Spirals
1) We should all hope to retire like this cat, though perhaps some friendships can only be made as kids. And we may be alone during the pandemic but perhaps not as alone as we'd like.
2) Some interesting developments in the news media. Direct texting journalists with questions and feedback seems feasible to me only if you don't get a lot of readers. I can't imagine anyone other than a minor celebrity using it because surely it would get out of hand quickly.
What I wonder about is if a service like Subtext will supplant emails. Many people already don't use it or have one, but this is phone-centric and app-based. Of course I imagine it lacks things like being able to send attachments and multimedia but that could be worked out.
3) The deceased person chatbot project doesn't seem very surprising to me. Quite a few people might like one to remember their loved one. And what it first made me think of was the Jor-el interface that Superman uses in Superman 1 and 2. But someone making a chatbot of you once you're dead seems far more preferable to one when you're not. That creates all sorts of new identity theft problems.
4) Jamie Tarses sure managed to accomplish a lot in her life, but I can't help wondering if the stress of all the BS contributed to her death at 56.
5) I am definitely missing the easy photo sharing of Pillowfort. I've taken various nature pictures in the last week which normally would have gone up there the next day. Instead, they are all sitting on my hard drive and I now need to archive them elsewhere to make posts.
On the one hand I've been very lazy in the last year and a half, since it was super easy to hot link or essentially copy posts over. Luckily while the site is not accessible the content is still there so all the links still work.
On the other, while I do think that PF will likely be back, I don't know that it's going to be very soon. My guess, given the pace of development so far, is that it will be June. The real question will be money. While the site is down they can't expect people to be doing much donating, but at the same time, their costs for bandwidth and hosting must have dropped to near zero. But it's always labor that costs the most and labor is critical right now.
I also think that, if they were smart, they'd spend this time rewriting code to also spend it on their premium package. I don't think it needs to be rolled out with more than 3 features at the moment. Just creating the framework and demonstrating some possibilities would be enough to get several hundred people paying an annual fee. But I don't see how they can move forward without focusing on revenue, because any idea they had of an upward spiral of donations with a free-for-all opening has gone dead in the water. I think they're going to have a very hard time building momentum again. Instead I think they need to do what they can to monetize the core group of users, which is not very large.
If that worked well over the next year, then they might be able to think of going for new users, but I really think that it should be by bringing back their one-time $5 fee for an account combined with free invites from existing users. There were enough new people using them that the method was clearly working, but a lot of people might prefer to do just a straightforward account opening, especially if they were looking more for an alternate site than to join friends or a group on PF. And having even that small revenue would be much better than just overloading the site.
View poll: Kudos Footer-253
Comments at Dreamwidth
.
2) Some interesting developments in the news media. Direct texting journalists with questions and feedback seems feasible to me only if you don't get a lot of readers. I can't imagine anyone other than a minor celebrity using it because surely it would get out of hand quickly.
What I wonder about is if a service like Subtext will supplant emails. Many people already don't use it or have one, but this is phone-centric and app-based. Of course I imagine it lacks things like being able to send attachments and multimedia but that could be worked out.
3) The deceased person chatbot project doesn't seem very surprising to me. Quite a few people might like one to remember their loved one. And what it first made me think of was the Jor-el interface that Superman uses in Superman 1 and 2. But someone making a chatbot of you once you're dead seems far more preferable to one when you're not. That creates all sorts of new identity theft problems.
4) Jamie Tarses sure managed to accomplish a lot in her life, but I can't help wondering if the stress of all the BS contributed to her death at 56.
5) I am definitely missing the easy photo sharing of Pillowfort. I've taken various nature pictures in the last week which normally would have gone up there the next day. Instead, they are all sitting on my hard drive and I now need to archive them elsewhere to make posts.
On the one hand I've been very lazy in the last year and a half, since it was super easy to hot link or essentially copy posts over. Luckily while the site is not accessible the content is still there so all the links still work.
On the other, while I do think that PF will likely be back, I don't know that it's going to be very soon. My guess, given the pace of development so far, is that it will be June. The real question will be money. While the site is down they can't expect people to be doing much donating, but at the same time, their costs for bandwidth and hosting must have dropped to near zero. But it's always labor that costs the most and labor is critical right now.
I also think that, if they were smart, they'd spend this time rewriting code to also spend it on their premium package. I don't think it needs to be rolled out with more than 3 features at the moment. Just creating the framework and demonstrating some possibilities would be enough to get several hundred people paying an annual fee. But I don't see how they can move forward without focusing on revenue, because any idea they had of an upward spiral of donations with a free-for-all opening has gone dead in the water. I think they're going to have a very hard time building momentum again. Instead I think they need to do what they can to monetize the core group of users, which is not very large.
If that worked well over the next year, then they might be able to think of going for new users, but I really think that it should be by bringing back their one-time $5 fee for an account combined with free invites from existing users. There were enough new people using them that the method was clearly working, but a lot of people might prefer to do just a straightforward account opening, especially if they were looking more for an alternate site than to join friends or a group on PF. And having even that small revenue would be much better than just overloading the site.
View poll: Kudos Footer-253
Comments at Dreamwidth
.