you gotta look at the conversion rate as well. If only 500 ppl used Pinterest years back, but 200+ people continued using it daily after 1 month, that's shows the product has very good potential, even though the total # of users is weak. That means you just gotta figure out to get more traction.
If on the other hand, you find out only 1 person is still using it after a month, that means it's a product fit problem, and sticking to your guns is probably futile.
I think the guns the parent poster is referring to was the widely publicised statement that they would "shoot in the head" their projects if they weren't working. So they are sticking to that particular gun, as it were
I was an Oink user and deleted it a few weeks ago from my phone. It seemed like an intriguing idea (to see recommendations of things rather than places), but ultimately there are only so many photographs of beers, burgers and coffees that one can stare at.
Why would anyone bother committing to one of their products again if they just arbitrarily shut things down when they are working on the next big thing?!
As a founder of a company in the same space (chee.rs) I was surprised to see them pivot from the idea so quickly.
Our internal analysis of share/engagement metrics was showing that our own users were way more engaged than Oink's. We were expecting that if they noticed us in the market they'd have been working on rev 2 of the product - gathering intel from products like ours and integrating it - rather than shutting it down.
Since you guys are in the same space. What are you seeing that the rest of us are missing? Is there an actual business around the idea?
Oink was maybe useful when items were attached to locations. As soon as people started like Macbook Pros and other free standing stuff, it became completely pointless for me. (Too cluttered and not enough recommendation value.)
We're pretty confident there's a big business in our space. chee.rs is focused on the positive experiences in our users lives, rather than rating every little thing. Users post what they love (it's freeform: it can be music, restaurants or just general concepts), and other users pile on with positive reenforcement. What we're seeing is that users get hooked on having a space dedicated to things that people like and spend hours at a time (literally - like spending 3+ hours on some nights) in the app just going through what other people like, and posting their own content from time-to-time.
We've had a few businesses approach us cold after being cheered, asking if they could offer some sort of coupon, or other offer to users who cheer on their business. That's something we haven't really figured out how to run with and/or monetize yet.
I can't really explain what gets these users hooked, but you can see the sort of engagement we're seeing here: http://chee.rs/1433322
If you can, use CloudFlare for SSL instead. $20/month and you get a ton of other features. You don't get last mile SSL support to GAE, but at least it stop script kiddies in coffeeshops.
If your users love you so much, have you considered selling them some premium version of your service? If you want to survive, you've got to sell something, whether it's equity, someone else's product/service or your own.
Explore the space between selling virtual sheep to OCD-inflicted grandmas and shoving the local butcher's billboard in your loving users' faces.
I definitely understand why the public isn't a big fan of his anymore, but I can't help remember back to The Screen Savers, and the early days of digg, when he was really someone I looked up to.
I haven't really been involved in social bookmarking very long, but isn't Digg what spawned the voting-system type site that we see in Reddit and HN? My understanding is that slashdot based on discussion instead of a straight-up voting mechanic.
The difference between Digg and Slashdot is that with Slashdot, all the stories were placed by editors. You might have been able to submit stories to the editors, but there was no upvoting and the front page was purely up to the editors. Of course, later Slashdot added Firehose, and then awhile after that I stopped reading Slashdot.
Slashdot had moderation for comments, but no similar mechanism for stories. Digg had the voting system for stories and for comments.
I don't know the Reddit history that well, but as I read recently in a PG essay, it was originally slated to be a food ordering application on your phone.
I do not know when they pivoted, or when their idea to pivot came, but I _suspect_ that their pivot was at least partly inspired by Digg's early release.
metafilter predates both Digg and reddit by 5 years, and was enjoyable for quite a while longer than either of them. I don't think it's fair to credit either of those sites with social bookmarking.
Oink.me.uk/.cd getting shut down made me quit caring about commercial music. And seeing how Alan was declared non-guilty later made me really really angry (the most awesome music service was killed and there was no reason or legislation to it).
-------------------------
This is an interesting case. It seems like the group designed, built and shipped a pretty slick ratings app all in a bid to gather data. Rather than mine existing databases or pay other companies to license their information, they were able to garner attention via the app launch and gather their own.
