I agree that Reddit is taking a naive view on Advertising. There is a huge amount of value to be added here, both to Reddit and the Community by an effective Advertising platform. I'll speak with examples:
r/gaming, a post about Borderlands2 with a sponsored ad that links to one-click checkout on Steam.
r/politics
A post about Romney's many lies featuring a donate to Obama link, or vice versa.
r/fitness
Featuring a sponsored Ad to a local crossfit gym that is having a free trial.
To pull this off they need much better Advertiser control, sentiment analysis of posts, and inclusion into a larger Ad Exchange (or offer Reddit inventory via an exchange model).
Adding some type of effect to show that the shirts are actively being bought (I imagine every few seconds half a shirt 'flash') would give the sale more of an active-feeling. Right now I don't feel strongly urged to make a decision right now, but rather that I could come back later.
Second comment: Rather than giving away the least popular shirt, you could apply some type of variable pricing depending on when a user purchased a shirt given its popularity?
My name is on the no fly list (well, mine and a million others). I get 'randomly' stopped by customs every time I re-enter the country through an airport. This doesn't happen at passport control but rather at customs. I've started leaving notes addressed "Dear TSA" in my luggage just to laugh at the expression on the agents face as they go through my dirty clothes.
The author states that in his time at Google he realizes it was always a company funded by ads, but that he did not have to personally feel the need for Ads in all products. That's a fair point. Where I lost him is his connection of Google+ with Ads.
I disagree that G+ is an Ads play. It's a play for staying relevant on the internet. When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system. They want CNN to post articles into the CNN FB stream. They want people to read those articles on the CNN page (yes, this currently links to outside FB... that will change). They want to do this so that you never have to leave FB, and in fact if you look at the user behavior of 13-17 year olds you will see disturbing trends that this is the case.
Facebook is a danger to a free and open internet by becoming the de-facto internet. I concede that this is a stretch, but it is within their power to do so and from my understanding is how their strategy is lined up.
TL;DR: G+ is only about Ads in the way that Google needs users to serve Ads to and there is a threat that all users of the internet only go to Facebook and nowhere else.
Most of my work is done in Ruby or Python and deployed via Heroku or EC2. I would look for someone who can either work in those frameworks, or can rewrite it in their language of choice.
It would be great to have the ability to post-pay. I can imagine finishing the book and realizing that it was worth $20, and wanting to pay more. In this case if I come back to LeanPub there would be a list of books I selected to postpay, so after I finished reading them I could judge the true value and pay that (or add to what I have already paid).
96% of revenue in the most recent quarter came from Advertising. If Google hadn't pioneered contextually relevant advertising it would likely be bankrupt today (as no VC would front the money it costs to run and maintain the datacenters powering search today).
To my knowledge complying with COPPA is a difficult and tedious process. Common sense does not apply, and in fact, in my understanding, can often put you in violation of the law (for example: stating that you are going to remove someones access for being underage , because then they can reasonably understand that lying is in their best interest).
I disagree becuase the chromebook functions under the idea that 99% of what users need to do happens within the browser. OSX makes the guess that what the users need to do happens within the Apple Entertainment Ecosystem... (Disclaimer: I use both)
I agree in principle that claiming the path to A is by doing B is generally a pyramid scheme situation. However, this author came across differently because of his specific situation. I read it more along the lines of the Randy Pausch quotation about brick walls keeping us from achieving what we want.
'The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!'
Also the growth is not necessarily all in engineering. For example, I think Twitter is going to be needing a sales team to help push any pending ad products.
Depends on the team. I worked at a few different ones at MSFT, and generally the position was - two machines. Two desktops? Ok. Desktop + Laptop? Ok.
Most developers went for the desktop x2 plan. PM's almost always went desktop + laptop.
Again, this was for NEW machines. I had, at my peak, 6. 4 desktops and 2 laptops. Most of these were random old peices of hardware that were fit for recycling (but still fully functional!) that I used for whatever side projects I needed the hardware for.
Everyone always complains about their PC hardware - but not once did I see someone who actually needed a piece of hardware go without it. Monitor upgrades, for some reason, were much rarer and didn't make sense at all.
Perhaps the type of people that would employee a man of this skillset are more likely to have a facebook account than the general population. It's also not that far off to imagine that those folks would be logged in already via cookies. For that target population the user experience probably works.
I saw the exact same thing. I had something like 1.25%-1.5% CTR from the mobile network, with no conversions. It was pretty terrible, and I disabled advertising on mobile networks (on by default) to save the wasted funds.
I've also now seen hundreds of networks where I get 100% CTR (2-3 impressions, all leading to clicks) on what are obviously junk/spam sites. Each of these only cost me a couple quarters, but it quickly adds up.
It's easier now to travel then it has ever been before. I can wake up in the US and decide to have dinner in Paris.
This versus having to tough a weeks long voyage across the Atlantic followed by months in wagons crossing unfriendly territory where I might die Oregan Trail style.
Sure, airports could be better. But if you think the difficulty of airports now outweights the benefits of travelling I am surprised our ancestors ever left their huts.
I'd be interested to see the distribution of passports geographically across the US. Some parts of the United States just don't lend themselves to easy travelling. Other than Canada or Mexico it isn't as easy to travel abroad (or neccessary) as it is for Europeans. The US spans Mountains for skiing, beaches for surfing, jungles, deserts, you name it - we've got the geography for it. In fact, it would be interesting to compare these statistics to possibly europeans leaving the EU zone (since then we would have geographically equivalent sets).
In conclusion - get a passport, travelling is awesome!
r/gaming, a post about Borderlands2 with a sponsored ad that links to one-click checkout on Steam.
r/politics A post about Romney's many lies featuring a donate to Obama link, or vice versa.
r/fitness Featuring a sponsored Ad to a local crossfit gym that is having a free trial.
To pull this off they need much better Advertiser control, sentiment analysis of posts, and inclusion into a larger Ad Exchange (or offer Reddit inventory via an exchange model).