I have actually been looking for a website that plays all my favorite radio stations, but did not find any stations for my country or some way to see if i can add them by url
the logo should be static, the colors can be better
i think a webradio site standard would be a huge thing
yes i remember laughing when the xbox came up thinking they were never gonna come close to nes or sony, these guys know how to build great products not all of them are but once in a while they nail it
I wasn't asked. But Steve and I had a bunch of usernames we'd log into for the first few weeks to submit cool links. I must have had about 10 that I'd cycle through (such is the life of the non-programming cofounder in the first month of a social news site).
The day when neither of us had to submit anything was a great one - it happened during that summer and gave us hope that the damn thing might actually work.
Are you saying that's a bad thing? Getting traction is extremely challenging. Most startups reliant on UGC do this, in the past we've done it with Amazon MT too.
I don't think it's something to look at negatively when you take into consideration the judgmental nature of a consumer. Most consumers don't know or care how new a product is, if it looks inactive they won't use it. Faux-ing a small amount of activity at the start gives you a chance to set a tone and direction for user-generated content, and helps overcome the initial bias of a new site.
The main thing, IMHO, was the way it used flash/flv for video presentation and had a way to let users upload fairly arbitrary video formats and convert to flv on the back-end. I don't remember if I encountered flv video independently before I encountered youtube, but it was around the same time.
Remember the days before flash video? Remember having to use quicktime and realplayer? Those days sucked.
I'm pretty confident that before YouTube, the average non-geek did not have a way to embed videos on their personal websites. YouTube solved a simple but not easy problem: how can you let the mainstream share videos and search for videos. The server-side FLV encoding from what I've read - was groundbreaking - most previous video sharing websites either required a specific format/codec that required anyone who wanted to view it to install the codec and/or viewer.
YouTube democratized online video. The founders may have been at the right place at the right time with the right execution. However, do not discount the fact that YouTube's founders came from PayPal. I'll try to find the link later but in an interview one of the YouTube founders said being on the ground-floor at Paypal and watching them build the runway for the company to take-off inspired them because it made them believe it was possible.
They're protecting the people that buy ads from them, people like me, people with no advertising budget that are just trying to get a few people to check out their stupid blog (http://www.gibsonandlily.com).
Those ads cost something like $1 a click (or more). If I found out that my tiny tiny budget was going to ads on some stupid domain parking website, I would be LIVID.
Yeah, google terminated his account. They did it to protect people like me, and they are the reason the reason that people like me use them.
I'm sorry, but domain parking/squatting/tasting/leeching/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is an instant failure in my book.
If your ad appears on a domain parking site and no one clicks it, it doesn't cost you anything, right? Only when someone clicks the link, right? So if you are advertising your website and someone clicks an advertisement, regardless of where it appeared, that's a problem? I could see it being a problem if you paid per impression, but not for clicks, unless the clicks from a domain parking website have a lower "conversion" factor than other types of domains.
the logo should be static, the colors can be better
i think a webradio site standard would be a huge thing