1. Not really, but it's endlessly entertaining and sometimes even useful. I haven't made any meaningful new connections though recently I got accidentally friended by a private equity guy who gave me a little advice for my companies. The only issue I've seen come up repeatedly is when relationship breakups hit the mini-feed with the little broken heart icon. The real-timeness of this is a bit much for some people.

2. I tried Joost a while ago and there wasn't much that seemed worth watching. Usually I browse http://www.videosift.com which is a digg like site for online video. It's mostly limited to short clips and a few longer videos that no one reports to Google for deletion. Joox.net is also outright amazing but you need to install a plugin (seamless install in Firefox)

3. As the community gets bigger news has to start appealing to the lowest common denominator. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40284

1. My issue with facebook is that I feel bad rejecting requests to add friends, invitations to events, and applications I don't want. And yes, I know this is lame. I am actually thinking of nixing my account and just going back to blogging as my online outlet/identity/whatever. And no, I don't think the connections have been that valuable. To me, IM was/is a better social networking tool. Wow, I just sounded like an old fart to myself, at 24. I guess if you use facebook with intention, it's a good tool, but as a "destination" it's just become full of noise.

2. Nope. I might start watching videos of DIY stuff, but that's about it. I just cut off my cable I don't want to just replace it with online spectation.

3. A half-dozen RSS feeds in Google Reader, all blogs as opposed to general news. I scan digg, slashdot, and reddit but rarely click through any links anymore (thank god reddit wasn't around in '04 or I would've been just like the people spamming it up with political outrage now). Not much I'd change about news.yc, in fact I'm kind of obsessed by the simplicity of its UI, and have enjoyed the quality. I hope the specificity of the topic will limit the dilution seen at the general news sites.

1. Facebook - No, I don't feel the connections I make are meaningful. It is useful to talk to people I otherwise wouldn't, but I rarely do that either. The group and event organization are the most useful features to me, because they are really the only features that couldn't be replaced with email or IM.

2. Internet TV - My first thought was, "there is such a thing?" Most of the stations (eg. NBC) block non-US IPs from watching their online programming, so I guess am missing out on that. I almost never watch TV, but there are a few shows I do enjoy, and I would much rather watch them on my own time than when they air. And I would gladly pay a small amount of money to do away with the ads, even if it meant the video file could only be watched once.

3. News.YC is great, partly because it is small.

"It is useful to talk to people I otherwise wouldn't..."

I find the beauty of Facebook is the ability to manage acquaintances and good friends and place them on the same level. However, I also feel that this prevents circles of friends and groups from growing tighter.

"The group and event organization are the most useful features to me..."

They may be the most useful, but there's much more room for improvement.

1. Facebook is pretty solid, and I think its openness is one of its major strengths. It does strengthen my existing friendships, and I've made some new friends on there as well. With the new apps coming out, it seems like the sky is the limit. The only thing I dislike about it is the design - it is very usable, which is priority #1, but otherwise so-so. I especially hate the offset-header thing they do, it makes me feel as if something is missing/broken. Many of the apps are counterintuitive or obnoxious. I hope people aren't getting mad at me for ignoring their zombie invitations.

2. There is a lot of weakness here, which seems odd considering the obviousness of the solution: I should be able to watch any TV show from any network I want, whenever I want. I should be able to pay 50 cents to get rid of the ads or something, or just run the ads outside of the shows entirely. In addition, when I go to a network site the landing page should be a video player playing whatever is being broadcast in my time zone at that moment. 1) Put TV on the internet. How hard can that be? 2) Make it random-access. 3) Have all the shows on there, past and present.

3. Online news is even weaker than online TV, if that's possible. I'd rather bathe in motor oil than read the comments on Digg or Newsvine. There does seem to be a correlation between how long a news site has been around and how badly it sucks. Could a million bored secretaries flaming randomly eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare? I don't know, but they're giving it their best shot.

I'm going to say something heretical here: social news is a lousy idea unless a narrow focus is maintained, like news.yc. I read news looking for insights that I as an average American cannot reach on my own. The commentary of millions of other average Americans adds NOTHING - in fact, it's a negative value proposition.

The solution, if you agree with me that news should provide insight, is exceptional reporting, top-notch writing, and a variety of ideological viewpoints. You aren't going to get that stuff from the internet masses.

