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this is just a small post about my yesterday experience. On a flight between Boston and Denver (United airlines) there was a video running on the screens. Video was: "How to make a million dollars" And they showed a footage about footycs.com, a youtube-like service for skaters, snowboarders etc.
I mean, is this is not a real prove of being in the bubble: Ordinary people in the plane get entertained by two (very young) "web-entrepreneurs". Unfortunately I wasn't able to locate this video in the web. However, it is worth to look this video first, before deciding for going by your own business. You could learn a lesson from that: do not be so darn naive and work hard when starting your own company.
P.S. Just realized that this video is already pretty old (3 years or so), however still very interesting.
EDIT: Here a blog, I found about this video: http://www.ianfernando.com/2007/tlc-how-to-make-millions-internet-entrepreneurs/
me and my friend always asked us, how important avatars are on the websites where people participate in discussions. Nowadays all the forums around uses avatars, all the IM clients uses avatars, skype and so on. Yes, even stackoverflow uses them. So, it seems, that everywhere, where people tend to communicate or maybe interact with each other, avatars are used. (HN doesn't count here, because it goes a really really sparse design paradigm)
However, I also know people which hates them. In some case this is also a good point, since avatars could break the design experience of a website: imagine a pink pig as an avatar on some more serious site, e.g. like stackoverflow. In my case I often just ignore them, however, I found my self putting an avatar representing me on a lot of sites and im-clients.
So, what do you think: How is it important for a website to provide avatars support to their users, if the website is going main stream? What is a benefit of this? Does it increase 'user come-back' ratio? Or is it just a question of: "Everybody uses them, so let us also use them"?
thanks in advance