zachster

Clickables below: http://hot-spot.me/sxsw.php

A couple days ago, I posted a mashup I did of the SxSW panelist directory. I found it a lot easier to pick panels based on what companies people came from. I got no love from YC: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2281104

So let's try this again. This time, pick the pretty people, and if you make it through all the pages, I'll give you a list of the "prettiest" panels based on everyone's votes.

When I conceived of this, I wondered how evil it was. But after testing it a bit, I'm pretty confident in saying that pretty people propose great panels! I'm sure a larger discussion could be had on this topic. Maybe a panel next year? Anyone pretty want to propose it?

And in my defense, against claims I'm being objectifying and mean, I'm not showing anyone's ratings and I'm only showing the 20 most popular panels for each gender. If your panel was not picked, you were probably #21 and missed it by a hair.

My Facebook app, Profile Banner rose to over 1.25m users in less than a month. Facebook just shut it down for violating their terms. I was helping users tag themselves in photos that were not of themselves (possibly).

For sure a contributing factor was that I also allowed people to tag their friends in banners too, but I gave people an easy way to block themselves from that. And a tiny percentage of users ever used this feature. Really, I thought FB would at least contact me requesting a change before taking this drastic action. I'm naive.

Does anyone have any advice on how I might be able to recover from this?

FYI, HN user gdeglin called that this was going to happen. I guess a similar thing happened to one of his apps.

I was using my AWS console a few minutes ago and a new tab popped up featuring the odd title "Elastic Beanstalk". I tried to sign up for the service and access the documentation, but got nowhere. http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/7673/elastic.jpg

Google turns up elasticbeanstalk.com which redirects to AWS.

Ideas? Is it an ever expanding farm of Minecraft servers? Or maybe unlimited storage for hosting for leaked Scientology documents? Or is it just the public page for their long rumored agro-business venture?

My day-distraction-project Profile Banner went viral a couple weeks ago (even though I got no love from HN!). http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=117320678334654

I'm getting 200k impressions per day, but I don't want to put skeezy ads all over the place to pay for the servers I need to buy (or lease or whatever).

I was thinking that I could sell a really simple graphics app. I get quite a few requests for recommendations. My users want something easy to make the banner of their dreams.

I sent Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com) an inquirey (a few minutes ago), but I thought I'd ask here for recommendations. My users are young, international, and a little silly.

I'd love to find something that feels more like an iPhone app than a desktop one. I think $20 would be a good price point, hopefully with at least a $5 referral payout.

Any suggestions. I'd also be curious about open source ones (but REALLY simple), and other suggestions for monetizing. I am working on a system where users can pay to get their banners featured so they get more downloads. But who knows if that will work out.