I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup.
And that’s cool! Embrace that. More people need to do stupid shit. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Don’t do it to make money. Don’t even do it to learn hip new technology X. Do it for the sake of doing something stupid
"I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup"
brings up a good point. at what point can we separate the real startups from the hacks?
in general, the best startups are not started because of money. you'll lose track of the essence of what you're doing as money clouds your perspective.
as guy kawasaki likes to say, "if you create meaning, you'll often create money"
I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup.
I think this is so true. A startup seems to imply that it will at least in theory become a business at some point. I bet that Facebook didn't even call itsself a "web startup" when it started out at Harvard until it started to spread and raised some real money.
To call every little project that someone hacks together in a weekend a startup is a misnomer, similar to the tendency for founders to give themselves C-Level titles in their startup companies which consist of nothing more than a prototye and a pitch, rather than just calling themselves 'founders'.
Maybe we need a new word in the vocabulary for this employment category.
It's hard to explain to people who ask me, "What do you do?" Well, I don't have a job exactly. I quit that in order to work full-time on something that I hope will make money someday. There is no legally incorporated business... yet. So it's not really a startup, but it's not what you think of as unemployment either. If I tell people, "I'm doing a tech startup," they go, "Oh! That's cool." And I count that as a successful social encounter.
So true. In fact, I also believe the word "founders" implies a glorified version of what at the end of the day simply are "authors", or to suit better this site: "hackers".
A derivative idea. Not that this takes away anything from the service. Most ideas and successful implementations aren't of the kind we've never seen before.
What the human race perceives as creativity is largely mashup of what others have done in a new way. Mozart? Derivative of music played by instruments. Van Gogh? Derivative of people painting on canvases.
Once you start being too picky about what an idea is, you start to lose sight of what makes the idea awesome or why creation is so much fun in the first place.
Everything has degrees of originality. Google didn't invent the search engine but they came up with a great way to monetise it (oh and some algorithm too).
This is a novel idea. Storing contact details for concurrent people and presenting them to each other in a randomised way. I've not seen this anywhere using telephone numbers, skype, email addresses - it's novel. Chatroulette connects people directly through its own servers, Facetime is one-to-one video chat. This is something that bridges those two in a simple way.
We’re in the most ridiculous industry on earth. You can whip something up in a few hours and before you know it, people around the world will be using it.
The awesome thing about holman, is that he did this app just for fun and the love of "the hack". In my opinion he will gain much more than a chunk of ad revenue. A very well-respected reputation. This to me seems much more valuable than even $5k ad revenue. I don't feel like we would be talking about him near as much if facelette.com was some spammy looking "made for adwords" app.
When you go to the site it is just so pure and honest, it doesn't make you question what you are doing, or who is doing what with your information.
It's funny that the HN crowd talked about something like this 4 months ago, and it took holman just a few hours to ship. Only goes to show that ideas are cheap :)
"Don't be afraid to build things for the sake of building them"
Completely agree here. Plus, it's only after you actually build out an idea that it really has any transferable value. There are definitely going to be ideas you have that seem a little off or even stupid, but don't let that stop you. Otherwise we would live in a pretty dull world of gray color and political correctness.
What you are witnessing is the predictions of Alvin Toffler comming about. From WP,
<quote>The gap between producer and consumer is bridged by technology using a so called configuration system. "Prosumers" can fill their own needs (see open source, assembly kit, freelance work). This was the notion that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the prosumer. In some cases prosuming entails a "third job" where the corporation "outsources" its labor not to other countries, but to the unpaid consumer, such as when we do our own banking through an ATM instead of a teller that the bank must employ, or trace our own postal packages on the internet instead of relying on a paid clerk.</quote>
As more internet users become Prosumers, the idea of a 'startup' becomes trite. Instead, everyone is a business or two on their own.
I tried it on my mbp with facetime beta, connected with couple of people in spain, US, it was fun initially. we gave small intros, asked where they were from etc
but the later group was not interested even to talk, they wanted chatroulette style, you would see empty walls, close up eyes and nose, they all disconnected under 5 seconds probably they wanted a girl on their screen
ApplicationController is sort of the general controller Rails generates that all your other controllers inherit from. Facelette is so simplistic I didn't need to dig into it at all.
The real meat of it appears to be based around the new (to me, anyway) facetime:// protocol, which I'm assuming FaceTime.app handles. Take a look at the sessions/queue view for more.
Yup. That's basically the whole reason behind why I made it, once I saw facetime://. Otherwise everything else would be unbearably cumbersome. With that snippet of knowledge, anyone could make a clone (and I encourage it!)
By "endless", you mean the 5-6 concurrent users likely on at the same time as you. Also, there's an extremely high chance that all the email addresses are throwaway accounts. It's not nearly as big of a deal as many have mentioned.
I think it speaks to the fact that today's technology lets you quickly make products that people want to talk about. I don't think it's necessarily a condemnation of TechCrunch or that Facelette is impressive (the latter of which is definitely untrue).
I’ve also come to loathe this mentality, at times. It’s the same mentality where someone whips up a two-page website and asks people to “review their startup!” I think startup is a phrase that’s been abused. You’ve made a project, or a mashup, or a hack, not a startup.
And that’s cool! Embrace that. More people need to do stupid shit. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Don’t do it to make money. Don’t even do it to learn hip new technology X. Do it for the sake of doing something stupid