I also consider the Facebook requirement obnoxious - up until I decided to give Grouper a spin, my Facebook profile was minimal, not even a profile picture. But I was curious enough that I bit the bullet and gave Facebook way, way more information about myself than I'd normally be willing.

Which, of course, makes the vapor nature of the service that much more upsetting.

My experience could very well be an aberration - that said, I figure I'd throw out a warning to others interested in trying to service but are hesitant to give Facebook more personal information.

We use several techniques to filter out sketchy accounts, and your sparse Facebook information may have triggered our suspicions.

We need to use Facebook for, at the very least, making sure you don't know the other group.

Also, in terms of the allegations of vaporware, just search Instagram for the hashtag #groupergram. There are over 1,000 photos from recent Groupers. We've also collected our favorites on our landing page http://joingrouper.com and here: http://joingrouper.com/groupergrams

If I were in Google's shoes, I wouldn't be launching a native Maps app. Period.

It's not like Maps is driving vast amounts of search revenue for Google. And with the degraded functionality of Apple's own Maps app, Google's Map app has become a reason for a buyer to consider switching to a Google-blessed Android phone.

And I say this as a long-time iPhone user - Maps was an important application for me. Now that it's become less functional, I'm going to actively look at Android and WP.

Everything they collect through maps can eventually be used to enhance their advertising offerings.

So maybe Maps isn't driving a lot of revenue right now but it's definitely one of Google's most ambitious data collection projects.

There's some value in the aggregate information from all users in improving the service, but the law of diminishing returns will be reached quickly. Losing even half the mobile maps usage would have basically no impact in the ability of Google to deduce things from the data. There might be a few exceptions like real-time traffic information where every data point is precious.

I don't think Google's going to get very evil, at least not overnight. They have the infrastructure to collect all this data, the resources to store it, and the technology to make sense of it. They're already at the point where their business regularly butts against social norms regarding privacy.

Ultimately I find advertising an extremely unpleasant (if not inherently evil) phenomenon. At the highest levels it's nearly the science of manipulating unwilling people. Advertising companies, especially nebulous yet megalomaniacal tech companies with access to the best behavioral datasets possible, should be treated as highly suspect.

  > If I were in Google's shoes, I wouldn't be launching
  > a native Maps app. Period.

Loosing iOS users for some barely noticeable amount of switchers is hardly a good business for Google—do they even make money from Android phones someone sells? I heard Microsoft makes more money than Google does.

Their goal isn't to make money on the devices, so that's a little like comparing the margins on a Kindle Fire to the margins on an iPad.

I'm... not sure how to parse that sentence. I guess it's implying I have a non-trivial amount of stupidity, which probably explains my parsing problem.

Transit routing is a hard problem to scale - Apple has taken a shortcut and pushed it off to 3rd party developers, who can tackle the much more approachable problem of solving it on a city-by-city basis. Which make sense... but this is still a large regression as far as users are concerned. And doesn't help folks that live in smaller cities.

Yes, Apple is probably working on this. But now we come to an odd signalling issue - Apple has basically told 3rd parties that it is worth their time investing in this area. If-and-when Apple opts to plug this functionality hole, they've pulling the rug out from under these developers. And any app developer worth his salt has to be factoring that.

And I'd be really surprised if Apple steps in any sooner than the next iOS refresh - fixing transit seems like a wonderful bullet point for iOS7.

"Loosing iOS users for some barely noticeable amount of switchers is hardly a good business for Google [...]"

Err... what are they losing, exactly? Users aren't inherently valuable. If there's value these iOS users add to Google, I'd love to hear it.

Google is already generating local search and behavioral data via their large Android install base. Beyond brand visibility (which is going to be reduced, thanks to Apple's own offering), what does releasing their own native app get them? A native version that, again I want to emphasis, Apple is actively competing against their own product. Whatever Google releases, it is now going to be a 2nd class citizen, without the OS-level hooks Apple's own solution gets. And this assumes that Apple even lets them release an app. This wouldn't be the first time Apple has blocked Google from releasing an application on iOS because it duplicates existing 1st party functionality.

Basically - why should Google release their own app?

"—do they even make money from Android phones someone sells? I heard Microsoft makes more money than Google does."

I don't think I can adaquately address this in a response to a comment. Google is not a charity, and Android does add to Google's bottom-line.

In closing - I'd fucking love it if Google released a native Maps app. I'm an iPhone user that's gotten bit by this, and am sticking with iOS5 for now. But I'm not going to hold my breathe waiting. Particularly when I don't see a compelling reason for Google to save me.

They don't care so much about people using Android as they care about people using Google products - because then they can collect more data.

Of course if people are on Android the risk is a bit smaller that Google search and maps will be swapped away under their feet.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:idAZix5...

So - I have a hard time believing he's going to let Fiddler fall apart. If anything, he's finally getting an opportunity to make it his priority, and with an actual development team backing him, I'm actually excited to see how far he can push Fiddler.

tl;dr - I don't have faith in Telrik. I do, however, have faith in Eric.

If neither Amazon nor Google's brand recognition hasn't convinced folks (buyers or sellers) to start pushing it instead of PayPal for Internet purchases, I can only hope it's because their solutions are equally terrible - otherwise, I have a hard time seeing how a new player will make headway in this space. And I'd really like a new player. :/

It also had an even worse payment flow than paypal. Which is saying something.

You can't ignore early adopters like that so no-one switched.

Also seem to remember it didn't take payments from a lot of countries. Could be wrong.

