I'm a self taught designer/developer, not a genius but pretty competent with some useful skills. No CS or Art/Design degree so a lot of companies (start-ups included) will dismiss me out of hand rather than for my own merits and failings. And as the saying goes, I know some really dumb people with some pretty great degrees.
I agree there's value to a degree (any and all degrees I mean) and there's certainly some painful ineptitudes in my self-taught skills which I might not have if I did a CS or Art/Design degree. My point is that just requiring a degree seems somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't tell you if I scraped through and don't really understand the subject or if I'm the next Woz. It doesn't tell you if I know how to ship or if I'll need constant hand-holding for the next few years.
Is there any chance that there's bit of a chicken/egg scenario going on here?
Maybe we won't see many coupons for LBS until they have a large enough slice of the retailer's demographic (or just a large enough % of the population) and few people will sign up to use these services if they don't have these coupons.
Facebook on the other hand is a different beast. A massively larger user base and greater brand recognition with companies. How many ads do you see on TV where the URL on the screen is to facebook.com/some-household-brand. Businesses are already savvy to the fact that a great proportion of their customer's traffic is on Facebook. Seems like a small jump to move your coupons from your Facebook page to your location/"Place" on Facebook. Gowalla and Foursquare don't have their foot in the door like Facebook does.
While FB is on a great trajectory in this space, as of right now I would guess Yelp serves more page views to people looking for information about restaurants. They have some deals but its not extremely compelling.
Two possibilities: Yelp is missing a big opportunity or that opportunity is an illusion; every restaurant doesn't want to offer coupons freely online.
I realize you didn't specifically say restaurants, but if it isn't happening in that extremely competitive industry, why would it happen anywhere else?
Is making a site or a business around other people's data (YouTube's, Vimeo's etc) a bit risky in the sense that if YouTube changed their policy or terms, or just got arsey, and blocked your access you might be left high and dry?
If I were an investor (which I'm not - no experience or skills in that area) I would be interested to hear your answer on that. What would plan "B" be if something like that were to happen?
>> "It is OK if a query is slow as long as it is always slow"
I'm having trouble understanding the motivation. If a slow query is always slow, then I'm always going to be kept waiting for that page/data. It seems logical to worry about the queries that 100% of the time keeps users waiting rather than the queries that keep users waiting <100% of the time.
Does anyone care to explain why this is a good idea (for Facebook at least)?
I'm sure the rationale here is that if a given query takes 100ms, they don't focus on getting it down to 50ms even if that's several times what the average is because they know they can. Certainly someone should focus on making that query faster, but it's more straightforward.
The harder problem is figuring out why that 20ms query suddenly balloons to 200ms. You can say, "no big deal, it only happens 1% of the time," but if you don't know why, you could make changes to the system that cause it to happen much more frequently and eventually bring the whole system down.
Also, there's a bit of UX here. People are much more frustrated by things they don't understand and/or aren't used. There are parts of GMail that are always slow (archiving a lot of messages). I know this so I know I have to wait 5-10 seconds. What if sometimes it took 1 second and sometimes it took 20 seconds? What if it took 20 seconds 5% of the time. I'd probably always click again and think something was broken. If it's always slow, I want it to be faster, but at least I know what to expect.
It's all about user experience. If a feature loads for you in 300ms, then it will feel unbearably slow if it later take 700ms. If the feature always loaded at 700ms, your expectation of 700ms would never be disappointed. The theory is that a consistent 700ms is more appealing than an inconsistent 300-700ms, even though the median is better in terms of raw performance.
The parent hints at this by talking about minimizing unpredictability and describing Facebook as "people oriented" - it ultimately boils down to user experience.
Think of it this way: if you know a certain function will reliably take a little while to complete, you can justify the effort of adding progress indicators and other feedback to let the user know.
But if query performance is unpredictable, even planning the UI design becomes difficult - not to mention the end user's experience.
From the site: "Although fake smiles often look very similar to genuine smiles, they are actually slightly different, because they are brought about by different muscles, which are controlled by different parts of the brain."
This raises an interesting point. I've often expressed that same sentiment without examining the underlying emotion or motivation for it: I'm sad that you got something done that you wanted to do and I'm stuck here seeing other people coo over it while I'm working on crappy projects I don't care about.
Now that I see that I'll endeavor to never act so hideously towards another's creativity, for my own good, and try to make the time to waste on things I care about.
I'm a self taught designer/developer, not a genius but pretty competent with some useful skills. No CS or Art/Design degree so a lot of companies (start-ups included) will dismiss me out of hand rather than for my own merits and failings. And as the saying goes, I know some really dumb people with some pretty great degrees.
I agree there's value to a degree (any and all degrees I mean) and there's certainly some painful ineptitudes in my self-taught skills which I might not have if I did a CS or Art/Design degree. My point is that just requiring a degree seems somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't tell you if I scraped through and don't really understand the subject or if I'm the next Woz. It doesn't tell you if I know how to ship or if I'll need constant hand-holding for the next few years.