FWIW Facebook tore through my college in a couple weeks way before they had any type of inviting mechanisms. So PM fit was definitely there and virality was all word of mouth.

Yes but right after school expansion, it was not only WOM.

you guys are totally right (in the growth tactics I definitely tell you lots of the non-organic stuff). That being said the idea here is "how to start a startup" and so I was trying to focus on what got Facebook the first 50million users not the next 1.3Billion and how we think about growth for products at Facebook and how I think about it when advising companies. It's always cool to see the different comment threads (one saying I'm too optimized for big company growth, one saying I'm talking about too early, I am hoping that means I pitched it about right :) )

Mark Zuckerberg's Bacon number is 4 Mark Zuckerberg => Ehren McGhehey => Johnny Knoxville => Sarah Jessica Parker => Kevin Bacon

I thought the list is the subscirbers to their daily emails... not the businesses they've signed up.

People unsubscribe, spam filters kick in, or people just start ignoring the email.

Ah, well in that case their list definitely deteriorates.

Demand generation vs demand fulfillment. Once people are looking to buy something search ads are a great way to connect with them, but it's hard to reach them if they aren't yet searching.

I see his point more as acting angry because social norms say you're supposed to, rather than you're actually feeling angry. It takes a lot for me to get truly angry, but I think I've acted out in anger before to fit in with expectations or get something I wanted.

For example, if a friend accidentally dents my car out of carelessness, I may blow up at him to convince him that he should be more careful. I'm likely not all that concerned about the dent, but just brushing it aside as no big deal doesn't do much good for either of us (or the next person he hits).

Surely the more expedient and effective reaction is to address it immediately, but calmly - inform the person of your grievance and implore them to alter their behavior, but do so without the anger, as that can damage your relationship.

Or is the facade of anger better?

No, people respond to displays of anger. And if the other person's convinced you were in the right, it might not even damage the relationship in the long run.

At the Daily Bruin all interns were unpaid. Typically after 6-12 months of part-time work (in any editorial department) there was opportunity to move up to senior staff positions and earn a stipend. That staff would put in 40-80 weeks on top of a course load, earning $2-3 per hour. I think it's very fair to bring on an unpaid dev intern and then let them work towards the stipend just like editorial positions. I wouldn't be surprised if the paper also employs a full time sysadmin/dev, for a real wage.

I'm at UCLA now, and over the last few weeks I've seen front page classifieds for DB hiring front end and backend devs. They're definitely paid hourly (I think I saw 14/hour, but I may be wrong)

Ha, I actually went out to grab a paper because I recalled seeing this too. Those ads were for Student Media which I guess Daily Bruin is a part of. It advertised "pay competitive with any on campus."

As for other other jobs on campus, I saw that the Volunteer Center was hiring "Wordpress programmers" for $19/hr a couple months ago.

Now I wish I had paid more attention in PIC 40A this quarter... By the way, UCLA HNers need to do a meet up

I've only identified about 4 UCLA HNers, one of which tried to do an LA meetup without much success http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804191

While many of these companies are facing slowing growth, or even slight declines, I'd argue what carried them up is still making them very profitable businesses... and they'll be around for a long time.

It'd be interesting to have the discussion about flash-in-the-pan companies that truly did collapse due to their original model.

I know I shouldn't be making enchiladas... but do you really need to show me 4 Google ads for "Belly Fat Diet Recipe"? Fine! i'll make a salad.

with cheese

I'm actually somewhat disturbed by how popular that ad is. It's all I ever see while surfing, some days.

If the Web doesn't attract better quality advertising than those lame-ass belly fat diet ads, then Web advertising in general isn't going to be sustainable.

This article reads like a bunch of notes. Not much interesting stuff and zero flow. oof

nice work, it's fun to get some of the best stuff out there that doesn't seem to be made up like tfln or fml

1) Add tipjoy functionality, encouraging users to tip the best/funniest/helpful tweets.

2) charge referral fee to users who you scrape. Each new follower they get from favstar.fm costs $0.10 (seems like many of the people you are featuring are self-employed or creative types who would probably like more followers)

3) sponsored favoriters... allow brands/users who want their profile pic to show up as if they had favorited a tweet. pay per impression or click basis (they could get creative with the profile pics to grab attention)

4) promotion of top favorites across the web. build plug and play modules that people can add to their own sites, my yahoo, igoogle, their facebook page, etc. (or maybe just an RSS feed). Anyone can post it to their own site for entertainment value, but the only tweets that are eligible for the module are ones from paid accounts. Trouble is, the best/funniest twitter users probably wont want to pay for that distribution, they don't need it.