--------------------
if this is indeed the case, they should have been upfront about it. This is like taking users for a ride. 'Now that we have enough data, we're going to shut this thing down'
I don't buy that. Where did nextweb come up with the idea that the app was just an information gathering device?
They "inferred" it from this quote:
------------
We are extremely grateful for all of your effort finding and rating the best things in the places around you. We’ve discovered thousands of awesome pizzas, pastas, coffees, teas… and roller coasters, zoo exhibits, paintings, sculptures, vistas… and sodas, salads, sliders, soups… and so much more.
----------
That's reading into it way too much.
Oink was a beautifully designed app. If they just wanted to gather info, I don't think they would have spent so much time making it look good.
I think it just didn't work out the way they wanted it to, they are learning from this experience and quickly discarding what doesn't work and moving on to the next thing.
How come Oink didn't got any traction, even with all the publicity they did everywhere when it was launched? When oik hit the app store I thought "god, If only I have 1% of kevin rose visibility to use it". I guess this ain't enough.
I think people are getting tired of using apps to tag stuff, take pictures, "like" this and that, etc... It feels like we are working for a company and not having fun or create anything, and Oink! just gave me reason to think this way even more firmly. There's no market for this anymore, because we don't have that much time to spent in dozens of different communities, and so,the less populated die.
So please, if you want to build something, please work on something real and that actual solves something, not another Flickr meets Facebook/twitter app.
Yep, you're right. What was the purpose of Oink? There weren't a ton of reviews or opinions - not enough anyway for it to be vastly useful as a replacement to Yelp. And it wasn't no Angry Birds so why even use it in the first place?
And they got a bunch of publicity, but ask yourself this question: of all the apps you reach about in Techcrunch, Mashable, etc, what % do you actually use? Publicity doesn't always translate to lots of users. They probably got a ton of initial downloads from curious geeks, but that's about it. Their churn rate was probably ridiculously high.
Publicity is pretty good for 1 thing for sure: search engine rankings, and Oink wasn't a website.
I wasn't a fan of Oink from the beginning. On its first use I was able to like such arbitrary things like my own T-shirt, or a piece of gum on the floor. I knew right then this was going to get way too noisy and it did.
I do see where they're coming from though. The reputation system was supposed to balance this out. Kind of like social news websites where people submit tons of links. Somehow through upvoting things become relevant no longer noisy and I'm pretty sure that's what Oink was going for. It was all very well designed.
I think a lot of people who used it didn't treat it that way. They treated it as another review site, which it also was. But treating it that way makes it such a chore to "build" and so eventually we all lost the point of it all.
I would think that if successful the reputation system would have to be constantly fiddled with and change like that, "OMG I lost my reputation", would be a constant community management challenge.
IMHO it would have been better PR to "pivot" even if it is to an entirely different thing. It would sound more respectful to people that used the app, covered the app and those that cheered them on.
I'd really be interested in seeing what next they build.
No offense, but why are you interested in seeing what they build next? Seems to me they are nothing more than a small group of overfunded kids with computers.
Interested, not excited. I want to see the "better idea".
I am suspecting this episode will offend people who are working real hard on what they think is are more important ideas and are struggling to get finding, only for Kevin to throw away millions for fun.
I'm super surprised by this, and Kevin Rose just lost a couple of points of respect in my book. Must be nice to have investors who will throw money at you, so that you can give a half-hearted effort at something (or maybe less than half) only to shut it down a few months later to "try something else".
It's like ADD at the business level.
Terrible decision. I don't even think anyone even tried to make this a success.
Were the investors throwing money at oink or at milk? If it is the latter this decision makes sense.
Using money to fund ideas that may or may not pan out is an interesting concept and kind of cool and if they decide to throw out ideas that don't work rather than stick to it that just defines what milk is.
So as a consumer, why would anyone ever even try Milk's products until they clearly become viable? You are being asked to give tons of your time and energy to build out their product (user generated content), recommend it to your friends, and do their word of mouth marketing, and in return the company has no loyalty to you unless its spectacularly successful.
