For both preservation and nostalgia, this is fantastic to see. Several of my formative years were consumed by Pinball Fantasies on the Amiga. I still play it regularly on FS-UAE and a (seemingly unmaintained / defunct) port on iOS.
I somehow doubt the likes of Thiel, Levchin and the other early Paypal folks were 'stupid'. But then, they really didn't have to run it for a long period of time at eBay so maybe one has to question what eBay was thinking.
The Google cache is gone and Archive.org doesn't have a copy either.
This is the kind of thing that worries me about publishing on the Internet — in print, everyone who had a copy of the article previously would still have it. Pulled from the blog, it's just... gone.
Match.com just shelled out $50 million for New York's homegrown dating site OKCupid, the dating site known for being free, giving its users quizzes, and turning those surveys into fascinating plunges into the human psyche at the OKTrends blog.
The press release indicates that OKCupid will not be shut down and its users siphoned into one of Match.com's subscription-based dating sites. OKCupid cofounder Sam Yagan will head up the company's New York office and continue to run the company's day-to-day operations. "We are excited to join forces with Match because it is clear that no company is more committed to helping people find relationships," he said. "This marriage offers us the best of both worlds: the autonomy to continue pursuing OkCupid's original vision and the ability to leverage Match's reach and expertise to grow even faster."
Match.com and OKCupid are now owned by New York's IAC, which operates some of the best-known properties on the web.
There's already speculation that OKCupid will lose some of its fun hipster personality. Already a blog post titled, "Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating," has been removed.
An excerpt from that post:
Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize.
For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site:
Women get too many bad matches
Men get far too few replies
For another thing, as I'll explain, pay sites have a unique incentive to profit from their customers' disappointment.
As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt. But I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won't be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I'll use is from Match and eHarmony's own public statements. I'll list my sources at the bottom of the post, in case you want to check.
...
It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.
...
So next time you hear Match or eHarmony talking about how huge they are, you should do like I do and think of Goliath-and how he probably bragged all the time about how much he could bench. Then you should go sign up for OkCupid.
Hopefully OKCupid will keep its personality and its trendy trends blog intact despite being acquired by its 16-year old cousin.
Wow, I didn't expect that. "We didn't censor it, we just took it down!" Pretty much the only thing that could leave a worse taste in my mouth about it.
Wait, I'm naive in these matters, but how can the Google cache of a page be "gone" (I checked just now and the page is there), doesn't Google keep a copy forever?
AFAIK the Google cache is just that: a cache. If a page is deleted, the cached version will also expire after some time. For permanent record, you need the wayback machine, but that has much fewer sites in it than Google.
I'd like to garner your opinions: what else could IAC have done in this situation? Or perhaps a better question is what you would have done in their shoes.
One property is threatening the business model of another in a visible way (at least in search engine rankings). I propose that the readership of OkTrends is minimal compared to the wider online dating market, so was this the prudent course of action?
Well, let's assume for the sake of argument that the post was pulled as a result of pressure from IAC, Match.com, etc. I don't know that this is the case, but it certainly seems plausible.
So, what should IAC/Match.com/whoever have done in this situation? Leave it the heck alone! First of all, by owning two of the biggest players in online dating, customer acquisition is basically a zero-sum game as far as IAC is concerned- presumably, any customers lost to Match.com from OKCupid's blog post would end up going with OKCupid instead, and therefore either way IAC wins, so what does it matter? Of course, this assumes that an OKCupid customer is of equal value as a Match.com customer, which may or may not be true.
Secondly, it's important for IAC/Match.com to keep in mind larger question of why they felt like it was worthwhile to own OKCupid in the first place. Presumably, they wanted to own it because it targeted a different customer population than their other properties; part of the reason that it does so is because of its quirky, "edgy", and open image. It's 2011; people notice when companies take down influential and well-known blog posts, and their opinions of these companies change accordingly. Ergo, by pulling these sorts of shenanigans, IAC or Match.com is potentially undermining the very thing that made OKCupid attractive to them.
