This article is very interesting. However, while reading, it sounded like a late night infomercial. There may be real value in this style of teaching Math, but as my first introduction, this Times article feels like the sponsored hooks used for products such as those baby reading flash cards and acne medication.
I hope that the Jump system is real and that it solves the problems outlined in the article.
Camera phones with video recording capabilities are almost ubiquitous. More then that, they're cheaper and solve the primary usage case better then the portable Flip cameras do. Flip cameras provided better quality portable video and now that embedded mobile technology has caught up to that quality, justifying the price to carry around another device is difficult.
Camera phones probably made it inevitable. But Cisco certainly accelerated matters.
I got a Flip camera phone 3 or 4 years back for Christmas. Great impulse buy. I think there was only 1 model. Less than $100. Didn't use it that much but still loved it. Girlfriend, too. Great for trips.
Loved it so much that when it crapped out, we decided to get a new one this year, even though we both have good smartphones. Now there were 2 or 3 models of Flip. None less than $150. I just wanted what I had before. Simple, cheap, works.
I think I got a discounted one on Amazon for a little under $150. Get it in the mail. Doesn't work out of the box. Neither Linux nor Windows computer recognizes it. Won't charge. After an hour on the phone with a woman in the Philippines, we finally got it charging. First time we try to use it, it just shuts down. It was on the next flight back to Amazon.
There was still a market for the old Flip: me. Cisco screwed the pooch on this.
Agreed. We got one from our ISP when we signed up for fiber. Not sure I would actually buy one, given that my wife has an iPhone, but the Flip has been very useful.
The popularity of apps like hipstamatic, instagram etc. has somewhat mitigated the desperate need for high quality on these devices. If not in all demographics, i'd hazard a guess in those that would otherwise be most vocal about it.
Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow.
Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better.
I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.
Hmm... yeah, after about a half hour clicking the buttons, I don't think that I'll use your app more then once.
It really is a nice way to cull my followers. I'm trying really hard to keep my Twitter account topical and interesting. However, spending the time to go through each and every user more then once doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
The follow to followers ratio was something we definitely considered and will hopefully be able to put into a future version! We think it's a cool stat, but we didn't want to clutter the page with numbers and make it overbearing.
The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.
A few people might see your product and stick around, but I think that the brand confusion (and potential law suit) might be strong enough con's to negate these few users.
>The rate of people who would visit your new product and then immediately leave would be high. Generally, this is called bounce rate.
Would that be a bad thing? Even those that left would then know that your site existed, which isn't without value.
As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this. If anything, you could then change your name slightly, and get some press about it.
They'd have a negative association with it, since the site didn't give them what they wanted. You don't want to start your first impression with a negative.
Possibly the majority of people would know what it was before clicking, because the search engine description would tell them. In that case they're just fulfilling their curiosity, which can only be good.
The 'move on' part doesn't exactly speak well for capturing new customers. Certainly not well enough that you'd sacrifice a better, more appropriate name?
Well, I guess the quality of the name is another point entirely, and the scheme might unravel there. :) I just thought it was an interesting idea. If the quora spike did come from Tron, I think it's at least interesting to consider engineering such an accident. It might be good, bad, or a wash, but IMO I think the bounces would be an overall positive. The name... that is another problem.
> As far as names matching a character in a movie, I think it would be very difficult to make a suit out of this.
You would be very surprised:
'Some controversy has risen in Germany, where Albert Uderzo's own publishing company, Les Éditions Albert René, is claiming in court that certain IT companies whose name end in "ix" (not unnatural in companies who work with Unix) are damaging his brands "Asterix" and "Obelix".'
Google Trends monitors search terms, not traffic. The Google Trends graph is relative to the total search volume for the keyword Quora.
Web traffic is a very different thing. It's how many people actually visit a site. Here's an estimate of Quora's traffic:
http://www.quantcast.com/Quora.com
You can see that while they've experienced a significant peak in traffic that has resulted in a recent decrease, they're doing very well.
^^^ I came here to say this. With that said, I'm a little sick of the quora hype. I have a love/hate relationship with the UI decisions they made. I haven't had a ton of luck with the questions I've asked on the site, but I have found it useful when researching existing (answered) questions. Although those questions tend to be very valley/startup centric.
The argument presented in the article blames MySpace's decline on "staff, architecture, and business plan".
While I agree that these things are contributing to the decline in MySpace's influence and traffic, the underlying problem is the engagement of the community. MySpace is a Social Networking site that rely on a community of users.
People want to be at "the coolest party". They want to talk to the coolest people and engage in the coolest party games. In a separate, but similar example, musicians need to reinvent themselves in order to maintain their mass-market appeal.
MySpace's failure is that it hasn't re-invented itself to stay cool. Their recent design change was too little, too late and relied far too much on the past. The redesign was like "the old guy at the party" trying to make conversation - everyone feels a bit odd that he's there.
Facebook will suffer the same fate unless they eventually reinvent themselves or truly transition into becoming a Social Network Platform. Something new will come along that has slightly cooler tech but more importantly, draws the coolest collection of people.
