1) I am sorry that you have been misinformed. The only genomes I ever pulled was a group of about 6 about 4 years ago, a group that I selected exhaustively from about 100000 myself to make large format prints. And the archive pages for those sheep still stand, including their ancestry. I don't know why your friend thinks otherwise, but I'm sure it's a simple miscommunication. If you can point at the "hole" in the archives, I would be more than happy to take a look at it.
2) My work at Google has nothing to do with it. If anything my time is worth more now because I am so much more busy.
3) You are right I have to be extremely careful. And I have been, and my user base is quite happy as a result, both voters and designers. My big problem is server overload. We just did a survey and of the 836 respondents, 98% would recommend Electric Sheep to their friends, and only a fraction of a percent objected to me making money from it ("making" is a dream, for now I just want to recoup my investment). Nearly everyone recognizes that I have and continue to put an inordinate amount of time effort and money into this. Donations have spiked with the traffic I have received from this announcement. Because people love it and they support me.
I am pretty sure we are remembering the exact same incident, it would have been around this time four years ago. I just asked my roommate about it, and your stories line up:
He saw a picture of an awesome sheep on your site featured as a print, but with no prices. He emailed you about the prints, you referred him to your art dealer, and she quoted him outrageous prices that were totally out of scale with costs. When he went later to download its 'genome', it had been just removed for that sheep specifically. The capriciousness of the whole exchange really pissed us off, and we later ended up ceasing to use electricsheep in the school's CS labs because of it.
I saw the survey, and the whole thing seemed really weird. Of course you're going to get an extremely favorable response when sampling from your hardcore fanbase.
The point about your job at Google was that you don't need to extract a paycheck from electricsheep to get by. Your constant focus on art-world monetization is extremely off-putting -- it's one thing to take the money on the table from patrons, and another to artificially limit the audience for your work. All the 'limited edition' shit seems all the more ridiculous when there's zero opportunity cost.
2) My work at Google has nothing to do with it. If anything my time is worth more now because I am so much more busy.
3) You are right I have to be extremely careful. And I have been, and my user base is quite happy as a result, both voters and designers. My big problem is server overload. We just did a survey and of the 836 respondents, 98% would recommend Electric Sheep to their friends, and only a fraction of a percent objected to me making money from it ("making" is a dream, for now I just want to recoup my investment). Nearly everyone recognizes that I have and continue to put an inordinate amount of time effort and money into this. Donations have spiked with the traffic I have received from this announcement. Because people love it and they support me.
I hope you will reconsider.
Thank you, -sp0t