We didn't need Google, or didn't think we did before Google came along. I don't recall sitting around complaining about Alta Vista and Excite and the other pre-Google search engines, which seemed to do a pretty good job in their day. But then Google came along and was clearly better -- enough better that we all jumped.
How much better did Google have to be than Alta Vista to replace it in the minds and mice of most users? I argue five percent better is good enough. In a market where products are presented as services and those services are ad supported and don't cost users any cash, there is almost no exit barrier. The system has no friction, no stiction. Five percent better is enough to steal that kind of promiscuous market. And five percent isn't much -- a little better UI or server or just a slightly different idea can be enough.
Web 2.0 made this trend even more pervasive, because now applications could be built of other applications, many of them open source. Getting five percent better could mean an idea realized through a mashup with almost no real work, or that was what we have told ourselves. But the reality is that for true success real work is still required, and that's one of the Web 2.0 white lies that need to be exposed.
Web 2.0 makes it easier to do things, but not easier to do them well. You need a good idea, good building materials, and most especially a good carpenter to put it all together. ... One of those carpenters is Paul Tyma, the author of Talkinator.
... Mailinator is an e-mail system that requires no sign-up. The idea is brilliant: if you don't want people to know your real e-mail address, just make up a mailinator address. Mailinator addresses are useful to give when you don't want to be data-mined and bombarded with offers as the world discovers you... Anyone can check [your] messages, but most Mailinator mail is never read because it is spam. The business model here is both simple and modest: show ads to the one percent of Mailinator users who actually DO check their mail.
In order to make money with this business model you need a LOT of traffic. According to Paul, the Mailinator server receives about 12-15 million messages or 28 gigabytes of mail per day, 99 percent of which is never read. The one percent that IS read means there are at any moment about 150 active users on mailinator.com. The volume of mail coming in has hit as high as 2,000 messages per second.
There is an important lesson in Web 2.0 economics here. Mailinator runs on ONE server. That server is in a rack at Serverbeach and would cost under $100 per month if Paul actually paid for it. But by running a link for Serverbeach on the Mailinator page, Paul gets free service whenever one of his users becomes a Serverbeach customer through that link. ... The server is free, the traffic volume is HUGE, and even with that one percent duty cycle the site makes good money from AdSense ads alone.
So why aren't there more Mailinator competitors? There are plenty, but they come and go. The reason they come is because the idea is clever and easy to implement: rent a server and run Sendmail and some scripts. The reason they go is because you can't run Sendmail and some scripts on a single server processing 2,000 messages per second while 150 people read their mail at the same time. Mailinator is a nice little business if you can run it on a single server, but you can't support enough users on a single server if the service is built as a mashup. Mailinator is 100 percent custom code, highly optimized for what it does, which is the other lie about Web 2.0: mashups often don't scale well.
Talkinator [is] Paul's new chat system. This is quite specifically text chat and involves no voice or video, just letters and words. And like Mailinator, Talkinator is a no-log-in system.
Why would he do that? Why have no log-in? The better question might be why do the other chat systems HAVE log-ins? They want you to register so those systems can track you and make money from your chatting habits. They have log-ins so those sites can be more useful, maybe, but mainly so they can more effectively USE YOU.
Paul implemented in Talkinator what he calls a round-trip translation option so misunderstandings are minimized. (Round-trip translation = recursive translations where I would translate my instructions into Portuguese then back into English so I could fine-tune the text until I knew it was perfect.)
Arguments are minimized, too, since Talkinator simply won't allow swearing.
* * *
Link: The Architecture of Mailinator
Among comments: Take a look at www.backnoise.com
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий