She replied;
"Can I sing funky lounge songs? You haven't seen my 404 error."
Try this one or check the picture out.
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I got Twittered by Dek about the 2 billionth Flickr photo this morning and I find out it was taken in Sydney. Cool.
This feeds nicely into a talk I gave recently on aggregating trillions of transactions to make web applications. I think the numbers, if not the talk, went over most peoples heads. But then when you see things like Flickr's 2 Billionth Photo, it makes a trillion look small.
Here is a quick run down of my maths;
Put a 1,000 tiny functions together
x
Create 10 bits of joy for a user
x
Get them to come back 100 times
x
Do it for a 1,000,000 users
=
1,000,000,000,000 things to manage.
Get me?
The Flickr maths goes way past a trillion when you add in the 2 billion photos.
Here is my presentation:
Download trillion_transactions_mick_liubinskas.ppt
The point of it is that web applications are a complex interaction of features, value, people and time. It's hard work to get it right and it's a constant battle, which makes cloning something that seems easy to be crazy hard.
So here is some food for thought:
Thank to you Mrs Smith in Year 8 for helping me love maths.
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Mimicry is the highest form of flattery. But when someone offers $1,500 to build a web application that you have spent a year and lots of emotional energy and passion in, it feels quite strange.
TechCrunch have covered it, looking at the angle of outsourced work and web app differentiation. Some of the conversation pointed out that other apps like Google, eBay and Digg have all had people try to clone them cheaply and no one ever hears about it. Other people talk about the challenges of scaling and marketing these types of products.
Ross Dawson pointed out that Guy Kawasaki launched Trumors for around $5,000 investment.
So what is it? Cheap or expensive to build web apps?
Of course there is no one answer. You can certainly start apps pretty cheaply. You can put up a prototype and a simple design and see how it goes. Then you add to it, tweak it, refine it, and gradually make it better. That's what takes skill, time and money.
The type of application you want to build also impacts heavily on the investment it takes. Some applications lend themselves to incremental building and some need a certain amount of features before you can even show anyone. You can dabble in a news app, but not in a banking application.
Tangler made the decision early to build a full featured, highly scalable and great looking product. Early talks with about this with Citizen Agency highlighted all the pros and cons of this strategy, and based on the momentum and the vision there was an express decision to not go the lighter road, like Pibb. Is it the right choice? Right now I can say that there are lots of times that the grass looks much greener on the other side. Tangler takes time to wrestle and it's often not as nimble as we like. That being said, talking to the users that we are really focused on tells us that we've created something they love and can use immediately.
The proof is in the pudding, and Tangler isn't finished cooking yet, so we'll have to tell you a bit later. Or more importantly, you can probably tell us.
Now if they'd said $150 million, that would have been interesting!
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