multiple teams and read articles across the web). As a beginner, I don't invest that much time and usually do my player analysis on the provided site (ESPN, Yahoo, etc). Just my thoughts.

This looks useful for hardcore fantasy sports fans. However, I have always felt like Fantasy Sports need a lower barrier to entry for fans, not tools to make hardcore fantasy players better. As a casual sports fan I can definitely see the appeal of Fantasy Sports, but whenever I enter a league with friends I still get dominated, which is no fun. I think there could be a huge market for simpler, social Fantasy Sports games.

Verizon and Motorola are definitely not helping diversify the customer base with the "bare-knuckled bucket of does" billboard and TV ads with jets and robots. I also find it interesting that Android users seem to be the stingiest (only 21% pay for apps).

What struck me with this article was the requirement to "pull" the data. Take the waterfall example (someone buzzes about a cool waterfall they find). That is great, but for it to be useful to others they have to be hiking in the area, be a buzz user, AND have Buzz open. I think many of these location apps are missing the discovery piece and need someway to push content. If you are hiking and your phone vibrated and told you about the waterfall it would be much more useful.

I don't want to be matched up chatting with friends (I can do that anytime) and I don't really want total strangers (it gets creepy and dirty). However, this could be great if it connects you to friends of friends. You could then spend the time figuring out how you two are connected.

As I was watching this I also thought that Google could be using Buzz to devalue Twitter. If Buzz can get a mass audience Google may be able to acquire Twitter more cheaply. Twitter has way too much of a head start for Buzz to actually rival it.