Your photos are good. Getting instagram followers in itself is a separate set of skills than being a good photographer. There is no scope of "organic" growth when the platform is swamped with people trying out different tricks.
The list is very long. I really wish a rebranding or renaming or merging of services was somehow listed or displayed separately. This would give a better idea of the services actually killed.
Yes i added ads initially. But I always made sure they did not compromise with user experience. The ad revenue was not significant initially. It has grown steadily over couple of years as the user base has increased.
Monthly ~4-5k USD from Adsense through my Android Apps, and couple of hundred from in app sales for removing ads. I made my apps just to learn about Android initially. I did not know it would be a big hit. So, I just kept on adding features as per popular demand.
I don't think it is right to jump to conclusions based on those images. I have been to one of the clean rooms, where the satellite ASTROSAT was being created. We were in the outer most room. And for that too we had to wear these bunny suits covering all of our body, hair and skin. The actual satellite was in inner levels, where standards were higher and we were not allowed to go. We were not allowed to take any instrument inside of that room. So there were no photos. May be that is the reason for this perception, it is just bad PR. Based on my experience I do find that ISRO takes these standards very seriously.
I see apps trying to overcome this trust deficit by using phrases like. "We wont post anything on your feed" . "No posts. We promise". Even if it isn't a legal commitment, It might go a long way in convincing users. Especially if there is a brand involved.
I have had the fortune of working on this IIT right after my IIT :). I worked on implementing the research software used by Giulio Tononi and his research team. I added a visualizer in OpenGL, and optimized the calculations for calculating integrated information.
I rely on it heavily. I have my home folder backed up and synced across machines on Ubuntu One. But I am using the free tier < 5GB. I will have to move on to other alternatives.
I guess it wouldn't have been sustainable for them, seeing as others are giving a lot more in free tier. So they would have had only a handful of paying customers.
This foot-in-the-door techniques and many other things have been covered beautifully in an ongoing course https://www.coursera.org/course/socialpsychology.
It is about to be over. I do recommend going through the videos. There is a lot to learn.
Man-Made or not, At least they have existed. That should be enough to add it to periodic table. There is always a non zero probability that they might exist somewhere else in the universe.
I was involved in a Blackberry portathon. They were offering USD 100 for each of the approved apps submitted at that time. This incentive surely didn't help. I remember participants there, raising concerns about 20-30 different apps by same user converting one currency to another. But it seems BB wanted quantity so badly that they are ready to compromise on the quality side. Infact they were actively promoting a 3rd party tool Blackberry app generator (or something similar). Which was just a app generator packaging single RSS feed as an app.
That would have suggested dominance of bureaucracy in Google. Guidelines suggesting projects to be put on Google Code, etc. This seems more decentralized.
I think the example he took of moving sites from Linode to EC2 is one of the better things he can do while avoiding working on his product. As he claimed he did learn something, adding value to his skills. But yeah, I get the point. There are so many other things which might not be productive.