And in contrast to the Milk model, you have sites like Delicious, Flickr, and even Digg itself which still operate even after the original founders have moved on.
What percentage of Oink users knew Milk's philosophy? What percentage of them cared?
More to the point, what percentage of potential users for their next app will know about Milk's philosophy (or care) when they see it in the App Store's "Featured" section?
It might make the news, and it's a good talking point, but I can't help feeling the naysayers are just stuck in an echo chamber on this.
While I'm not disagreeing with this, I wonder if it will impact the users of Milk Inc tools' willingness to participate in future projects. For services which run off of user's submitting content (reviews in the case of Oink), I'd imagine users may become hesitant to contributefor fear of the project (and thus their work) getting shot in the head.
I'm not saying terminating a project that didn't meet expectations is wrong, I'm just curious about the lasting implications.
I was one of the (seemingly) few people using Oink in Orlando, FL, and I thought it was great. I'll certainly be more hesitant to create any more content for a Milk product because it kinda feels like I just fired off information in to a black hole.
I figured it would be killed after how little people in my area were using it and I knew what I was getting in to, but I think I'll still let other people be the test dummies next time.
In fact, I think it shows a lot of discipline to stick to what they said they'd do.
I think a very valid argument can be made that this is the problem with the Milk model. The fact that they're funded without a product mandate means that they have a nice safety net so instead of pivoting a product and trying to fix what they have, they "shoot it in the head" and move on. There's no incentive to try to make what they have work. This isn't discipline, discipline is about making the hard choices and its easy to put a product out to pasture, its in fact the opposite. There's no reason to be disciplined when you're just playing with other people's money.
This is pretty much the opposite of what YC does which is give a smart team just enough money to live and make them fend for themselves. You're a hell of a lot more disciplined when you're clawing and scrathcing just to be ramen profitable.
In the grand scheme of things none of this will really matter. Silicon Valley and tech in general is in the grips of ADD culture.
It's no longer about million dollar ideas, it's not really about execution of solutions either, it's about teams wandering around in search of something.
And maybe inevitably Kevin Rose will stumble upon the real purpose of Milk and spend time on it and make it a success. And the mistakes he made will just be papered over while what worked is left to be studied.
So silicon valley's real value is to coddle the needs of wishy-washy primadonnas as they attempt to find them self? When they succeed, we deify them and shower them with worshipful funding, when they fail its an exercise in letting what worked float to the top to build upon it for the next what-if?
I call bullshit.
Sorry, but the idea behind Oink simply wasn't very compelling.
I am actually turned off by the fact that Kevin managed to get investors in his own private sensory incubation tank which has no problem walking away from everything.
The mantra of fail often is being confused with continual failure.
Not everyone plays it but a lot do. It's the easiest point of entry for when you don't have the know how, lack experience, don't know enough people to do things such as launch rockets, design electric cars, optimize doctors, or achieve world peace.
And the mistakes he made will just be papered over while what worked is left to be studied.
Actually, what didn't work is very valuable. That's the whole point of things like customer development/lean startup. You learn why something didn't work so that you don't repeat your mistakes, and chart a course for something that you think will work the next time.
It should come as no surprise. Rose said they were going to do this all along. The vision for the company is to continually pump out apps until one sticks. If Oink didn't receive the traction they needed to keep going, why keep going?
Oh God. Queue this as a forthcoming trend. Sucks because this trend is really going to have a negative affect on new startups acquiring early users. People are no longer going to invest themselves into a product if they think it's simply going to close up shop a few months later.
This implies that "people" think much about the business behind the products they use. I'm not convinced people put that much thought into whether or not to test something out.
Person 1: "have you seen this new app?"
Person 2: "Oh, cool. I'd try it out, but I read on [insert tech blog] that they're practicing lean startup methodology so I'll wait to install it until after their series-A"
Yes, I know that's a strawman argument, but I have a hard time seeing people really thinking like this at all.
