CRYPTOCHAOS

"The smoking gun is if the traffic disappears when you stop buying. The idea is not to buy traffic. It's to generate loyalty."--Andrew Frank, Gartner analyst

Fellow ex-Vianteer ☛ Kudos Andrew for the quote...

There’s a large uproar right now following Tr.im’s demise on whether or not anyone should actually be using URL-shorteners just in case something like this happens. [...snip...] But an archive of these links that is maintained outside any one service could help put people’s minds at ease.

Yes, I was a tr.im user. It was a great service and now they're holding my links hostage because they could not figure out how to monetize the service. Hopefully a company like bit.ly will step up and pony up enough ransom to free them. Aaahhh perhaps that is the URL shortener industry's new monetization approach. Get competitors to buy you out if your shutdown threatens credibility of the entire sector...

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees.

The most interesting point, for me, is that FriendFeed has only 12 employees! I know I shouldn't be supprised in this new age of small startups that stay small, but the site just oozed polish, features and performance. I expected them to at least break 40 employees. Kudo's to those guys and I hope they got some good cash in the deal.

Twitter Inc. said its fighting off a coordinated Web attack that has made its popular microblogging site inaccessible for several hours Thursday morning.

"Ramen profitability is the other extreme: a startup that becomes profitable after 2 months, even though its revenues are only $3000 a month, because the only employees are a couple 25 year old founders who can live on practically nothing. Revenues of $3000 a month do not mean the company has succeeded. But it does share something with the one that's profitable in the traditional way: they don't need to raise money to survive."

Paul Graham is always a good read.... Check out the full blog post.