I think that can come in handy in a business-to-business situation. For example, if you have two engineers you can either call them each a "Software Developer" or you can have a "VP of Engineering" and a "CTO".
Now when your customer, Huge-Corp(TM), who is going to pay the bills for the next 3 months calls, would you rather tell them "let me put one of our developers on the phone" or "let me put our vice president of engineering on the phone"?
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; InfoPath.3; MS-RTC LM 8)
Timestamp: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:39:09 UTC
Thanks for the details. I didn't test dance mode in IE. I thought I'd cut myself some slack since it's just an easter egg. I'll see what I can do though!
Nice page, but you won't be able to read the text on smaller screens. You may want to consider making the height of that huge graphic dynamic (within limits).
I made hi-res cutouts of each person. The plan is just to shrink everyone slightly and add the new people to the left and right. I'm not sure how it will look, but that's the idea at least.
Also, at first I was worried about matching the lighting in the new photos, but these cutouts are all from different photos and the lighting was quite a bit different between each shot already. I'm no expert, but I just played with the levels in PhotoShop until things looked right. I think it came out looking pretty good.
I very much doubt that Gregg Gillis will send them a takedown notice. (They are technically violating his copyright since the track is under a non-commercial/attribution Creative Commons license and they seem to violate both those terms. Gregg Gillis, however, doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would send out petty takedown notices.)
6 up-votes, so I take even your VP of sales now got the HN account :)
(edit) The page itself - I am trying to like it, but something about it rubs me the wrong way. It might be that it is too personal and overly playful, and people look somewhat unnatural, almost as if they were forced to look having fun. This coupled with sudden image swaps creates the impression of a twitchy teenager trying to look cool rather than a smug bunch of sociable geeks. Also your CEO needs a shave, looks kind of unkempt, and Jeff's photo is of a different scale, so he looks like a person with a small head.
Oh, and the dance mode doesn't appear to be working in FF3 on Windows. Typing "dance" does not do anything.
It took considerable willpower to not downvote you (though it appears that somebody else already has) -- but really? Making fun of somebody's facial hair?
For the record, they all look a little bit unkempt (except Brendan, who I'm guessing is single ;-)). To most people, that's a job perk -- not having to put on a suit and tie and be perfectly prepared every single day.
Not nitpicking, no. He is a head of the company, and his appearance contributes to the overall company's image. Consider what your first impression of a company would be if its CEO were a pierced dude with dreadlocks. Same goes here, "relaxed" and "approachable" is nice for socializing, but in business context it might be less desirable than "reliable" and "organized".
I will take back the unkempt, but I would still insist on Chris needing a shave. Now, back to the downvoting frenzy.
I'd actually feel more comfortable calling these guys on the phone or having a sitdown business lunch with one of them after watching this video. Too many business folks take themselves too seriously.
And Chris looks like he's shaved as close as he can. Didn't come off to me as a five o'clock shadow at all.
It's definitely not the "typical SF thing" etc, but to anybody outside California, this feels refreshing.
Great job