Tim O’Reilly Posted in Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media

wingedpig.com – Mark Fletcher’s Blog: Stealth Start-Ups Suck:

…Here’s the thing, stealth mode for a web start-up is the kiss of death.

Stealth mode is when a company is operating in secret for some length
of time before launching their product or service. In many industries,
creating a new product or service takes significant time and effort.
During this time, being in stealth mode may make a lot of sense. But
creating a new web service is not rocket science and does not take a
lot of time or money. My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that’s being generous. I’m speaking from experience here. I developed the first version of ONElist over a period of 3 months, and that was while working a full-time job. I developed the first version of Bloglines in 3 months. By myself. It can be done. And I suck at it! Just ask all the engineers who have had to deal with my code.

Why go fast? Many reasons:

• First mover advantage is important.
• There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably way ahead of you. Get over yourself.
• It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.
• Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don’t bother trying to achieve it. Ship early, ship often.
• The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you’ll start getting feedback from users.

I get into a great converation with Lisa Williams in a thread started when Steve Outing poses the question “Will Independents Succeed First?” at running citizen/grassroots journalism efforts.

Check out this excellent Flash tutorial site. Only a few are there, but their presentation is great – sometimes it’s far easier to learn by seeing then reading alone.

Oh, he will deny it of course, but when Doc Searls praises you so highly, you’ve been granted more authority then the rest of us anonymous Joes.

Go and enjoy your recognized punditry Dave. Or deny that you are one. Your choice my friend 🙂

Reading Doc’s post I just kept on thinking to myself… “oh the irony…”. I love it 🙂 Honestly though, your writing does deserve some more attention and I’m very happy to see you starting to garner it.

We had another fun and thought provoking meetup last night in Philly. One of our conversations has led me to post at Philly Future a question: is it only the young and the rich who blog?

Note I have a rather flexible notion of who is young and who is rich. If you’re not a senior citizen – you’re young. If you shop at Starbucks for coffee – you’re rich.

I think that just about covers 99% of the bloggers I personally know.

Where are the seniors and where are the lower middle class and poor bloggers? Reply at Philly Future.

See its page at OSFlash.

BTW, if you do Flash/Actionscript development, and use Eclipse for managing your projects, you’ll want ASDT, an Actionscript editor for Eclipse. Syntax highlighting, code completion and more. Misses flagging of errors that Eclipse’s Java editor provides.

Bug fixes and more: Raible Designs ~ [ANN] AppFuse 1.8.1 Released.

I gotta check out his demo done with Flash.

OSFlash is a Wiki devoted to open source development with Flash. Tools, libraries and more.

Many fun and interesting Flash sound, motion, and interface compositions to play and open your mind with with at yugop.com, Levitated and Joshua Davis.