It’s a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions, and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing.
I’m trying to create a piece of interactive art. Can you help by drawing something? It should only take 5 minutes.
I’d like you to draw a picture of your soul. How you imagine it to look.
How do you ask a stranger (not necessarily fluent in English) to recall and describe their private emotions? A survey was developed and tested over a number of weeks.
Web hooks are user-defined callbacks over HTTP. Conceptually, web applications only have a request-based “input” mechanism: web APIs. They lack an event-based output mechanism, and this is the role of web hooks.
Consumer startups are tough. You have two basic choices: A paid offering or a free offering (or freemium). If you charge people a penny, you’ll turn off the bulk of your visitors. If you offer free services, you might grow to be the next YouTube, Wordpress or Facebook. Most entrepreneurs are not risk-averse and the dream of being big is just too appealing and the majority of us take the “free-route”.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/30/the-little-secret-of-web-startups/
by Joel Spolsky
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done.
Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American Express bill. But getting back into the flow of writing code just doesn’t happen.
by Joel Spolsky
“I don’t know what’s wrong with my development team,” the CEO thinks to himself. “Things were going so well when we started this project. For the first couple of weeks, the team cranked like crazy and got a great prototype working. But since then, things seem to have slowed to a crawl. They’re just not working hard any more.”
It seems that the web has been so thoroughly infected by the memes of “the future is free”, “we’ll all live from ads”, “VC money will get us there”, and “acquisition is nirvana” that it has almost lost its faith in the simpler ways.
It’s depressing and it’s wrong, but I also think it’s going to change. I think the days of the traditional San Francisco startup approach are numbered. It’ll be flushed down the drain along with CDO’s and zero-down mortgages.
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1615-how-did-the-web-lose-faith-in-charging-for-stuff (Comentariile sunt foarte interesante)
