I think Disqus is a great service, and I suspect that this business model will work fine for them, but it's obviously not ideal for everyone.
The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam & bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.
Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".
Gah. The old site and old pages will come back -- part of the shift that pmoz mentions above is that different teams ran the 2010 site and the 2012 version, and so we're learning (a bit late) how to build in permanence into the site structures).
That's cool. I think my first computer-related job was circa 1984, when I worked for Vera Molnar and her husband. Some of her art is in that archive, but there's more at http://www.veramolnar.com/diapo.php?y=1984.
All I really remember is being asked to draw triangles on the screen; an amazing interactive computer graphics simulation of a beach that let one adjust sun position and wave direction with knobs; and that I don't think I was ever paid; I don't really mind.
There is a notable exception: http://thefailcon.com/ "FailCon is a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their own and others' failures and prepare for success."
This is a tad off-topic, but I'd love something that's more like django's admin UI for mongo-using projects. Not the same tool, I know. What's a good word for something like that?
This comment thread is a bit depressing, but ignoring that.
One of the bits about the piece that has me scratching my head a bit is whether the mess that is dependency management in OSS operating systems (and generally OSS software distribution models) matters _enough_. While I very much share the author's reaction of "can't we do better?", it also feels that optimizing that mess isn't just a design exercise as much as a social one, because OSS isn't really a bazaar but a constellation of connected more-or-less-cathedralish bazaars. And I don't know that this mess is deeply problematic (although the author does find some egregious issues).
Design happens at a specific scale, and some scales reward investment in design more than others. Designing a chair that can be mass-produced is more effective than designing a room, which can't. One could argue that designing a self-contained piece of software (e.g. the Python runtime) matters more than designing a deliberately open system (e.g. the ecosystem of Python libraries), and that the alternative (random competition, forking, etc.) is Good Enough.
[for carbon dating: had my first IT job in the early 80s, as a teenager]
The target audience is very much _NOT_ real developers. Think of it as "lesson 2", where "lesson 1" is something like x-ray goggles: https://webmaker.org/en-US/tools/x-ray-goggles/ for someone who _knows nothing_ to start with. Your average (not geeky) 12-year old or 70-year old, for example.
I don't know that anyone's tried that yet. Boot2Gecko is focusing on making a real phone that people will really be able to buy, so working on a platform that requires "fighting the manufacturer" isn't a priority. But it's open source, so it's always possible that someone could take on what's likely a huge task! Currently B2G works on a couple of models, and requires Android ICS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla/Boot_to_Gecko/B2G_b...
I used to share your skepticism about single sign-on. I'm actually quite bullish about BrowserID because it uses concepts that both users and websites are very familiar with (email, 'validated email addresses'), and works it in a flow that feels very much like facebook connect. It's really neat rather than overengineered IMO (and I can say that because I didn't do any of the engineering ;-).
Similarly, the apps project is a lot about recognizing what mobile apps did well, and filling in the gaps in the web (stores, receipts, APIs) that will make it possible for people to translate their mobile appdev skills into the broader web.
The economics of hosting comments are interesting -- there is real engineering effort in doing it well; there is product value to some degree of aggregation (spam & bot detection, etc.); the operating expenses are real especially at a Disqus-style scale, but it's not clear that many people would pay even a small subscription fee.
Makes me wonder about the viability of either a federated (not fully p2p, but "local" aggregators), either with or without actual coordination between members of the federation on spammers, e.g.. I'd probably swallow the cost of hosting comments for a few thousand "neighborly" sites, if it meant i had a good commenting system with no commercial interruptions, and be happy to subsidize "good people".