Category Archives: opinion

Invite me!

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It seems that a lot of emerging web apps today are invite-only during alpha/beta. This is smart because it allows you to limit the number of users as you deal with design, coding bugs and scalability issues. However, I’ve noticed that these sites bring a lot of attention to themselves because only a select few are able to gain access to the site. Think about it, you’re get free marketing from these select few who are offering invite codes to their friends. These friends want to know what’s going on, sign up and then brag to their friends about what exclusive service they got into (I would know, I’ve done it :-P)

Like an exclusive Hollywood night club, those who are “on the list” feel like they are part of the “in-crowd” while those who arn’t on the list want in. Sites like pownce and dopplr have benefited greatly from this because they now stand out from hundreds of 2.0 startups that many people could care less about at the moment. Since you need to be invited to joined, all of a sudden people want to see what it’s all about.

Remember when Gmail first came out? The fact that it gave users 1GB of storage was pretty remarkable at the time. However, the craze for Gmail started because it was invite only. I remember people were SELLING invites on eBay for a pretty decent amount of cash. Is an online email provider worth bidding on eBay for? Apparently it was because it was an exclusive service.

Civil Disobedience with 1 Click of a Button

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The reason for Digg’s popuulary is the ease of it’s voting system.  If you like a story you click a “Digg It” button and the number of “Diggs” the story has is updated without any page load.  If you haven’t seen or heard, the digg front page is going crazy with stories with regards to a number.  If you wat me to be more specific: 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0.  Why?  Well coincidently that number (Hexadecimal number) just so happens to be the same as the HD-DVD encryption key.  So what does that have to do with civil disobedience?  Well apparently digg is trying to block stories that involve this number.  Censor if you will.  How funny that a number can cause so much trouble.

Due to Digg’s ease of use, people have been fighting back by posting story after story involving this number.  Taking up an entire page as a matter of fact.  Many of these stories have received well over 1000-2000 diggs which is pretty high for any story on digg.  Never  before have I seen so many people banding together  to fight back.

I’m sure there’s a lot to be said here.  About ease of use.  About your community.  About not turning your back on your user base.  About selling out (After all, who was a sponsor of diggnation?).

To be honest the HD-DVD key and everything I said above is really insignificant.  I find it stunning that a number of people will cause so much trouble in regards to a number, yet I see little being done about our political system.  Why?  I mean I hear a lot of people TALK about it, but nothing is done.  We’ve pretty much turned into lazy activists who will only do something if we can make a change with a click of a button.  Perhaps I’m just a hypocrite by not doing much myself, but it really makes you think.  Today our president vetoed a bill that would end the war in Iraq and we’re concerned about a fucking number.  Maybe if we could click something to impeach our president, more people would care.  Of course nothing will ever be that easy.

Gates dares anybody to exploit Vista

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I saw this article on digg just now and I think it’s a brilliant move by Gates.  Let me just say that Bill Gates is not an idiot.  He knows that there is no such thing as perfect software (perhaps with the exception of QMail?).  He also knows that software testing is also a long and expensive process that is not always complete.  Put those pieces together and you can turn the initial users into software testers!  To further elaborate, I think he’s trying to mock people into finding all of the bugs they can find and submit them to Microsoft to prove him wrong.  Of course they will prove him wrong, but Microsoft will then fix those bugs accordingly and then be able to push their software on businesses because it will truly have no more bugs!

We remember the Windows RPC buffer overflow exploit, right?  Well to refresh our memories, it existed up to Windows XP SP1 and allowed remote access to any vulnerable machine.  That was a big embarrassment to Microsoft right there.  If you encourage people to find as many bugs as possible when the user base is low, it’s not much as an embarrassment and a much smaller fire to extinguish if a major bug is found.

Of course this is all speculation/opinion, but wouldn’t that make for a great strategy?