...in a mitten-shaped flyover state, I think part of the problem might be that these businesses don't realize that most of the US doesn't look like LA, San Fran, or New York City. Therefore their idea of useful or exciting really isn't to someone living in Herpaderp Iowa, population 4,354. Maybe if they tooled their services to be a little more useful to people who can't just hop on the subway to the latest gastropub, they'd be a bit more successful.

For once I should have read the article. Pricing tiers. Still 50GB is a lot to give away.

Just wondering. If it's advertising, I don't see it lasting long.

Even Walmart offers options such as that. This is basically one-hour photo wrapped to look like an Apple store. The overhead will be hilarious, and they will go under inside a year.

I need a car analogy about the Library of Congress before i can understand that number.

...but if I sign up for Alice's network, and ten of my friends are on Bob's network, and another 35 are on Charlie's network... what do we gain by belonging to 3 separate networks?

If the content is all federated (Alice's network pulls contact info from Bob's network, etc), it acts the exact same as Facebook does for the end user.

This to me sounds like an arbitrary barrier to social networking. My friends don't fit easily into social network "buckets", and nearly none of my friends have time to sort and connect to various federated sources of information. They have 15 seconds to check one spot - facebook - for notifications, messages, and status updates. The really hip ones use Twitter.

So really: Sell myself and my friends on this in one sentence. "It's not facebook" is not that sentence - if Google can't make that work, neither will geeks trying to precisely bucket social communication like we were robots instead of messy, finicky humans.

A d3 was essential for my Pathfinder character, an alcoholic gnome "drunken master" sorcerer; the DM tweaked a mechanic to allow all of my spells to be affected by my alcoholism; 1 was 50% less effective, 2 was normal, 3 was 50% more effective. Made for some tense moments (my fireball spell fizzling) or some utterly awesome moments (my fireball spell shattering the wooden bow of an Orc ship, saving the town and drowning about 50 enemies).

I miss Pathfinder.

This is brilliant; allow people to preen over themselves by getting them to pay a fiver to let "more" people see their posts.

It's like printing money.

I doubt it will affect regular users of facebook much; I assume the kinds of people that would pay money to let their posts be seen more would be blocked already from most people's feeds....

>Sure, the iPad is really nice and has its advantages, but don't assume that it's more capable or a better value. Personally, I'd prefer to have two Chromebooks sitting around my house than a single iPad.

Sure, but i'm betting that more people are like my wife, who basically abandoned their shiny fancy Macbook, for first an iPod touch, and then a rooted Nook Color tablet, because it's couch friendly. Using a mouse on a sofa cushion sucks.

...gets from this story is that it's "just" a social media app, "just" a stupid way to put filters on your crappy cell phone pics.

Sure is. And it's going to make their founders mountains of cash. If it were so easy, why didn't you come up with it? Eh? Is making money beneath you, snobby Slashdot User?

Utility lines perhaps, or the railroad still technically owns the right of way.

at this: "It would be interesting to repeat this analysis using Facebook data, but there is no reason to believe the results would be substantially different."

Yes, because the millions of smartphones out there with a camera and a Facebook app (as opposed to a flickr app) aren't going to skew the results at all.

Flickr is for people who like photography; ergo, the data is going to be skewed heavily towards actual cameras.

Facebook is for people sharing themselves with their friends and the world. One only has to peruse a random person's Facebook profile picture page to find hundreds of self-snaps taken in the bathroom, or at the pub, or on a train, or whatever.

Kodak, in my opinion, failed because they neglected to make quality products in their particular niche (easy to use, inexpensive, easy to share). They offshored their production, so Kodak cameras were notoriously hit-or-miss in regards to actually working right. They missed the highend market (then again Kodak was never known for that anyway), letting Sony, Pentax, Canon, and Nikon beat them there. They failed to leverage their gigantic photo paper experience into anything worthwhile (I own a Kodak printer that, as I type this, refuses to print due to some bizarre error I don't have time to diagnose).

In short, Kodak failed because Kodak fucked up. Photography isn't going anywhere. Hell, film photography isn't going anywhere. Kodak just stood still and let the world pass them by.

They took our Kodachrome away, and nobody cared.

It's a pretty geeky issue to get worked up about. Most people won't notice until Youtube gets pulled. By then it'll be on the books for months, and we won't have any recourse to get rid of it. And it's not like the Congress Critters are listening anyway. It's an election year, after all, and they need Hollywood donations....

Oh well, the internet was fun while it lasted. I guess I'll go outside now.

Was salivated over for its eye candy, not necessarily for its gameplay. It's a benchmarking tool. Then again, people who downloaded it for benchmarking certainly had no qualms over blowing thousands for a top of the line gaming rig....