Surprisingly (to me), that sounds like a good description of what I'm working on. It's more of a scratch-an-itch, and has no funding (or chance of it in the near future) and no customers. I'm not even thinking of it as "a startup".

I'm doing it now because I'm out of a job, and don't feel like finding another right away. This has been bouncing around my head for months, and I finally have a chance to implement it.

I must have forgotten pg://newthings, because I've read it but I apparently hadn't internalized it.

Is this some sort of mantra or are you thinking out loud?

:)

Google would've been doomed...

Sounds to me exactly like Google was.

Even the first Google search algorithm was hardly a "simple solution"....

Well I don't think the search algorithm is the simple part of Google.

One example of a simple solution PG used was Viaweb. Viaweb's source code is analogous to Google's search algorithm in that case. I think in the context of that article the user-facing part of Viaweb (and Google) is the simple part.

"Software, to them, equalled big, honking Windows apps. Since Viaweb was the first web-based app they'd seen, it seemed to be nothing more than a website." [From Six Principles For Making New Things by pg]

How so?

"Even the first Google search algorithm was hardly a "simple solution"...."

And who else was going to try to build a better search engine, rather than just another search engine with more traffic?

A simple solution means "simple to the user" not for the programmer. One Google query might take hundreds of servers to process and bring back millions of pages but frankly I do not care much as long as I get my result in less than a second after I hit SEARCH. It's easy to Me.

no, yes, yes, yes, no, yes

yes

1. no, it's hella complicated, but we're good enough to get it done

2. no, this problem has been discussed at length, no one has come up with the right idea yet. (which we have, of course)

3. yes, i mean it's not world threatening, but it will magnificently enhance shareholder value... :D

4. no, i think as a social site you have to either give people what they expect, or give them what they don't expect but will definately like

5. yes, we're going to roll into beta ASAP because it's a competitive market and we need to stake our claim

6. yes, we plan to grow our company and the community hand-in-hand and push new features as we grow and acquire the right team to accomplish what we intend as the encompasing design of our product (which may change according to user reception, of course. incremental build allows us to gauge user feedback and adapt accordingly).

the startup we're forming is a social networking webapp/site (challenging the myspaces and facebooks).