As a buyer (and not a merchant), I love Paypal because I can have it debit directly from by bank account instead of handing over my credit card information. I hate credit cards, and this combined with Paypal's two-factor authentication gives me some good peace of mind. I haven't seen any other services that provide direct-debit to Australians, and even if they did, they would be useless to me unless they were as ubiquitous as Paypal is. I can use Paypal just about everywhere except for Amazon and O'Reilly. At this point I wouldn't even consider using Amazon or Google Wallet for purchases.

On the other hand, these horror stories have made me very wary of the merchant side of Paypal, and I'd definitely think twice about using them to process payments.

I don't understand this at all. I pay through PayPal via a credit card when a merchant accepts no other form of payment, and if they ever gave me trouble, I trust my credit card provider enough that I don't have to trust PayPal. I wouldn't let PayPal near my bank account, because bank accounts don't have the same level of protection for illegitimate transfers, and PayPal will happily ACH away however much they feel entitled to.

You'd rather give the internet a direct line to your bank account to suck out all your money, vs giving it a number to a credit line (which you can refuse to pay if there's any fraud)? I'd like to see the logic behind this.

eBay would account for some of it. Also, payments is a relatively highly regulated market globally, as evidenced by Stripe trying to expand internationally.

We axed amazon soon after we integrated with them - I gather that now both the API and more importantly the UI are much better, and people can sucessfully use their pre-existing amazon accounts. That would be huge.

Google we still support, but it's usage has plummeted from a low starting place on our site. It'll be dropped on the next rev of the our UI.

I'm from the Netherlands and if you're a freelancer here you need to provide income statements for 3 years before you can get a credit card.

That meant that until last year I couldn't buy a thing with Google Wallet or Amazon Payments without asking my family for a credit card.

The only thing that worked for me was PayPal (and the iTunes store.)

That's amazing. Also goes to show anyone who tries to talk about "Europe" is making a useless generalization - here in Sweden I easily got two credit cards when I was a student with no income aside from government student loans.

But don't you have VISA/Mastercard debit cards? In Sweden, there are no longer any ATM cards, everyone gets a VISA or MasterCard instead that works in ATM, stores and online.

If you didn't apply or it gets revoked because you were flagged somehow, which happened to me when moving abroad for a year, you end up in the situation I described.

And no, we are still pretty much exclusively ATM based here.

Network effects, name recognition, and forced integration with the only online auction site that matters.

This makes crowdfunding projects like this a little tricky, since they doesn't map well to the legal agreements that make up the existing payment systems.

I think the legal gray area comes from customers believing that they are buying a product from the crowdfunders. This is covered by an advisory by the FTC; to be covered by dry-testing exception, the following conditions need to be met:

* In promoting the merchandise, the merchant can make no suggestion that the merchandise will be shipped or that customers expressing an interest in it will receive it.

* In all promotional materials, the merchant must disclose all material aspects of the promotion, including the fact that the merchandise is only planned and may not be shipped.

* If any part of the promotion is later dropped, the merchant must notify subscribers of the fact within a reasonable time after soliciting their subscriptions.

* If, within a reasonable time after soliciting their subscriptions, the merchant has made no decision to ship the merchandise, it must notify subscribers of this fact and give them the opportunity to cancel and, where payment has been made, make a prompt refund.

* The merchant can make no substitutions of any merchandise for that ordered.

It seems obvious that crowdfunding efforts don't meet these criteria.

[1] http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus02-business-guide-mail-...

Those are serious questions that only a lawyer can answer.

Uh, no. By that definition, every transaction would be an equity transaction.

Equity specifically refers to an ownership interest in a business.

And that's a terrible mistake. I don't care how capable my Angry Birds experience is on my camera. I care about applications written to enhance the photo-and-videographic functionality of my camera.

I'm fine with Nikon throwing on a custom launcher, if that's what they need to do to work around Android's touch-focus. I'm fine (and in fact, prefer) folks authoring applications specifically to the Nikon camera's interface.

And there's so much opportunity to extend a camera's capabilities, once it can run 3rd party applications. Auto stitching panoramas. Unwrapping spherical maps. Chromakeying. Instagram-esque filters. Subject tracking. Realtime preview and control over wifi and bluetooth via companion devices. Panning motor control. Multiple camera's automagically synchronizing. Etc etc.

The author uses Parrot's Asteroid car stereo system as an example for how a non-standard usage and non-standard UI are bound to fail. But that's a really weak comparison. Who do you think is more likely to grow a robust 3rd party ecosystem - a one-off experiment in a crowded, cost-sensitive market (a $350 device for bleeding edge enthusiasts), or an oft-upgraded stable of professionals who are already spending multiple thousands on equipment to be more productive?

The alternative is Nikon creates their own OS and development environment. But why compete with a flourishing platform, when you can just simply use it?

Is the server-side ecosystem for Linux-hosted C# production worthy? And if so, does it compare well to the solutions getting recommended in this thread?

A specific comparison would be nice, blanket statements are not helpful.

Adobe is emphasizing that they have to do more compositing logic, so they they need an RGB version of the video frame on the CPU side.

If they did the colorspace conversation on the GPU, they'd have to pull the converted image back and incur the latency hit. Apparently, they see less latency in doing the conversation on the CPU, and have made the call to trade processor efficiency for latency.

To be clear: YUV colorspace conversion on a GPU is really damn simple. I have a ~30 line shader that does it from my video processing codebase. But I can take the hit - I do a substantial amount of image manipulation using shaders on the GPU, and mask the read latency with heavy multi-threading. A Flash application doesn't have this luxury.

But this discussion is largely academic - if you're writing a Flash based video player that doesn't need the flexibility of Flash's full compliment of image manipulation and composting functionality, you'd be using their StageVideo API - an API that does do all the video work on the GPU. This API was introduced in Flash 10.2, which came out after this article from 2010.