In Vancouver it's well known that the overwhelming majority of Chinese people who emigrate here have English variants to their name. If anything the study underestimates the figure as many non-Canadian Chinese (particularly in HK) do have western variants.
Glad you've taken an introductory critical thinking course. This isn't ad-hominem. Raising doubts of the validity of someone's statement based on inherent conflict of interest is a valid line of argument.
No, it would be a valid argument if the argument was "Marc Andreesen says this, therefore it must be true". It happens that Andreesen said these things, but I pointed that out because I wouldn't want people to think they were my insights.
You'll have to actually address the points themselves, sorry.
As a facebook user, I'm happy I'm not longer gonna get "your friend has invited you to this app..." notifications. As a developer, though, I can see why this would be frustrating.
The main frustration here is that the Requests are those that are actively initiated by a user. A friend is actively trying to invite you to the app, rather than just an app spamming those who have once installed it.
That logic melts down when it meets the ecosystem that churns out 5 Farmvilles or Slot Manias a day. Suddenly a rotating set of 1% of your friends list can make using Facebook so painful you'll stop, permanently.
So many new apps launch that banning notifications by app gets tedious. They all suck in different groups of your friends, so banning notifications by friends is tedious. Not forever, perhaps, but long enough to make you think ill of Facebook.
We've been there before, and even though as a developer I miss it, it was the right thing of Facebook to do.
This is what I was trying to achieve with my app. The Request notifications were for individual users - not pre-ticked.
The problem is that creating something that people actually want, working via the channels that Facebook provides for people to access the Social Graph is very risky, as they can move the goalposts at any point.
The fb policy is that you aren't allowed to incentivize the sending of requests, but you can give a reward for someone accepting a request. A subtle distinction, but a distinction nonetheless.
Yah - I've seen the same thing. It's more about working closely with founders and then, "oh yah that thing you were planning on adding in 6 months, I'm gonna do that now and steal your IP"
Yup. But what I've seen even more is people cozying up to new founders and mooching time, publicity, connections, and money off them.
One thing to be on guard against is the human social capital version of the Ponzi scheme. In this a self-promoter makes wild promises, gets you talking them up, and then uses you as a reference to climb the social ladder and gain access to people further up the success chain. At no point is anything actually done or delivered to anyone. The end-game for such a person is to worm their way into a successful venture at just the right moment to hitch a ride... such as at the moment of a liquidity event. Another goal can be for them to get their "stink" on as many entrepreneurs as possible-- get their names on contracts, etc.-- so that if someone is successful they can come along later and sue. If they time it right, they might catch you at a liquidity point and you'll pay them off to make them go away... very similar to a patent troll.
These people will waste your time and make you look like a jerk. You'd be surprised how many of these there are, especially if you're in a "startup hub."
There's nothing wrong with networking of course, but there is something wrong with claiming relationships that don't exist, claiming to own things you don't own, lying about your accomplishments, and damaging other peoples' reputations in the process. The line is a bit fuzzy, but there are definitely a lot of things that are at best unprofessional and slimy.
People who just do this and nothing else usually don't cause much overt harm, but they do waste peoples' time and time is quite valuable. It's in the slimy ass-clowning category.
I went through a similar thing. It even got to the stage where my wife was telling me I was addicted to work but I had had jobs before, I just really liked what I was doing for a change and would get rushes from it.
