Arik's posterous

Thoughts that don't fit in a tweet

"If you're starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused." -- @isaachall

In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues -- it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:\Windows\ for dozens of users -- doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn't innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.

Isaac Hall (co-founder of Syncplicity) in an answer to the question: "Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?" on Quora (this is just an excerpt, I really recommend reading the whole answer; the quote at the title is from that answer too).

Love Gmail's Priority Inbox but miss it on the go? Here's a quick hack for you

I was waiting for a long time for a feature like Priority Inbox to come, but one of its main downsides is that it is not available on Gmail's mobile version yet. I thought about it a little, and found a simple partial solution to this problem.

The nice thing about Priority Inbox is that it's based on labels (like many things in Gmail) -- your important emails are tagged with the "Important" label. Therefore if you want to access them from your mobile, you just need to search for "label:important in:inbox" (or: "label:^im in:inbox"). Of course it's not a full solution, but it's something until full support is released.

Those of you who use Gmail's mobile web version can just use the following link to access your important emails:

Arik

Looks like someone figured out how to harvest emails from GitHub

Github_spam

Judging by the fact that I'm not the only one who received the exact same message today, I guess someone figured out how to harvest emails from GitHub repositories. Probably from the readme files people post or from some metadata in the repositories (the email address is part of the username in the commit history).

I don't understand how the originator of this spam attack thought that someone will fall for that, but oh well.

Hopefully next time Gmail's spam filter will catch this kind of spam.

Arik

Twitter's Latest Evil Plan

Today Twitter announced their own URL shortener (t.co) that will wrap ALL links in Twitter -- not just the ones in direct message, as it was until now. In the announcement blog post they mention that this is being done for the better user experience:

Since early March, we have been routing links within Direct Messages through our link service to detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of malware, phishing, and other dangers. [...] We want users to have this benefit on all tweets.

Additionally, [...] if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn't a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this.

To meet both of these goals, we're taking small steps to expand the link service currently available in Direct Messages to links shared through all Tweets.

But later on in the same blog post they reveal the real reason for this change:

In addition to a better user experience and increased safety, routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform [...]. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.
 
Here's the real reason why they need to shorten all links -- they want to track every link you click on Twitter. And this won't be limited to Twitter.com (and the other Twitter official clients), because they are adding a new clause to their TOS -- "We will be updating the TOS to require you to check t.co and register the click.". So no matter how you consume your tweets, you will be tracked by Twitter.

I wouldn't mind that change much, if they came up front and told us that this is to track the clicks on the Twitter platform. But when they try to disguise this as something that is good for the users, it's just evil and ugly.

Free speech < Revenues < World Domination. At least if you ask Facebook.

Dan Peguine just pointed me to a post on AllFacebook reporting that Facebook just took down all the "Everybody draw Mohammed Day!" groups and pages. This comes right after Pakistan banned Facebook because of the same groups and pages. A year ago, Arrington called out Facebook for not banning jew hating and holocaust denial groups on Facebook.

At the time they stated that those groups belong on Facebook, because they fosters open discussion, even if it's a controversial subject. If you believed Facebook that this is the true reason they don't deal with such groups, you might think it's novel. But why don't Facebook stand behind free speech in this case? Well, it appears that free speech and open discussion is cool as long as it doesn't cut their revenues or user base.

I wouldn't mind much Facebook deleting these groups if they were consistent about it -- I mean, if they were deleting all controversial groups, than it was OK. But deleting only some and only because of revenues is just wrong.

Best Definition Of Disruptive Technology I Read So Far

And, like other disruptive technologies, it's getting better all the time.
 
This, after all, is the typical pattern with disruptive technologies.  The disruptor enters at the low end of the market, providing a simple service that is cheaper and more convenient than incumbent alternatives and "good enough."  The low end of the market adopts the technology--and the incumbent players, which serve the profitable middle and high-end of the market--snigger and point out that their products are "better,"
 
But then the disruptor improves its product, the way the Huffington Post has improved its product for the last few years.  And soon the disruptive product is useful to the middle of the market as well--and it's still simpler and more convenient.  Soon, the incumbent player, under attack from below, is forced to migrate to the higher end of the market, seeking to preserve its huge profit margins.  Eventually, the disruptor takes over the middle of the market, and the incumbent player collapses.

I really recommend reading the full article which talks about how the Huffington Post is soon (in 2-3 years) to become bigger than the New York Time in terms of traffic and probably revenues. And to think that the Huffington Post is a 5 years old blog and the New York Time is a 120 years old publishing house. It sure is a great example that disruptive technology is more about disruptive use of technology (I'm sure that in pure terms of technology NYT is better than the Huffington Post).

This is why @CritSend is so awesome

Message I received earlier from CritSend's support team:
 
As you may have heard on Twitter or Facebook from thousands of panicked Hotmail users, Hotmail is having a problem and is currently refusing connections. At the moment, most Hotmail users are unable to receive any mail from outside of Hotmail. Anyone sending to a Hotmail domain is experiencing a connection refusal.

At CritSend we've built an emergency patch to store your hotmail emails and resend them when Hotmail has fixed their problem. 


At Topify we send over 1M emails through CritSend every month. When you send such amounts of emails it really becomes a headache, unless you use a great provider such as CritSend. They really do save us a lot of time (and money) and allow us to focus on building our product.

Arik

There's nothing wrong with Apple suing HTC. It's the whole concept of patents which is wrong

Today it's Apple filing a lawsuit against HTC, alleging that HTC infringing some of their patents - tomorrow it's Facebook who will file a lawsuit against the new kid in the block that will dare to implement newsfeeds. Patents on such things should be prohibited, they counteract innovation and competition. While HTC could afford buying rights from Apple for these patents (in case Apple would be willing to sell rights), I don't think the same is true for some bootstrapped social network that would like to compete against Facebook.

Patents make sense for industries were by just copying some process you can compete with the patent inventor on the same level. It was meant to protect the inventors investment. But this no longer applies to products such as the iPhone or Facebook (or their features). They aren't selling us some features, they're selling a user experience. And this no one can copy from them, and even if someone does - they should just innovate and become better and not file lawsuits.

At least that is what I think.

Arik

80% of Beejive IM Users Are Using an Illegal Copy

Many iPhone developers – such as those behind the popular IM client, Beejive – are reporting that 80 percent of their users are pirates. Yep. For every 10 users on Beejive, 8 of them didn’t pay for it.

(via Apple Moves To Block Jailbreaking In New iPhones http://bit.ly/HKG6t)

When most apps cost $1-10$ and have free alternatives, using a pirated copy is just being a bastard. Specially when most apps backed by small shops and that's the way they make their living.