It’s not common practice for me to write reviews of other companies.  But, this is one of those special occasions.
As a software engineer and business person, it’s my prerogative and duty to make software/web sites/etc for other people.  The best way to make software for other people, however, is to make software for myself.  This […]

Who remembers Doom? Now, who remembers the reasons that Doom was so revolutionary from a technology perspective? One of the most important advances that John Carmack made with Doom was that it was the first game to incorporate Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), a concept that had been explored in the context of computer […]

Two weeks ago, me, my two partners in crime Aaron Nemoyten and Jessica Mah launched our first official Facebook application: Serial Killer. Suffice it to say that this application is the answer and ultimate de-facto shove in the face to all the other poke apps on Facebook. Before you get all offended […]

You gotta do what you gotta do. When you’re a startup, sometimes that means your home is your office and vice versa. There are all kinds of advantages: saving money, no commute, good music all day, nice homemade lunch, working all morning in your underwear, etc. Of course there are some disadvantages […]

As a web site based around one feature and one feature only, Digg is not a product. Digg is a feature.The underlying question is, how easy is it to implement this functionality into another web site? And I think, in the case of Digg, the answer is “very easy.” Couple this with their total inability to “cross the chasm,” so to speak, and you have a perfect recipe for a web site that models what could become a very popular feature… in other web sites.

…If apps need to try so hard to spread themselves based on the “Ideavirus” model, why take it so literally? It seems like the model here is the common cold, spread almost uncontrollably… and nobody really needs it. Whatever happened to confidence in product?

While reading the blog of Scott Heiferman (co-founder of Meetup.com), I noticed a trackback to Marc Andreessen’s blog. Marc, in turn passed this quote on from Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, who wrote on the blog of Guy Kawasaki. Anyway, now that all the introductions and credits are out of the way, I […]

This is part II of a series.
What kinds of apps are working on Facebook, and what can we learn from them as developers and designers? How do we even define success on Facebook applications? Installs? Active users? Canvas page views? Churn rate? Let’s see.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the Appaholic Viral Dashboard. Over […]

Hey guys. I’m Siqi, and I’m your guest blogger today. Alex Notov invited me to write a little about the Facebook platform. Since I have over zero users in the three weeks since I launched my own app, I am eminently qualified to pontificate on why you too need to have a Facebook app this […]

… getting the Startup Bug. It’s currently 1AM PST (as of the beginning of the writing of this post). It’s also about 30hrs till our self imposed goal of releasing what we expect to be a viral facebook app, and, eventually, a platform outside of facebook. It’s also bed-time, to get those […]