The "I got interviewed by Google" articles are getting old for me. I just don't care, and their process isn't that interesting anymore.

we're hiring a couple badass engineers at dropbox (python/c++; client/desktop app dev experience preferred).

we're backed by yc and sequoia... shoot me an email at drew AT getdropbox.com

Agreed. They have, what, 20,000 employees now? It's as exciting as getting an interview at HP or IBM.

What I found interesting about it is that it shows the increasing tendency toward social fragmentation is even affecting France. Robert Putnam noticed this change in 1995 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone). Networks will make the problem (or at least the trend) much worse. My wife and I have a couple friends staying with us at the moment, and it's striking how often all 4 of us are simultaneously sitting using laptops.

Historically this is quite a big change. The last social changes on this scale were probably the ones caused by cars. Though indeed this is partially caused by cars too.

Life goes on, why should I worry!

What I would really like to read is "My Job Interview at X"

X - any startups like Twitter, Friendfeed, Posterous, Kashless. etc

I'll third the recommendation for Mercurial. There is no question that git has more community momentum--something which I hope will begin to change--but Mercurial is nevertheless an outstanding distributed version control system.

Mercurial's default mode of operation has the benefit of being extremely Subversion-like--in a good way. Indeed, if you never interact with anyone else, most of the normal Subversion commands--ci, mv, rm, add, log--"just work." There is no git-style index to worry about, no rebasing, and the command set is small and regular. That means that the learning curve is far, far shallower than git. Yet it still provides the same distributed branching and merging as git, and, though it is slightly slower, the difference is truly negligible in my experience--maybe a couple percent difference at most.

What about the incredible power of git, though? What if you actually want to be rebasing and rewriting your history all the time? When you want unfettered power in Mercurial, you've still got it. The `mq` extension, which can be enabled by adding a single line to your configuration file, allows you to do all the crazy patch rewriting, merging, splitting, and rebasing that git does.[1] But you can ignore that functionality if you want, and still have a very powerful and fast distributed change system.

When Fog Creek looked at going to a distributed source control system last year, I advocated Mercurial over the competitors. Though the transition wasn't seamless, I've been extremely happy with the result. The Unix experience is extremely pleasant, and TortoiseHg (http://tortoisehg.sourceforge.net/) provides a surprisingly solid Windows experience out-of-the-box.

If you can look past the fanboyism, I'd strongly encourage you to give Mercurial a try. I think it strikes a much better power-vs.-usability balance than git does.

[1] Except microbranching. Mercurial doesn't currently support local named branches. You can achieve similar things by using mq with qguards, if you really need them, but in practice, I find it's usually easier to just clone a second repository. In practice, although I do miss microbranches sometimes, I've found I greatly prefer the streamlined workflow of Mercurial.

SaaS marketing is expensive. Don't look at 37s or JoelonSoftware as successful models-- they have built in advertising for their exact target market with their blogs/content.

Can you spare $500 to find out? If so, do this:

1. Get an adwords account. 2. Research keywords with their keyword research tool. Are people searching for what you're building? How much advertiser competition is there? This will give you some idea of demand (this part is free-- or $5 for the account setup). 3. Build a landing page that explains your value prop as best you can and your pricing. Have a sign-up button that is BIG at the bottom that goes to a "we're in private beta right now" page with a "give us your email address to get an exclusive invite". 4. measure how many people click on the ad. Then measure what percentage click on the signup button. That's a pretty good indication of demand and pricing sensitivity. The email is a bonus-- if you dash someone's hopes and they still are eager enough that they give you an email addy, then there might be some classic "hair on fire" problems that your purporting to solve.

Oh, and +1 for businesses. I've heard 37s say that the vast majority of their revenue comes from biz accounts.

Speaking of IRC, I realized this weekend I've implemented what I believe is the world's largest IRC network (the Justin.TV chat system).

According to searchirc.com QuakeNet peaks at about 170k users, whereas Justin.TV chat has gone up to 188k concurrent users so far.

I should write something about how JTV Chat was implemented - there's some interesting stories.

I think you really need to go after businesses. Consumers are just plain cheap. I know I am. As an individual I don't really need anything. Certainly I don't really need any web service. Getting me to buy something that is just a luxury is really hard. I'm also very likely to cancel when buyer's remorse sets in.

Businesses are different. If they need to solve a problem (to make or save a significant amount of money) and the choice is between paying one of their developers $10k+ in salary to build it or paying you $80/mo to have it instantly there's not much of a decision there. You just need to make sure that you're solving a problem that thousands of businesses have and then push it really hard. A simple formula that's really hard work to actually do, but quite likely to succeed.