I think it depends who you are targeting. Even though Oink was targeting regular consumers, it does no favours for the reputation of start-ups trying to target businesses. I'm trying to sell a B2B startup's product into my office: one of the questions I'm asked is "it's a startup, what do we do if they shut it down in a few months"? Continuity can be a very important factor for certain types of startups.
from a personal example: I was really invested in the pool party app from Slide. Create groups and share pictures with groups of people, I convinced my friends to switch over. After they shut down, yeah I got my pictures off the service, but I will never invest in a new service like this again. Theres probably a lot of stories like this, and hes absolutely right that it doesn't help anyone.
I think they do though, not like that but. They will just generalise to all new products coming from places other than big well know companies. It will be more like "I started using [photo sharing app x] but then they shut down and I had to move my photos, I'll just stick to Facebook."
I can completely understand the way you feel, used to feel the same way many moons ago.
What changed it for me was to look at it differently:
1. If all products that were ever built were 100% good and successful, we'd be living in a different world. But, we don't. Fact is that most of us make a few good products (if we are lucky) and a lot of bad ones. It is the natural way of things, you can't control it. What you can control is how we go about doing it and how much it costs.
2. Money is raised for a lot of reasons. Money is spent for a lot of reasons. Not all worthy causes/products get funded well, same is the case for the unworthy ones. A lot of money, be it that most of it is wasted, tills the ground better and raises the odds for something good to come out of the flood of bad ones. Would you rather have no good ones at all in trying to ensure ONLY good ideas get funded and sustained?
3. You can use the same $$$s in different ways: blow it all up in one go, make different (smaller) attempts at it with clearly defined parameters for failure and success. Those two parameters are very subjective. Especially as product people we tend to keep products alive for much longer than we deserve to keep them.
4. Most important perspective for me: if you think you can do it differently, stop talking about it and have a go at it. Attempting (and even failing) to do half of most of the people we love to criticize brings about a sea change in perspective. It is always different in the trenches.
I think one of the biggest hurdles to ranking and rating systems is how the data comes in. Imagine a two-dimensional histogram where Y is the number of ratings and all of the items are arranged on the X axis.
What I saw with Oink was this X axis (the number of items to be rated) growing faster than the Y axis (the number of ratings): in effect, noise growing faster than signal.
They weren't aggressive enough in filtering out duplicate entries and/or working with businesses to upload their catalogs onto Oink so users didn't have to add (and re-add) them. Not saying it was an easy task, but essentially this is the main challenge to such a product.
This is a good example of how extremely hungry entrepreneurs often have the advantage. Established companies and serial entrepreneurs rarely stick with their ideas if there isn't immediate success. Yet most large successes take time to mature and build momentum. Really sad to see kevin and milk give up so fast.
If they didn't really believe in this "innovative" idea of taking pictures of food and posting them on the internet, and didn't have the resources and conviction to see it through, then why will they be more successful next time?
Glad they are moving on. IMHO never understood what problem OINK was solving or why so many people ran to support it simply because Kevin Rose was attached. I have the utmost respect for Kevin but oink was very "emperor's new clothes" for me. I wondered what everyone was looking at while I saw nothing but junk
But actually I am still surprised how quick this got axed. As a user you gotta ask yourself these days if it's worth investing a lot of time and content into a new app. An App that might be shut down, just because the builders want to go try out a new idea.
To give Kevin Rose some credit here, he always state up front that Milk was going to "try" different ideas and move on to another if one wasn't bringing the right amount of traction.
Now I hoped that the transition over to a new idea wouldn't mean the instand death of the previous and that's probably the biggest surprise here.
First line sheds a bit of light on their philosophy: "We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project..."
Sounds like they are trying for a shotgun approach (didn't the company behind Angry Birds do the same thing? I don't know the official business term for this methodology). Where they have an internal API/system to roll out an idea FAST, then see if it gains any traction within their internal goal (whatever short period of time they set for themselves), and if not, scrap it to move onto the next thing...?
I think that works great for little one-off games. But with websites where people are expecting it to be around for years? Will that burn users too often, too fast, and sully your reputation? I don't know. I'm curious.