That being said, I do like very focused social news sites like news.yc. Then again, you guys aren't a bunch of 'average Americans'.

"... I think its openness is one of its major strengths ..."

It's not as open as you thing. Try passing an url to someone from facebook. You have to log in. Don't have an account? Too bad. In this respect it's like a gated community with guards out the front. Got a pass?, No. Move along ~ http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/06/17/itsTimeToOpenUpN...

"... social news is a lousy idea unless a narrow focus is maintained ..."

True. It's difficult to regulate I'd add regulated by peers and overseen by a BDFL.

"... Then again, you guys aren't a bunch of 'average Americans'. ..."

American? No you drongo, I'm Australian.

No, I agree. It's all about the niche.

3. This one bugs me. It seems like smaller reddit type communities work best, but every social news site I've seen has only a few big feeds that the entire community has to use. I think the way to fix reddit/digg is to just open it up so anyone can create their own social news community, invite like-minded people (or not like-minded people, whatever they want), and have a mini-social-news site with stuff that interests everyone.

Then we could have social news sites follow kind of that same model that mailing lists and message boards and IRC channels do.

reddit has been saying for some time that they were going to allow user-created subreddits, but still haven't done it...

I agree with this, but after you have the framework to do this, I think, the more difficult part is how to present it.

Say you create a news site. You place the obvious largest sections in the obvious places, like the sorting options "new" and "hot." Now you want to accomodate all your user-created sections too. Where to put this?

You could create a cyclic box that just grabs particularly active user sections, but for oldtimers this would be inefficient. You could create a friends section kind of box that displays links to friend pages for logged in users, but that is potentially confusing and would compete with whatever top level links you initially have.

I believe it isn't so hard technically for reddit to open up user-created subreddits, but how to integrate it into the UI is what's hard. If you have a good solution, I'd like to hear, for the obvious reason. :)

Right, it's about the "monkey number":

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/06/11/dunbars-numbe...

Does Newsvine support this? I'm not a Newsvine user (I waste more than enough time reading Startup News!), but I think that Newsvine allows you to set up a personal feed, so that people who think you're a good editor can follow your feed.

Not sure about how you might go about setting up a small-group feed a la BoingBoing, where you and your twenty cronies collaborate to edit the news.

> open it up so anyone can create their own social news community...

You just described how blogs work.

1. When I first logged on to facebook, it asked me something about my email contacts. I just said ok. Next thing I know all these random high school classmates who I have no interest in ever seeing ever again become my "friends". All I want is to have an easy way to cut them out of my life without pissing them off. I'm talking about a way of getting rid of "friends" without insulting them...perhaps they could stop seeing the updates to your profile. However, I don't mind the loss of privacy as much as having these spammy "friends" clogging my profile and showing up all over the interface...

2. I do watch. I watch Internet TV but not regular TV, mostly because it means I can watch any chapter of futurama I want whenever I want. I see two banner ads that probably slow me down 1 second 10% of the time---this is infinitely preferable to trudging through eight minutes of ads for every twenty-two of content. I watch stuff at tv-links.co.uk. Of course, I wish I didn't watch Internet TV at all because I think watching TV is bad in principle.

3. news.yc is just fine.

1) Facebook is useful to me in order to a) always have up to date contact information b) have a central place where I can browse photos and c) have a quick introduction to new people that I friend, and see what they are into d) and keep tabs on what all my weak connections are up to. I don't have any major issues with Facebook.

2) I'm selective about what I watch, so I don't browse YouTube. I watch the Daily Show and selected PBS documentaries online. Occaisionally I rent a movie from Amazon Unbox, but the selection is terrible. I use NetFlix to watch old The Wire and West Wing episodes. I wish I could watch those shows online, but they are not available.

3) I wish there was a small niche news site for thoughtful political commentary and policy analysis (as opposed to the endless ranting on reddit). New.ycombinator and programming.reddit.com are great for my programming, business, and startup news.

I remember you kyro. Have you gotten started on something? I think many of your questions would answer themselves one way or another after you start designing. But I'll take a stab. I'll skip 2 because I don't watch so much TV, reason being that in most cases, reading is the fastest way of absorbing information.

