In my consulting work I see a lot of usage data from sites of all sizes, and there is a correlation between dial-up users and IE6 users.
I assume that dial-up users don't download Microsoft updates because of the download time and the frequency of updates. At this point, it's probably fair to say that IE6 users will only upgrade if they get broadband or replace their computer with one that has a better browser pre-installed. Since money is clearly a factor in both cases, I'm not holding my breath.
Color TV arrived around 1960, and it took 13 years to pass the 50% bar. (Source: http://is.gd/taGM) Clearly, there are some consumers who will only upgrade when something breaks -- probably because they just can't afford to do otherwise.
I actually feel for people who are still using IE6. For whatever reason, it's either impossible or impractical for these people to upgrade.
If you want to design a site that doesn't work with IE6 and you can afford to cut off 10%+ of the general population, just do it and explain (nicely) that the site requires a newer browser. They probably won't upgrade, but you've done your part. No need to resort to trickery.
In my experience, if you ask the people who use IE6 why they don't upgrade most of them will respond with something like "What's IE6? Oh you mean Internet Explorer. What's wrong with the one I have?" and then if you finally convince them they they should upgrade you have to explain to them how to do it, which for most people who are still using IE6 can be a big challenge.
My grandmother uses IE6. She says it works and doesn't want to bother with an upgrade. She doesn't care that you app doesn't render properly :)
She doesn't care that you app doesn't render properly
I think this is the most important point, but it is made so rarely!
Most people who have IE6 are either too ignorant to care if your site renders incorrectly or know that they are forced to use this browser for some reason. The former group probably isn't using your next gen web 2.0 fancy pants app anyway, and the later group has seen so many broken websites (at work) that they look right past the problems or try again when they get home.
In general, all you need to do is ensure your site WORKS AT ALL in IE6. It doesn't need to look perfect, just not be broken. But honestly, I might just serve them the mobile version with a warning on top...
That's not a bad idea... serving the mobile version to IE6, because as time goes on, and as more people are using smart phones with modern browsers, browsers that are more powerful than IE6, IE6 starts to look more and more like an ancient mobile browser anyway.
I'm launching a site next week for Internet-related job listings in the SF Bay Area for just this reason. The bigger sites annoyed me both as an employer and as a job seeker for the reasons you mention. I reached out directly to friends and HR folks at local companies and have a pretty good number of listings to start. Hopefully this will be a bit more targeted. I'll post to Ask HN for feedback, post-launch.
The monetization need not be direct (i.e. charging people to use the site). It could be better ad placement, a search engine that knows more about you than google does, monetary transactions (auctions, payments), as well as other stuff...
Like it or not, facebook has real utility (just like central park), and people are willing to pay for real utility in one way or another.
What I'm surprised they haven't done already is extend their event planning mechanism to partner with ticket agents, train companies/airlines, cinema chains, restaurant booking systems, pizza delivery, etc etc.
The http protocol cannot effectively distribute files however, whether they be documents (.txt for example) or programs (.exe for example).
It is bad form to refer to Gopher nostalgicly!
..to refer to Gopher only in the past tense is to do the protocol a great disservice. The protocol has NOT degraded over time, and today it actually functions better than it did in its heyday of popularity.
Referring to Gopher like something from the stone-age subconciously puts out the message that Gopher is somehow not useful in the new millenium!
I underestimated Facebook for too long. Then two weeks ago I was in the US Airways lounge between flights in the Charlotte, NC airport (which has amazingly fast free WiFi, BTW) and noticed that HALF of the people who were using the Internet were on Facebook. Granted, an airport lounge is going to pull a certain sub-set of society, but still... Facebook is every bit the social phenomenon that eBay and Yahoo were in the past. I don't know how you put a dollar value on it, but that kind of reach has real value.
This seems to be a microcosm of the problem Facebook is facing. Everyone is on it, yet significant (public company esque) profits have yet to materialize. It is definitely a social phenomenon, but unlike eBay and Yahoo monetizing the service is proving to be difficult at very large scales.