(imo, I don't know if I'd have put those two sentences in the shut-down notice - sounds like they were just experimenting with the site to see if they could make a quick buck, weren't really serious about it unless the $ or pageviews started flowing, and the users were just the guinea pigs...but that's just me.)
Milk was founded/funded on cult of personality rather than quality of ideas.
I wish them success, but maybe they should spend more time thinking up a quality idea instead of sitting around on a bunch of couches drinking beer and tea appreciating the brilliance of their hipsterness through their macbooks.
it seems like this move, an open database of photos, tags and content would somehow "save" Kevin's image, of course in the eyes of those who point him down.
Or how about finding a new home for the product (eg. another startup, media co., anyone!).
While I understand there is a large amount of effort involved in transacting something like that, certainly there is a legitimate & appropriate organization out there who could foster and grow the community that is Oink.
This action would mildly address the concerns about continuity and trust in product longevity.
What a stupid statement. I'm nowhere close of being a hispter but this remark is so stupid and useless that I don't understand how you had the guts to press Enter
It's kind of amusing to see how "hipster" has become a catch-all insult, particularly in nerd communities. Are you youngish and slightly unusual in a way that I don't like? Hipster!
I don't like Kevin Rose, but c'mon, at least find some more creative insults.
This really speaks to how we should look at apps, specifically those based around social networks. Consider the analogy of an app vis à vis a roller disco. The roller disco was a fad, so why can't apps and their subsequent networks be "fads" too? Maybe that's the point: they're cool because they're relevant now. Maybe longevity isn't the goal. We should enjoy the ephemeral things (so later we can say "remember when...").
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadEdit: Kevin Rose said he would kill off any project that wasn't gaining traction and he did just that. This is what I was referring to.
If they kept Oink alive until it took off (if ever) they wouldn't be able to build the next thing.
If on the other hand, you find out only 1 person is still using it after a month, that means it's a product fit problem, and sticking to your guns is probably futile.
But I really do appreciate that they offer a way to download my data as I've done it and discovered a beer I'd forgotten about: http://www.meantimebrewing.com/our-beers/meantime-wheat
Instagram hopes to prove you wrong.
Maybe oink just wasn't driving the engagement they wanted (or something).
Our internal analysis of share/engagement metrics was showing that our own users were way more engaged than Oink's. We were expecting that if they noticed us in the market they'd have been working on rev 2 of the product - gathering intel from products like ours and integrating it - rather than shutting it down.
Oink was maybe useful when items were attached to locations. As soon as people started like Macbook Pros and other free standing stuff, it became completely pointless for me. (Too cluttered and not enough recommendation value.)
We've had a few businesses approach us cold after being cheered, asking if they could offer some sort of coupon, or other offer to users who cheer on their business. That's something we haven't really figured out how to run with and/or monetize yet.
I can't really explain what gets these users hooked, but you can see the sort of engagement we're seeing here: http://chee.rs/1433322
http://code.google.com/appengine/kb/general.html#naked_domai...
We've been waiting for them to fix this for a while. I hope that it arrives around the same time as SSL support for custom domains.
Explore the space between selling virtual sheep to OCD-inflicted grandmas and shoving the local butcher's billboard in your loving users' faces.
Slashdot had moderation for comments, but no similar mechanism for stories. Digg had the voting system for stories and for comments.
I don't know the Reddit history that well, but as I read recently in a PG essay, it was originally slated to be a food ordering application on your phone.
I do not know when they pivoted, or when their idea to pivot came, but I _suspect_ that their pivot was at least partly inspired by Digg's early release.
How ethical is this to set something up to obviously collect 'free data'?
------------------------- This is an interesting case. It seems like the group designed, built and shipped a pretty slick ratings app all in a bid to gather data. Rather than mine existing databases or pay other companies to license their information, they were able to garner attention via the app launch and gather their own. --------------------
if this is indeed the case, they should have been upfront about it. This is like taking users for a ride. 'Now that we have enough data, we're going to shut this thing down'
They "inferred" it from this quote: ------------ We are extremely grateful for all of your effort finding and rating the best things in the places around you. We’ve discovered thousands of awesome pizzas, pastas, coffees, teas… and roller coasters, zoo exhibits, paintings, sculptures, vistas… and sodas, salads, sliders, soups… and so much more. ----------
That's reading into it way too much.