1. of course they are meaningful, because I know the people. The ties they create are digital. For those that bond with their friends online, FB facilitates it. For those that don't there's no difference (I'm in this group). I don't expose much of myself nor edit my profile much because I don't think it's worth the effort.

3. This problem I'm particularly interested in. The idea that services like these attract the LCD is a result of their design and not of operation. I think it is possible to circumvent this problem, but you must change the design concept.

I recently attended the Wikimania conference and they talked about the absurd complexity of the rules now applied to Wikipedia. The oldies were talking about "back in the day" just like the old diggers. Spawning a new Wikipedia-like system isn't going to work; Citizendium is not the answer. You can spawn a new digg and it would still face the same problems. You can talk about spawning a new news.yc for non-startup content, and assuming it gets popular, it would still run into quality control problems. Plus, pg has a sizeable following, but there is only one of him: unless he clones himself for the new site, or creates a different system, his divested energy will result in one being less active than the other.

A community news site that handles 10K users isn't going to handle 1M users similarly just by scaling the system or by implementing friends and leaders. There's that rule of 150 written in the Tipping Point book that says any group exceeding about 150 members will become difficult to manage(I shouldn't cite Gladwell but it's not an unfounded idea). A site of thousands of active members will, of course, run into management problems, but with a 10:90 active:lurker ratio, it works ok when your site has up to perhaps 20k users before you see any substantial, visible change in focus. Since not every user is active at the same time of day, you can increase the size of the virtual community, perhaps to something like 300 core members before the content changes dramatically.

I don't know digg's numbers, but taking wikipedia as an example, with thousands of active editors, of course you will run into problems! And they think it's a result of lack of consensus over what is acceptible behavior or something.

Seems pretty obvious to me, and I welcome challengers. When I said this at the conference nobody seemed to buy it though.

Great questions!

1) No, I do not find Facebook relationships meaningful. I got sick of FB after I hit about 200 "friends". I ended up getting a ton of notifications & spam and it was all pointless. I'd rather spend an hour with someone over a beer than spend an hour going through messages on FB. So I gave up on it and never really missed it.

2) I don't watch TV period. I have no spare time and if I did, I'd spend it reading a book rather than vegetate in front of a TV (of any kind).

3)... no comment =)

My $.02:

1. Facebook is next to meaningless to me... it's cute, a cool way to share photos and waste time, but the connections have no real value, they either existed before or will remain confined to the medium. I'd imagine this is not true for those in college, but accurate for an older user such as myself.

2. There is already a perfectly acceptable and available medium for tv - TV! The market of people who have access to the internet but not TV is rather small - again, an idea that might play better with a college crowd who exist in a world exactly as I described.

3. The key to the holy grail of news sites in my mind is the dunbar number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number), as Davidw points out in his comment. I think if you can find a way to create a site that can harness the strength of this principle, you'll win here.

1. Facebook is decent but a lot of my real-life friends already use MySpace. I refuse to keep up with 2+ social networking sites, its a waste of time!

If I could push/pull content thru one site, I'd be more likely to use social networking sites more.

2. Internet TV = http://tvlinks.co.uk if the DVR missed a show or I discover a new series mid-season. I like amateur stuff like YouTube but usually get links to it from friends & other sources, never get content thru their portal.

3. I've accepted that online news is a moving target, and the best I can do is keep my feedlist short and relevant to what I'm currently interested in. Social news sites are like bright burning stars that collapse under their own weight as they grow more massive. I agree, Digg is dead, Reddit may be dying... YC News is cool because its still small.

I'm trying to come to grips with the fact that interesting new stuff on the Internet doesn't come around every 5 minutes.

Every 3 months, yeah, but after 10 years of browsing the Internet for several hours a day, I think I've seen most of the interesting stuff. "Dude, I beat the Internet, the boss at the end was hard as hell."

I don't think you're asking the right questions.

- What motivates you?

- Can you do something that will help you in multiple ways (fun? learning? curiosity? creativity? potential for money to continue doing this forever?) and also will help the world as well?

- What would you be working on right now regardless of chances of getting funding if you didn't need to work for someone else?

- What would you like to learn about that you think will help you in the future (e.g. web apps, not COBOL) regardless of whether you succeed or not?

