Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by marban 1491 days ago
I built the first Android Twitter client, sold that to Idealab* and given our huge market share (~40% IIRC ) pitched them the idea to build our own Twitter clone in order to move those users over. Twitter took notice and locked all our apps which eventually kicked off the anti-third-party tendency that we see today. Good times.

* https://bgr.com/general/tweetup-acquires-twidroid-renaming-a...
1 comments
marban 1491 days ago
Another time I turned my private news aggregator into a public service (Popurls) which kicked off thousands of clones and was at one time the number one traffic referrer to Digg and Reddit. A year later Guy Kawasaki cloned it, and I find myself invited to a Ramen lunch with Kevin Kelly who blogged about it as being his favorite website. 15 years later, I got funding from Mark Cuban for building a successor. All from a private solo side project that started as a 20-line Perl script.
link
twox2 1491 days ago
How I loved the original popurls!!
link
marban 1491 days ago
Butterfly FTW!
link