I've worked for David for two years. I can honestly say he is the nicest person I've ever met. Genuinely kind and thoughtful, and wants the best for the site and the people that use it.
We were actually pretty surprised to see users sharing their startpages on their blogs and such. At first we didn't really get it; I mean the only reason we made them public was so that you could access it from where ever you were without having to log in. Basically, we made start.io to act as an attachment to a browser.
But some people really do like sharing their links. Maybe it's just that they're used to sharing all their content online. One of the most visited start pages comes from a ministry sharing belief-oriented links to their visitors.
I'm not sure what un-prepped signups will use it for, but I don't really care, either. We developed this to be a flexible platform from the beginning. That's just what happens when you made a product customizable, and for a general purpose. People will shape it to their needs. The obvious example here is Twitter, which began as a service to publish away messages to the web. Then people wanted to group their thoughts to channels, then they wanted to message, now they want to network and expand their names and products. Twitter is a good example of a platform that made getting information from the users brain to a public domain incredibly easy.
Thanks for all the comments so far, this is great.
Yes. If you're worried about someone else using your startpage, you can make it private in Settings. I'll tell you though, the startpages aren't indexed by any search engines, and personally, this has never been a problem for me.
My thought exactly. Who, of all the users on IE, has even heard of a different browser? And then of these users, they decide that IE is still better? Is this like some .001% that I can't find anywhere?
Thinking Strategically is one of my favorites. It spends each chapter analyzing techniques of competition, trend, and innovation. It reads quite easily and offers outside examples ranging from sports, large corporations, and world wars.
While you may find it challenging to read straight through, it works well, too, as something to pick up every so often or to read alongside other reading material. Even for those of you without a peaking interest in business, the advice presented in the book is undeniable logic that will definitely appeal to programmers and entrepreneurs alike.
I think maybe you've just seen the movie, and been misled into thinking you know what Asimov's robot stories were about. I, Robot the book, has no bad consequences (likewise almost all of the other Robot novels...excepting the bit with the mind-reading robot and the 0th law leading to interesting results for planet earth...but it was still all for the good of mankind). The robots were all basically the good guys.
I'm not sure I understand how the existence of conflict has anything to do with my statement. You said, "how badly things can get out of control", and my recollection of the robot novels (and I, Robot, in particular) pretty much universally includes a few humans getting out of control and robots helping other humans put things right again. I don't see how your comment (either of them, actually) makes sense in that context.
What he's saying, is that beyond our tiny sub culture of internet nerds, the average person won't be leaving SMS any time soon. The mainstream market has started getting used to that medium in the last few years and has no intention of using a 3rd party platform to replace it.
I run a homepage manager with my friend and we look at 2 very concrete statistics: signups and clicks (on the homepages). We wanted to see if we could increase our adoption rate, so we revamped our splash page.
We pushed it live just earlier today, so I don't have much data to share with you quite yet, but I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think about splash pages. Particularly ones that have a style that's different from the rest of the site. Have you seen any changes in your number of signups? Did you attract a different sort of user that wouldn't normally sign up?
