Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
A million Manila sites in 2000
Author: Dave Winer Posted: 12/23/1999; 8:32:17 AM Topic: EditThisPage Free -- Why? Msg #: 13850 (In response to 13849) Prev/Next: 13849 / 13851
that the trial on Userland servers is now of indeterminate length is no concern to me (other than being encouraged to work with my own editthispage.com site!) - we will need many, many folks to "get their feet wet" to drive significant market interest in Manila and Frontier.That's exactly what I was seeing. I put myself in the place of an EditThisPage.Com pioneer and asked myself if I would do a lot of development on my site if I didn't know if it was going to be hostable in the future. Right now other than UserLand, I don't see massive numbers of active sites running on other servers. I wanted to answer the question I was seeing most often, it's safe to invest in your ETP.Com site, we'll take care of hosting it for the indefinite future.
A goal
I want a million Manila sites by the end of 2000. I also want to have the infrastructure in place to organize those sites so that people can find other people with a similar background or interest.
I've been talking with people who have launched some of the most succesful Dot-Coms, and listening carefully to their advice. One of the common threads is that you never make it happen by limiting access to your service or product. In this day and age the competition is too aggressive.
Frontier has been pretty invisible, and for a clue why, look at how we were shaping the product and distributing it. Now we're in blast-it-out mode. We'll keep raising the bar until the system breaks, and then we'll fix what broke. That's how you climb onto the hypergrowth track. It's viral marketing. We're going to make Manila the HotMail of web writing. We won't stop pouring gasoline on the fire for quite some time to come. Lots more in the pipe, you won't believe how easy it will become to write for the web.
PS: I think SegNet is a great place to host Manila sites. It looks like I'm going to be doing a lot of traveling in 2000, and I'm getting my laptop ready for global writing. I could use your service! Pass that up the chain of command at SegNet. Our growth tracks are pretty compatible I think.
This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:53:51 PM.
© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.