Another work around is to create a pro app and offer in-app purchasing to upgrade to a pro version, at least your profiting from your existing user-base and they know they are not paying for this ripped off version without realising.
I was very impressed with this until I realised that everyone with my birthday will get the same result as me so the count is not accurate with out a specific time of birth. Just saying.Great idea all the same.
That probably wouldn't help a whole lot either since it's unlikely that this is based on a huge central repository of world births and their associated times. Does most of the world even track those?
Does anyone else think the Nokia Lumia 800 looks like an iPod Nano in design with a touchable screen? The rounded sides and flat top / bottom and the multiple / bright colours.
Like nodata said, you might want to take a look at third-party plugins / add-ons. My friend had an issue with using a third-party advertising company to run adverts on his site and firefox / chrome flagged the JS it embedded as malicious.
From searching and looking around a logo design can cost around $250 on its own, getting a domain to match a pre-designed and brandable logo is a nice idea and i like the concept, will i ever use this? Probably not.
It was interesting to read that the price does not include the existing users and data. Which would in my eyes, possibly be the most valuable part of purchasing a website like this. You could pay for or develop something similar for much less that the starting price here.
My approach would be to inform current users via email or some login notice lightbox about the situation, along the lines of:
"This site is in the process of being transferred to new ownership. We value your privacy, and will not provide any of your data to the new owner without your explicit permission. If you don't want to continue using the service following the transfer, you don't have to do anything (but you can download a snapshot of your own personal data from <link>). If you do want to continue using it, tick this box"
The only problem I can see with that is that most users should rightfully refuse until they know what the new owners plan on using it for, so you need to have a sale lined up and a new privacy/data use policy drawn up before you can do that.
Perhaps you'd keep a copy of the database yourself, and then once the sale happens and terms are hashed out, send the mail to everyone, and deliver a copy of the filtered opt-in database to the new owners.
I think it's actually a pretty good thing to do, both for the seller and the users.
If companies didn't sell on the account details of their existing userbase these users would effectively be frozen out of any future site development/improvements (unless they re-entered all their data).
And since acquiring users is hard, from the seller's point of view an active userbase is probably one of the site's biggest assets (and also a validation that the site has some potential to it).
This is what i meant that the user data is valuable otherwise you would have frozen out the existing users and have a web platform you would have to build up a userbase on again, which if this was the case then you would just start your own project as you are starting from scratch. The only upside is existing traffic to the website. Existing users who turn up one day to realise the content they have added is now gone would be a disaster for the user, then asking them to sign back up to recover that data is another unnecessary step.
Great post, very insightful. I had not really noticed serivces like FB and Twitter had moved the logout button the way they have until you pointed this out. It is quite a clever idea, as your post suggests sites that offer a service or product require the user to be logged in to get a personalised experience. Users are less likely to logout if they cannot see it as an option.
I would imagine that you / the user is not expecting to be surprised at any point if you use a service like this. I would also imagine that the op would fadeout or disable the ability for anyone else to purchase the same gift. However I am not sold on the idea of all the money raised goes to the User on the event.
For example Christmas you could of paid 50% of the cost to 5 items for friends and families hoping someone else would pay the rest, what if they do not? Come Christmas day your money is just passed to these peoples paypal accounts and you have nothing to give them on the day.
A question would delivery be optional to the User or me as the buyer? So I can give that gift to someone and not just deliver it by post?
I do like the idea and if executed correctly a very useful tool for around Christmas time. But it can be hard to predict the response to a service like this.
DuqE the whole surprise factor is a great point and one we are uncertain on how to incorperate at this point.
In the case where a person gets only a percentage of the money for different gifts on their wish list and not 100% for any one item may seem like a problem but I want you to look at it differently. Think about this site first and foremost as an alternative to a gift card. Its basically the same principle but without limitation and the user gets to see that your money was given for the purpose of trying to help them get a specific gift(s).
Carmack has released id's previous engines, they're pretty interesting to read, and folks are still maintaining them. The technology ioquake3[1] is 10 years old now, but well-maintained as an open-source project. Darkplaces[2] is a heavily-updated Quake I engine that maintains backwards compatibility with Q1 while using fairly modern game programming techniques. Google ported Darkplaces to NaCl a while ago, and it has renderers in OpenGL, Direct X, and OpenGL ES now.
