Did you actually sign up for one? It seems more sketchy than I'm willing to do anything with. Like the next generation of a domain-sitting page.

It's an interesting ploy, but the success is going to be based entirely on what type of beta tester you're trying to attract.

Personally, as an introverted tech, I'd be interested in signing up, poking around, and filing bug reports, but requiring me to spam my friends list for an invite isn't something I'm willing to do.

I thought the same thing at first...but then realize they're not asking you to tell your friends before you get an invite. They're asking after you've already signed up.

Seems like a good way to "price" access to the beta at an amount people are willing to "spend."

You make a good point. We've been thinking about other ways for people to move up in the line that involve some of those things.

We don't require you to spam your friends list for an invite, but if you share the link with your friends, you'll get it earlier :)

For me personally I wouldn't share things with my friends that are an unknown quality unless they themselves traffic in things that are of an unknown quality. Most of the people on my friend's list are not interested in beta testing.

Same. Anyone know why they already changed it back?

It's still the 'viral' one for me. Home page asks for the email, then gives me http://fork.ly/6KYLWf .

The number of people who pick '12345' or 'password' is astronomical. And forcing them to remember a "strict" password is more detrimental to the user experience than just having a user/password combination.

Besides, what are you going to do if you get dupes? "Sorry, that password is already in use"?

I see now that it is a terrible idea. Thank you.

Checking out the site, it's actually pretty impressive. Not in the well-designed sense, but in the having-an-actual-product sense (even if it's, you know, a blatant ripoff of the sites he listed...http://www.globalcommunity.me/blog/ feels like it takes the cake in that regard). I'm curious about where he got his funding from.

Edit: The alt-text for his "Blog" image is literally 'scritter'. My co-workers are giving me funny looks.

I laughed out loud when I clicked that page. His mascot looks like the Twitter bird on meth.

That's actually a free icon from a Twitter icon pack. I've seen it in a few roundups. Nice that he's using a creative commons artistic twitter rendition icon as his mascot.

He's just cobbling together existing software. The auction is a default skin of PHPProBid.

I don't recognize the other sections, but none of them have the same look and feel (other than the logo...which is still a stretch). I think it's safe to say each section is just white-labeled software someone else created.

"the ultimate micro blogging website"

I think that's specifically why people will still be using routers. Nowadays, most single computers still are sitting behind routers, despite the fact that they don't actually "need" to, specifically for the firewall protection. It's a lot easier to plug into a router and forget it than it is to have to deal with setting up a firewall every time you reinstall your OS.

If we're talking about a box that primarily performs firewalling, let's call it a "firewall" instead of a "router". (Although as I said above, routing is still necessary in IPv6.)

It's still a router. It just doesn't do NAT.

FWIW, NAT is typically done by the firewalling code, whereas routing is done in separate code.

So "router" is always correct, but "firewall" does not always apply

I'd much prefer that noone calls any piece of software a 'firewall' ever again. It's been over-applied to the point of meaninglessness.