Oink was a beautifully designed app. If they just wanted to gather info, I don't think they would have spent so much time making it look good.
I think it just didn't work out the way they wanted it to, they are learning from this experience and quickly discarding what doesn't work and moving on to the next thing.
I think people are getting tired of using apps to tag stuff, take pictures, "like" this and that, etc... It feels like we are working for a company and not having fun or create anything, and Oink! just gave me reason to think this way even more firmly. There's no market for this anymore, because we don't have that much time to spent in dozens of different communities, and so,the less populated die.
So please, if you want to build something, please work on something real and that actual solves something, not another Flickr meets Facebook/twitter app.
And they got a bunch of publicity, but ask yourself this question: of all the apps you reach about in Techcrunch, Mashable, etc, what % do you actually use? Publicity doesn't always translate to lots of users. They probably got a ton of initial downloads from curious geeks, but that's about it. Their churn rate was probably ridiculously high.
Publicity is pretty good for 1 thing for sure: search engine rankings, and Oink wasn't a website.
I do see where they're coming from though. The reputation system was supposed to balance this out. Kind of like social news websites where people submit tons of links. Somehow through upvoting things become relevant no longer noisy and I'm pretty sure that's what Oink was going for. It was all very well designed.
I think a lot of people who used it didn't treat it that way. They treated it as another review site, which it also was. But treating it that way makes it such a chore to "build" and so eventually we all lost the point of it all.
I'd really be interested in seeing what next they build.
I am suspecting this episode will offend people who are working real hard on what they think is are more important ideas and are struggling to get finding, only for Kevin to throw away millions for fun.
I'm super surprised by this, and Kevin Rose just lost a couple of points of respect in my book. Must be nice to have investors who will throw money at you, so that you can give a half-hearted effort at something (or maybe less than half) only to shut it down a few months later to "try something else".
It's like ADD at the business level.
Terrible decision. I don't even think anyone even tried to make this a success.
Using money to fund ideas that may or may not pan out is an interesting concept and kind of cool and if they decide to throw out ideas that don't work rather than stick to it that just defines what milk is.
And in contrast to the Milk model, you have sites like Delicious, Flickr, and even Digg itself which still operate even after the original founders have moved on.
More to the point, what percentage of potential users for their next app will know about Milk's philosophy (or care) when they see it in the App Store's "Featured" section?
It might make the news, and it's a good talking point, but I can't help feeling the naysayers are just stuck in an echo chamber on this.
In fact, I think it shows a lot of discipline to stick to what they said they'd do.
I'm not saying terminating a project that didn't meet expectations is wrong, I'm just curious about the lasting implications.
I figured it would be killed after how little people in my area were using it and I knew what I was getting in to, but I think I'll still let other people be the test dummies next time.
I think a very valid argument can be made that this is the problem with the Milk model. The fact that they're funded without a product mandate means that they have a nice safety net so instead of pivoting a product and trying to fix what they have, they "shoot it in the head" and move on. There's no incentive to try to make what they have work. This isn't discipline, discipline is about making the hard choices and its easy to put a product out to pasture, its in fact the opposite. There's no reason to be disciplined when you're just playing with other people's money.
This is pretty much the opposite of what YC does which is give a smart team just enough money to live and make them fend for themselves. You're a hell of a lot more disciplined when you're clawing and scrathcing just to be ramen profitable.
It's no longer about million dollar ideas, it's not really about execution of solutions either, it's about teams wandering around in search of something.
And maybe inevitably Kevin Rose will stumble upon the real purpose of Milk and spend time on it and make it a success. And the mistakes he made will just be papered over while what worked is left to be studied.
That's the real point anyway.
I call bullshit.
Sorry, but the idea behind Oink simply wasn't very compelling.
I am actually turned off by the fact that Kevin managed to get investors in his own private sensory incubation tank which has no problem walking away from everything.
