Adam Rifkin wrote:
> What does Strata call this, "success disaster"?
"Catastrophic success" is the term I use.
Too bad about Organizine, never saw the site. I applaud the ethics
and conviction of the guy for shutting it down before it got to be
too much for him. Maybe he ought to have tried to find a new home
for it, or a new set of caretakers, but hey, he made it. Good of him
to put in the feature where it transferred content. Wish he's release
the source.
_SRC
PS- Good point from the .sig-- remember how we're saying that metering
ultimately hurts the Internet? Back in the days when you paid one fee
for a connection of a certain bandwidth, you didn't have to worry about
making something so popular that you could suddenly owe several months
rent worth of fees. Maybe there's a business model out there, something
like "noslam.net", where they host a bunch of auth proxies that do a
redirect, once you're auth'd, to sites like blogger or organizine. Put
a cheap packet filter on your site and only accept connections that
originate from the IP cloud of the NoSlam service. You can still grow
your free service as big as you want, but you never have to get hammered
as long as you can drop packets quickly from "the wrong places". No,
this won't make anybody feelthy reech, but I bet that folks would be
willing to pay a small monthly fee to protect their free services behind
this kind of "wall", and that the process of registering folks into the
auth db could be automated enough that it could be bootstrapped and run
affordably.
> This episode brings up some interesting issues about web
> applications. If Adam would have chosen to take on the responsibilities
> of running Organizine, and it gained popularity, it would have become a
> significant financial burden, as well as a time- and energy-sink. In
> order to manage that burden, he would have needed to either limit users
> to some manageable level or start charging money (or find some other
> business model to sustain the free service). Going to all that work for
> a limited number of users would be discouraging. But to start charging
> money requires forming some sort of business (or other entity) around
> the service, which creates all kinds of new headaches.
-- ======================================================================== Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ] strata "@" virtual.net VirtualNet Consulting http://www.virtual.net/ ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration ** =========================================================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:18:25 PDT