That's interesting. Even more so in that the 80 characters per line for punch-cards is because that's the size a dollar bill was back then, because punch cards were created for use in the 1890 census. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/census-tabulator...
It's like the railway gauge size being standardized by the ancient romans. The best part of all of this though is the other comments on this page - many of them seem to imply that 80 width was chosen because of how well it fits onto your computer screen and that 100 must be too wide. If the dollar bill in 1890 had been a bit wider, they'd likely be arguing now how 80 is too small!
It proves the point that it's important to actually understand why certain things are chosen and not just assume they're always the best. Going with the standard method is not always the most beneficial path.
Facebook advertising has always appealed to me. The amount of parameters you can filter users to display your ads to is so specific, you can really squeeze it down to your exact target demographic. e.g. Only to users that are over 18 (so they can pay for your service), under xx age (whichever age you expect people won't be interested), by interests (language learning!), by current location and birthplace (might be able to figure out some combinations that would be ideal for language learners. E.g. if they were born in the UK but living in France) and so on. It defaults to CPM, but I'd definitely go for CPC.
Thanks, funnily enough I started a tiny Facebook ad campaign to familiarise myself with it just yesterday. Need to put in some work to make the facebook page and ad more attractive before drawing any conclusions about its effectiveness though.
I agree the amount of targeting you can do is very cool.
Marketing guy here. Word of caution: FB ads are notoriously bad at getting clicks. Usually worse than AdWords. It's always great to test, but don't bet the farm on a FB ad campaign.
Out of interest, how easy would it be for you to adapt the system to manage the reputation for hotels, for example?
Doesn't sound like too much work given that you've said the system works on either web scraping or with API's of other review sites? Obviously you wouldn't want to jeopardize Bistro in it's current format through generalizing the platform for other "industries", but if done right, looks like a good opportunity to me!
It is surprisingly easy for us to rebrand into different industries. We did a test with the golf course industry a little while ago and it only took a few hours to go from idea to working product.
It's tricky to argue labels. To me (right or wrong) platform suggests support, active development, community, backing, a reason to believe that development will continue and something you can build on. Of course, you can call platform whatever you like though.
Ghost has many (all?) of the above, and that's relatively rare in any ecosystem (PHP, Ruby, Python, whatever) for a young project. If this project can continue building momentum, then it would truly be unique in general and certainly in the JS ecosystem.
ETA: When I say tricky throwing around labels, I mean one thing can mean one thing to me and something else to you. I guess semantics would be the short word for that.
Reddit's userbase grew very quickly after Digg drastically changed, aka 'collapsed', Reddit for a while also engaged in sockpuppeting posts to generate fake traffic to create the illusion of a userbase before it really took off.
4chan, in comparison, has always been organic from day 1.
I mean in the more traditional forum sense. That layout still doesn't make me feel like I know anybody, and it's missing the crapshoot banter/offtopic forums.