The mantra of fail often is being confused with continual failure.
Not everyone plays it but a lot do. It's the easiest point of entry for when you don't have the know how, lack experience, don't know enough people to do things such as launch rockets, design electric cars, optimize doctors, or achieve world peace.
Actually, what didn't work is very valuable. That's the whole point of things like customer development/lean startup. You learn why something didn't work so that you don't repeat your mistakes, and chart a course for something that you think will work the next time.
Really? 4 months to gain traction? I wonder how they come up with this number?
Person 1: "have you seen this new app?"
Person 2: "Oh, cool. I'd try it out, but I read on [insert tech blog] that they're practicing lean startup methodology so I'll wait to install it until after their series-A"
Yes, I know that's a strawman argument, but I have a hard time seeing people really thinking like this at all.
What changed it for me was to look at it differently:
1. If all products that were ever built were 100% good and successful, we'd be living in a different world. But, we don't. Fact is that most of us make a few good products (if we are lucky) and a lot of bad ones. It is the natural way of things, you can't control it. What you can control is how we go about doing it and how much it costs.
2. Money is raised for a lot of reasons. Money is spent for a lot of reasons. Not all worthy causes/products get funded well, same is the case for the unworthy ones. A lot of money, be it that most of it is wasted, tills the ground better and raises the odds for something good to come out of the flood of bad ones. Would you rather have no good ones at all in trying to ensure ONLY good ideas get funded and sustained?
3. You can use the same $$$s in different ways: blow it all up in one go, make different (smaller) attempts at it with clearly defined parameters for failure and success. Those two parameters are very subjective. Especially as product people we tend to keep products alive for much longer than we deserve to keep them.
4. Most important perspective for me: if you think you can do it differently, stop talking about it and have a go at it. Attempting (and even failing) to do half of most of the people we love to criticize brings about a sea change in perspective. It is always different in the trenches.
What I saw with Oink was this X axis (the number of items to be rated) growing faster than the Y axis (the number of ratings): in effect, noise growing faster than signal.
They weren't aggressive enough in filtering out duplicate entries and/or working with businesses to upload their catalogs onto Oink so users didn't have to add (and re-add) them. Not saying it was an easy task, but essentially this is the main challenge to such a product.
But actually I am still surprised how quick this got axed. As a user you gotta ask yourself these days if it's worth investing a lot of time and content into a new app. An App that might be shut down, just because the builders want to go try out a new idea. To give Kevin Rose some credit here, he always state up front that Milk was going to "try" different ideas and move on to another if one wasn't bringing the right amount of traction. Now I hoped that the transition over to a new idea wouldn't mean the instand death of the previous and that's probably the biggest surprise here.
What the Font was unsuccessful in determining it.
Sounds like they are trying for a shotgun approach (didn't the company behind Angry Birds do the same thing? I don't know the official business term for this methodology). Where they have an internal API/system to roll out an idea FAST, then see if it gains any traction within their internal goal (whatever short period of time they set for themselves), and if not, scrap it to move onto the next thing...?
I think that works great for little one-off games. But with websites where people are expecting it to be around for years? Will that burn users too often, too fast, and sully your reputation? I don't know. I'm curious.
(imo, I don't know if I'd have put those two sentences in the shut-down notice - sounds like they were just experimenting with the site to see if they could make a quick buck, weren't really serious about it unless the $ or pageviews started flowing, and the users were just the guinea pigs...but that's just me.)
I wish them success, but maybe they should spend more time thinking up a quality idea instead of sitting around on a bunch of couches drinking beer and tea appreciating the brilliance of their hipsterness through their macbooks.
While I understand there is a large amount of effort involved in transacting something like that, certainly there is a legitimate & appropriate organization out there who could foster and grow the community that is Oink.
This action would mildly address the concerns about continuity and trust in product longevity.
I don't like Kevin Rose, but c'mon, at least find some more creative insults.
Keep making stuff until it "makes it" Same thing as Color. Oink was aiming at a 4sq + instagram hybrid. Didn't achieve the set goal. Time to move on