Andy's Blog

Hi aharbick!

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to

reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in

the early days. Well, it's true! And since you're one of

those lovely people, here's a little something to say YOU

ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for! 

   Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 

   2 years, and your new expiry date is Oct 16, 2006.

2. More capacity!

   Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!

   This won't be activated for a day or two, but when it

   is, you'll see a note on your home page telling you 

   what to do. 

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth

is and supporting us, even while we're in beta. Your

generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are

today.

Kind regards,

The Flickreenies.

That's a nice surprise! Anyone want a pro account? Drop me a note.

Until today I never really understood why Podcasting would be so popular. Sites like Odeo and iPodder have gained a lot of popularity, and perusing del.icio.us you can find a ton of podcasting information. But today, I GET it.

I'm in Seattle on a business trip an I decided to walk to the office from the hotel. It's probably about a mile walk and took 20 minutes. I had my iPod and I spun a little Pedro the Lion, Postal Service, and Third Day. However, as I walked I had the desire for some news of some sort. Sure I could've had a radio, but then I need two devices. It would've been nice to spin some MP3 news tracks. Hence podcasting. My bet is that podcast consumers are disproportinately urban, walking commuters.

There's too much interest in real estate solutions that apply clever mapping techniques like craigslist + google (which is an interesting derivative/synthetic application) or redfin. Don't get me wrong, I think these applications are clever and interesting, but IMO they don't do much to advance the state of the art for buying or selling real estate. They basically just automate a formerly manual process with some wizzy technology. I can buy a paper map and plot real estate listings on it. Having either solution does little to inform me as a customer (or even agent) of real estate services. I hope that next generation real estate solutions will focus on leveraging data in better ways to better inform the customer instead of rehashing mapping/GIS applications.

buy.com just recently launched yub.com a social networking experiment in online shopping. I don't quite "get it", but it does seem novel. Parts of it remind me of Amazon.com's "Share the Love" feature, but as far as I can tell that never really took off.

David Heinemeier Hannson asserts that he would have a hard time hiring a programmer working on a Windows platform for 37 Signals. He bases the claim on deep conviction that Macs are great machines, and also because Paul Graham was stirring the pot about Mac adoption among hackers. I don't dispute that Macs are GREAT machines (I'm happily writing this from my 17" Powerbook), or even that Apple started a bit of a revolution among talented software engineers (I've watched close to a dozen of my most talented engineer friends buy powerbooks), but puleeze.... A talented engineer doing web-development (as is 37 signals/DHH) doesn't need a Mac. Sure, they can use fancy and cool little apps like CocoaMySQL, but in my book any REAL hacker only needs a shell and Emacs (or I suppose some lesser editor).