I suppose one could try and do some sort of calculation:
X = # customers lost to Match.com as a result of OKCupid's "don't pay for online dating" post;
Y = # customers alienated, amount of bad publicity, internal drama at OKCupid, bad karma, etc. resulting from taking down a well-known (and accurate) blog post
Is X > Y? Mazel tov, take down the post. Is Y > X? Leave it alone; monkeying with it will do more harm than good.
Note that this sort of calculation is essentially impossible to do in a principled way; as such, it seems to me that the sensible course would have been to just leave it alone and focus on making better products.
But what do I know? I'm just a informatics nerd, not a business expert, so maybe there's more to the situation than I'm seeing.
The blog is part of the OKC brand, possibly the part with the most integrity. Given this, the blog is part of the value that IAC was purchasing. Regardless of IAC's intentions, the OKC blog (and the pay-dating article) was part of the reason they were an attractive acquisition target.
I have to wonder whether this deal is related to the "should I sell to these guys?" question last week.
In their dating persona test (http://www.okcupid.com/the-dating-persona-test) there is the line "If you have any STDs please go HERE." wherein HERE was a link to match.com. It now goes to mingle2.com.
That link actually rotates randomly between their major competitors. In a few reloads, I got Plenty of Fish, True, eHarmony, and Mingle2. It's likely that they've pulled Match from that rotation, though.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing that line disappear altogether, as it always struck me as being in somewhat poor taste.
A brief guide to a customer acquisition, i.e., your business was bought for its customers.
1. Even though they didn't buy you for your technology or your human capital, they will tell you they did.
2. They'll tell you that they bought you because they never could have accomplished what you did, because of your talented personnel and unique culture, which they plan to carefully preserve and benefit from.
3. Then they will deprecate your technology, drive away your best people, and force you to work just like they do.
4. When the shit hits the fan, the product declines, and you can't even get small releases out the door, you'll think, "Aha, now at least we will get our 'told you so' moment, when they finally realize what they've done." But they knew all along what they were doing. They wanted your customers, they got them, and they don't feel any sense of loss at what they destroyed.
Just watched it based on (and add support to) your recommendation. George Lois in particular demonstrates a clear and cutting vision that I shall try to stimulate in myself.
Unless you're in a group, and it becomes a social activity.
Unless computers become ubiquitous commodities that represent both consumer product and fashion-like icons of social status.
Unless services such as 1-800-GOOG-411 exist.
Although I do not disagree with what is being said here, do not overlook the fact that Nintendo, as content distributor (WiiWare) and arbitre of several distribution platforms have a vested interest in downplaying the role of piracy. They are certainly not an impartial observer.
More than a content distributor, Nintendo is a major developer (via its numerous first-party studios) and publisher. While not an impartial observer, their businesses would peg them on the side of "any piracy is a problem" more than "piracy is not a problem".
I understand the sentiment expressed here. One thing I've recently done to mediate this is purchase a Kindle: transferring my once isolated consumption of copious content to a social activity around friends and loved ones. Far from a distraction, I find the ability to converse over coffee adds to my understanding and meliorates my memory.
I have thus far resisted smart phones and the like as I find ubiquitous connectivity distracting.
I've spent the past two years working for one of the monolithic IT consulting firms. Communication overhead is something anyone attempting to understand enterprise software needs to grasp. Omnipresent meetings occur as an individual's defence mechanism. It is a mischaracterisation to treat it as a problem divorced from corporate structure, as they really are two sides to one coin.
Holding a meeting keeps a paper trail of your attempts to solve a problem and dilutes responsibility across all those involved. Hence, despite the fact that all participants likely sit within ten metres of each other a meeting will still be scheduled: complete with calendar invites, hour-length time blocks (as less would not look like the issue is being given sufficient credence) and the scheduling of follow-up meetings.
Additionally, enterprise projects do not consist of harmonious teams. Each team is akin to a project of its own: each with its own corporate structure, politics, budgets, risks and resources. I recently had a manager from one team demand I attend dual hour-long meetings per day for her team. I politely declined, stating that to do so my team would require an additional resource to cover this gap. This did not ingratiate me.
