| >Please define 'real business'. What does a company need to have to be a 'real' business? Users? Revenue? Profits? A product that at least some people are willing to pay money for? Revenue and eventually profits. Even if "url shortening" is a "real business", it still is in the very far outskirts of "businesness". A very marginal value adding service, that exists solely because of some very marginal deficiencies of other services. Even Twitter has trouble monetizing, a "url shortening service" 100 times more so. >even URL shortening stops being straightforward once you expand from n = 1 to n = 10,000,000. I fail to see how. Even a simple setup can handle 10,000,000 shortened urls with aplomb. And url shortening is the most sharding friendly use case you can get, ie linear scaling is trivial in a url shortening service. >You may not think Hilary's qualified to talk about the details of Yahoo's particular advertising model, but don't extend that into what's bordering on an ad-hominem attack against a very legitimate startup, as well as a key figure at said startup. Well, she may or may not be qualified. I just pointed out that the page the parent pointed to as proof of her competence on the matter doesn't _prove_ her qualifications at all. |