soonisnow

"It’s less about Reed Hastings answering your questions — he has too much to lose by being blunt. It’s more about a guy from Netflix answering them. The everyday people that actually create the products, sites, and movies we love. The previously nameless and faceless parts of the machine that know where all the bodies are buried and are just “unimportant” enough to be honest."

This is the section that most resonated with me, and describes why Quora can be so powerful and valuable. It reminds me of an answer that has 828 upvotes, "What's it like to play on the same basketball team as Jeremy Lin?" -In it, a former Harvard teammate gives intimate, candid insights on observing a great player before the world had any clue he was great (though UConn eventually did).

The UX of Quora encourages this type of ask and answering: where long-tail bits of curiosity can be met with long-tail flashes of idiosyncratic insight. It's the best thing about it.

But, as with many kinds of truly valuable, deep insight into something, I'm myself curious how far and wide it 'scales' as a business or industry. Perhaps they are creating what financial-types call "optionality", with a diversified reach at lot of little bits of insight, any number of which might be hugely popular at any time.

Either way, I'm glad Quora is there for this. On the other hand I do very much believe that online Q&A is still quite nascent in its ability to help people not just learn, but achieve, produce, and collaborate on both deeply value-creating endeavors as well as the daily block-and-tackling of our work and personal lives.

Agree, it's about the how, not the who.

Methods evolve, and truly good design is as much about resource efficiency and user experience as it is interaction dynamics and look and feel.

Today, if our most iconic, beautiful buildings required, like the pyramids, 25,000 laborers hand-stacking mud-brick over a 20-year period, that would be bad design. If our intra-city train systems ran above-ground, powered by steam, that would be bad design.

It's not Graphic Designers who are ruining anything, just as it's not Teachers who are ruining public education. It's bad Designers using inefficient methods.

It's about the how, not the who.

Methods evolve, and truly good design is as much about resource efficiency and user experience as it is interaction dynamics and look and feel.

Today, if our most iconic, beautiful buildings required, like the pyramids, 25,000 laborers hand-stacking mud-brick over a 20-year period, that would be bad design. If our intra-city train systems ran above-ground, powered by steam, that would be bad design.

It's not Graphic Designers who are ruining anything, just as it's not Teachers who are ruining public education. It's bad Designers using inefficient methods.

Humility about oneself and the path and process to being better, at anything, I think, is core to the constant asking of questions. As the @tmac721 touches on: ask to challenge one oneself (and others), ask to listen (truly listen!), and ask because being better always matters more than being good.

"The bottom line is this: Not every talented programmer in the world is from a city with “Silicon” in its nickname. But many of those programmers would love to live in one."

This makes tons of sense. Apart from Forrst and GitHub (and Dribble), good old fashioned 1st or 2nd degree connections can be gold in non-coastal centers for tech and design talent. My co-founder is located in Pittsburgh and has begun to see lots of interest from other founders who want to key into the scene there (CMU, etc) and he is very happy to help, because well, it's cool to help startups, but also it's a forcing function for him to engage with top talent in his own backyard.

I'm willing to bet if most of us went into our contacts we would find a "hub" like my co-founder in cities like Pittsburgh, Austin, places in upstate NY, etc, who would be keen to help out.

PS: Do people find the job board at Dribbble useful?

Absolutely agree re: typography. Or to quote this great post from @iA, "Treat text as a user interface" http://www.informationarchitects.jp/en/the-web-is-all-about-...

It includes its own great list of other resources, including A List Apart and Thinking with Type.

I think a vast majority of websites ignore even basic principles like spacing, negative space, readability, and rudimentary concepts about typeface pairing.

If anyone is interested in learning a bit more deeply some of the underpinnings of OWS and the fallout of the financial crisis (most/all of which has not been appreciably cleaned up yet), check out Yale Professor Robert Shiller's course on Financial Markets, particularly session 2 on Risk Management and session 7 on Behavioral Finance. (Yes, he wrote _Irrational Exuberance)

(Correction: "choosing to shuTTer something..", I meant. I often confuse those two, and it makes me shudder.)

As a purely strategic and tactical decision, I for one applaud Adobe's ability to make one of the most difficult choices in any endeavor: choosing to shudder something that has had success in the past. Chambers iterates this well and succinctly "the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops".

Time and again, we see tech leaders pour billions into platforms, systems, and toolsets whose writing may be on the wall, but whose previous success, market share dominance, and/or prior profit potential overshadowed its forthcoming pain and struggle (see: Nokia Symbian/MeeGo, MS Bing), and time and again, the inability to cut things off quickly have led to near catastrophic results.

Choosing to build something is a courageous admirable thing. Choosing to stop building something is equally so.

Agreed. Like Google+ and gTalk etc? This is clearly the UX standard ahead yes?

For sure the fact that Apple/Steve passed (violently so) on Flash made it mobile DOA, but is it possible the actual frame/second rendering on Flash 10.1 was actually better-performing than HTML5? These tests are from 2010 but suggest so.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUWo19BcC7s (April) and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFFax1oYyBE (September).

Not so sure Steve was proved right so much as it was self-fulfilling prophecy (from the mobile deity himself)?

What strikes me most about this announcement today is how transparently it's for the benefit of Amazon, and not readers or users. With just 5,000 titles and no big 6 publishers signed on, and open to _only_ Amazon Prime subscribers, it seems much more like a marketing ploy for Prime, and less a real value being offered to users/readers. Much less.

Is this from 2002?

Very interested in the "internet of making things" (or project-driven, as @ataugeron iterates it here. Have been working closely on incentives around learning by doing and so far feel that these will help: 1) Recurring and consistent "prompts" (daily challenges, sure, but try to start out with some frequency you can keep up).. compare The New Yorker cartoon/caption contest; 2) Community involvement -- let other users comment and upvote, not just "best" pieces, but "most improved", "most imaginative", "most surprising" etc; 3) Let users lead: perhaps pick one of the "winners" of the above and let them post a prompt of their own and maybe even judge the standouts.

While timing in sales, as in most everything, is, as they say, everything, it's very difficult to optimize for this (in an enterprise sale, hurricane forecasting, stock market).. The variables (and processes) that a team can most impact, are 1) The product itself, and 2) The relationship with customers and clients. Of course, each informs (and enhances) the other, but teams would do well to optimize for these two variables (easier said than done) -- good timing may end up being the byproduct of a great solution positioned well to key decision-makers who know and trust and love what you're building.

Clearly not every investor is as explicit, prolific (nor as insightful!) as Wilson or Suster, but many, even the most modest-sized and earliest-stage investors, have posted something specific about what attributes in teams they look for and what broad or micro themes they focus on; many have a "Portfolio" page which can yield lots of useful information on the companies they've already chosen to support, and why. Finally, believe it or not, CrunchBase is a solid way to connect the dots - if you think XYZ or ABC investors would be a great strategic fit based on their portfolio co's, go and see who _else has invested in them, since they're likely to care about a lot of the same dynamics.

A tiny bit of homework goes a long way in getting an investor to return your email, and in getting someone to feel confident in making that initial intro..