laugh or cry?

not sure whether to laugh or cry. while i agree with some of the rationale of this guys article. i can't say i could agree with them all:

http://www.marco.org/?x=195

while this is not tumblelog'ish, i still gotta post about it =P my comments in red.

Require user registration

Cool, a new site that encourages my participation! I'd love to throw in my quick vote for Item X. You need to ensure that your site is absolutely useless unless I've registered a user account. That way, your community is naturally elite, because 95% of your site's visitors won't bother to register (or return).

I would say that if you are launching a 'web 2.0' app you may not want the 95% of visitors. What if you want money from them? not every site can be ad supported. While I agree that many sites may want to encourage instant engagement, some sites just need user registration. That's just a fact of user based applications, web or otherwise. By default, you need a 'user' who's not anonymous. A truly anonymous content site may not be desired. What's the point in writing some hugely insightful article if you don't get any credit? To the average content producer? I think most people on forums still value their post count. At best, this statement is conditional and doesn't apply to 'all' web 2.0 apps. Nor does requiring user registration mean that your app will fail.

...then require email validation

You don't want to grow too quickly. Limit yourself to the capacity of your outgoing mailserver, and omit users who have aggressive spam filters.

By the time the remaining users receive your confirmation email, their excitement and interest in your site has probably waned. This should prevent them from contributing to your site, so you'll save on hosting and administration costs.

again, this depends on who your audience is. this is just one step in ensuring that the user you registered is actually a user and not a bot. especially if you are running a 'voting' site as you stated above. i think having skewed numbers due to vote spammers would kill your services faster than email validation would. hmm... i have a GREAT idea. why not just BUILD EMAIL SERVERS THAT DON'T SUCK??? that sounds like a WAY better idea than doing away with email validation all together. i don't mind email validation as much, what i do mind is when i don't get that email ASAP after i register.

Depend completely on user-generated content

But don't start with a lot of content of your own. Tons of people want to visit your website and do all of the work so you can make money. Just put up an empty phpBB forum that proclaims itself as "The leading discussion community on [Topic!]" and content will flood in.

i'd have to agree with this one. I think it's a given that you can't just put up a site that says 'put content here guys/girls' and expect it to fill up.

Get an unintelligible URL

It's important that your URL cannot be understood or remembered.

If it's easy to remember correctly by most people after hearing it spoken once over the phone, you'll get far too many non-geeks trying to use your site. These are usually the same people stupid enough to click on ads. Do you really want these people wasting your bandwidth to amuse their simple minds?

i agree with this. i still use my yahoo mail account and forward it all to gmail for just this reason. what's your email? royashbrook, all one word, at gmail dot com. what? royashbrook at gmail dot com. gmail? yes. like gee email? no. forget it, send it to royashbrook at yahoo dot com. ok. if i had a nickel for every time i've had that conversation...

Clone another popular site

Don't flush valuable time and money down the toilet to think of a new idea. There aren't any truly original ideas anyway. Just do what someone else is doing, especially if they've recently been popular in the news.

You know what we really need? Something like Digg for technology-related news stories. Or a social networking site.

imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right? you know what, if you can make something along the same lines, and make it good enough for people to switch, go for it. gonna be hard to replace digg or myspace, but someone may do it eventually. why not you or i? you know who will *never* replace it? the people who never try and write a replacement. you always lose the race if you never step foot on the track.

Focus primarily on a tech audience

Stick with what you know. Since the internet is run by geeks, we're best at generating websites and services related to computers.

We're the most fickle with our website loyalty. Since we'll try anything for 3 months before moving on to the next big thing, your goal should be keeping us addicted to your site.

The geek audience also yields the lowest returns on advertising, and yet we have the most competition.

Why wouldn't you enter this market? It's challenging!

you choose your market. if this is what you want, go for it. would be hard to market bug tracking software to the typical consumer. how about project tracking? crm? yeah everyone and my mom would LOVE to use salesforce.com. oh wait, they wouldn't? someone tell those guys to shut down now cuz they are excluding the every day consumer! =P

All you need is AdSense

Build your business entirely on Google ads. You don't need any other sources of income or alternative advertising providers.

Google is perfect and would never do anything wrong, like cancel your account for life right before your first big paycheck for undisclosed reasons, or refuse to tell you why all of your ad clicks from yesterday mysteriously earned you $0.00, with absolutely no possible recourse.

Plus, everyone always clicks on Google ads because they're always so relevant and interesting. "Yes, I think I will try to find 'genocide' on eBay!"

yeah, google ads suck. no one should use them ever.

while i agree with some of his statements, his opinion as a whole i think is incorrect. in some situations, his ideas would be great. i just don't agree with 'most' because most people aren't building myspace, digg, or youtube. most people are building much smaller targetted apps for web 2.0 stuff. think of all the goal trackers and project management apps out there. i think they all probably have their own following. /shrug

i should add that i love this guys site though. =)