Over time I came to loathe almost all new "trendy" Silicon Valley startups, not out of jealousy but by how much they objectively suck. Two examples.
The first is Crosswalk, a "social site" that lets you share the list iPhone apps you have to your friends. No problem with that, actually it's a pretty cool idea. The site looks good, and they even have a nice iPhone-looking simulator. But then, accessing the site from an iPhone really, really sucks, as in it barely works. And then you need a Facebook account to create a new Crosswalk account, whose concerns from non-Facebook users (like me) they rebuffed out of hand on their FAQ. And that leads to the main problem: They get your list of iPhone apps by asking you your Apple credentials. You know, the one they could wipe your iPhone remotely with. Hey, did you know that you can easily list all the apps on an iPhone using something like libimobiledevice? Or by scanning through a local iTunes backup? Why would I trust a startup with my Apple store credentials and tie it up with a "real life" Facebook account?
The second is App.net, yet another Twitter clone. Open API, costs $50 per year per user (!), blah blah blah. Rather than creating a truely open, federated Twitter using a protocol similar to XMPP, instead they're making something even more closed than "free with ads". Not everybody's rich enough to justify being in a "cool Internet crowd" for $50. That may have worked for a while with BBSes, but that didn't last. So, yeah, instead of using my talent to bring something genuinely innovative, I'm going to make another slightly different clone, and when I realize VCs won't even look at my "ads free" clone that has no reason to exist I'm going to "Kickstart" it with public funding.
If your project has this cool look and funded only by the Silicon Valley crowd, you suck. I don't care if all you can hope for is being bought by Facebook, Google or whatever. If your business depends on selling out to people or companies with lots of money and bad judgment (or such horrible infrastructure that they buy companies as a form of outsourcing), you are worth nothing in the grand scheme of things. You're not "social", you're not a "community", you're just wasting talent.
Published on August 12, 2012 at 19:27 EDT
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