Then just create small projects and ask people to use them.

Well, a lot of these questions were ones that I have answered myself and were products of my frustrations with existing services, so I just want to extend these questions out to many and see if such frustrations are common.

1. Facebook lets me keep in touch with friends that I would otherwise never think about or remember. Right now, this is my only "serious" use for it.

2. I guess internet spoiled by letting me be an active participant (i.e. reading and commenting on news). I actually find TV to be boring if not done as a social activity: going out with friends to see a movie, for example.

3. Reddit, news.YC, and smaller niche sites (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology) do it for me.

Granted, Facebook does allow friends to keep in touch, but does it strengthen connections with friends? Or does it go deep as just looking at photos and writing on walls?

I don't think any website can strengthen your connections with friends; you have to do that yourself. That said, if I wanted to invite a friend over for tea, I can: 1. Email 2. Call his/her cell 3. IM 4. Leave a message on the FB wall.

I don't like to do 2 or 3 because they are real-time or require availability. For me, there's no difference in 1 or 4.

I neither use Facebook nor watch television, so I'll skip 1 and 2.

Number three is a very interesting question. Why did Reddit and Digg descend into their present state?

I think something other than "the userbase has grown" is going on here. I think one major reason is that you see others' opinions before you decide your own. As a general rule, any Internet poll prompts you to vote before showing you the running results, to attempt to preserve independence of opinion. Reddit and Digg, however, breach this.

Secondly, in both Reddit and Digg, any controversial item leaves public sight; only those items that most approve of reach and stay in the front. Those items only of great appeal to a subsection of the user base either fail to reach and stay in the top, and, as a result, simpler items with more general appeal begin to dominate the front.For Reddit; this was the rise of political articles; for Digg, which I am less familiar with, I'd imagine it involved less technically in-depth items.

The above system accelerates; as content begins to represent the cross-section of the interests of a larger, more diverse group, the site attracts an even larger, even more-diverse group.

The squashing of controversy and propagation of opinion combine so that commenting maintains a status quo: The posts that are upmodded are known to be upmodded, and, thus newcomers will associate these types of posts with being worthy of upmods and will upmod them themselves. Due to the desire for social status, those newcomers bold enough to begin making comments of their own attempt to imitate the style accepted by the community as "upmod-worthy." And thus, newcomers learn to achieve a style that causes their posts to be upmodded.

The above two points combine: The oldtimers tolerated newcomers; the newcomers tolerated newer-comers; due to the logistical nature of the system, each "generation" outnumbers the previous. The newer-comers whom the oldtimers indirectly "let in" may create comments repulsive to many of the oldtimers that get upmodded to the top; this slowly disillusions the relevant oldtimers, causing them to leave, solidifying the community's shift.

And there, that's Digg, according to my understanding. I must admit I've used Digg little and do not have a firm grasp on how its system works, so everything I say about Digg should be taken with a grain of salt; on Reddit, I am more confident in my ability to speak truthfully.

Reddit's story goes further: In Reddit, a controversial item where one side has an advantage can reach the front page. Thus, assuming it involves the general cross section of readers, the ideology that originally had an upper hand will get its content to the front and the opposing ideologues, primarily reading items they disagree with, leave. The former ideology solidifies its hold; future opponents of said ideology get discouraged from joining; groupthink evolves.

And thus, my theory for the state of Reddit today. Reddit's original techie audience created the status quo of commenting style. They drew in their friends and peers from various communities via word of mouth. The new users tolerated and contributed to the technical articles that were reddit's genesis; the techies tolerated and contributed to the nontechnical articles being brought in. The cycle occurred again, and, though the technical bias in the community was preserved through visible, active posters, a shift toward articles with broader appeal was well underway. Since the original techie user base likely contained more liberals and libertarians than conservatives, the former two ideologies, both of which involve laypeople and can be associated with most topics, began to heavily get their content into the front. Liberalism and libertarianism tolerate each other somewhat, but liberalism was stronger due to its numerical advantage among the general populace. The hold of liberalism expanded as outlined.

As one might expect from the above paragraph, the front page of the Reddit of today has articles on healthcare, global warming, and other politicized material; some items supporting Ron Paul; and a whole bunch of items with broad but shallow appeal, such as pictures of cats.