Theres also the problem of advertising on a social networking site. If we could observe everyone in that US Airways lounge's average Facebook session, how many ads would we see people click on out of that group? How many people brought something or signed up for something after clicking those ads? Advertising dynamics on a social networking site are fundamentally different. A question I always ask people when the topic of Facebook comes up is "have you ever clicked an ad on there? I don't think I have" and the answer is always some variation of "actually, now that I think about it I haven't". I'm not going to extrapolate too much on this given my sample size, but if this is the standard response to this question everywhere, then Facebook has a serious problem (despite its phenomenon status).
I agree. My personal anecdote is that I've been to three countries in the past year; Japan, Mexico and Colombia; and later connected with every single person I met that was in their teens or twenties. This includes some fairly rural parts of Mexico and Colombia that don't necessarily have broadband or very good Internet access, in general.
From what I noticed among my japanese friends however, Mixi is a lot more popular over there than Facebook. It's less open though: invitation-only, and you need a japanese cellphone address to register, so I've seen few travelers/foreigners on it.
It's pretty geared towards Japanese cultural norms, from what I've read and what my own Japanese friends have told me. I don't think it would be as acceptable as it is here to meet someone briefly through a friend and then add them the next day on facebook, for instance.
It's an interesting barrier towards global adoption, methinks; it's like how neither Google nor Yahoo can beat Baidu in mainland China, because Baidu just understands what its audience wants better. But, I think that a social networking platform is going to struggle a lot more with adapting to cultural norms than information search is.
It's kind of bizarre sometimes when I think about how I got into facebook in the spring of 2004. I was a sophomore at Cornell at the time, and I don't feel like anyone talks about this that much anymore now that facebook is all-inclusive and so widespread, but we really only got interested in it because it had come out of Harvard and Zuckerberg had started by adding most of the other Ivies and famous top tier universities (Stanford, MIT, etc.) first.
It kind of like getting into an invitation-only country club at the time. It was a bit silly, but that was what facebook's original identity was built around.
I'm 80% sure that facebook would have gone nowhere had Zuckerberg not been at Harvard when he started it.
I'm the other way around - I was like "This is going to be huge" starting around 2005, and now that everyone is using it, I'm like, "They're doomed." If I could short their stock at any market cap over $4B or so, I'd do it - and I wouldn't buy unless their market cap was under $1B or so.
Actually, considering I waited until Akamai was down to $150M before buying, and considering what Akamai does vs. what FaceBook does, I'm not sure I'd buy FaceBook at any price. Doomed!
I do think that Twitter's going to be huge though. Wish I knew how to get in on stock ownership for them. Alas, they turned me down for a job.
Why do you think time has anything to do with the stability of software? It's really up to them to label their software how they see fit. I respect them for not blinding doing what everyone else does.
I agree that the color choices aren't great, but the simplicity of the design is quite nice. (So many of them end up being Flashy nightmares.) I'd like to see more info graphics like this one, which communicate trends in a clear new way.
One of the nice things about traditional newspaper layout is that story placement and size help readers instantly understand the relative importance of each news article. (Of course "importance" is an entirely subjective notion, but you see what I mean.)
Other than the 2-box story at the top-left, having both X and Y axes and same-size boxes makes it difficult to determine what's worth reading and what's not. It would be interesting combine the grid with a Hacker News/Digg-like point system that reordered the stories by popularity.
The fact that you lose access to the Skimmer interface after clicking on a story seems weird, but that's fixable.
Still, I like that they're trying new ideas. And I love having a small photo with each headline.
I see your argument re: the 'importance' of stories - the 'above the fold' placement in print papers is the same idea - but I think, at least in terms of my own reading, that I can judge for myself what the important stories are.
Thinking about it this is one of the top selling points to me of this design. I don't CARE what the editors think is an important story, show me the article summaries and I'LL decide what I want to read about. This system is great because I can quickly scan the stories for those topics I'm interested in (Science, Tech, Business, Politics) and never have to look at sport or fashion or Britney's new tongue piercing etc
But either way, as you say, nice that they're trying out new ideas
I think the point is that the editorial placement of stories is relieving you of a burden, not telling you what to think. It's like the ordering of stories on the HN front page -- to say "I don't CARE what other HN readers think; I want to go through each one and decide for myself" is to miss an extra dimension, somewhat.
