Promoting their own event is not without self-interest, even if the poster sales aren't directly profitable.
Also, it's not authorship over "red on white" as a concept, it's authorship over this specific combination of type, size, layout, & copy that implies association with Facebook. If they just wanted to maintain the message, and not the association, they wouldn't have kept the visual style. Implying an association (with Facebook, or Ben) that isn't really there is the dishonest part.
Designer of EtherPad here. I'm a big fan of HackPad and I encourage people to give it a shot. I get a lot of questions about the best version of EtherPad out there, and HackPad is the one I recommend.
It might not look that different, but they handle similar features in smart ways.
Some of hackpad's features are: task-lists, inline linking and page creation, simple image embedding, search, deep email integration, dropbox integration, mobile (iphone,android) support, an osx launcher/search app. The way hackpad handles basic editing and authorship annotation has also received a lot of attention and iteration. Play with it and let us know what you think!
Inline linking and page creation, image embedding, and search are plugins that are part of the etherpad source and just need to be enabled.
When you say it supports iPhone, does that mean you somehow made the contentEditable issue go away and can edit on iPhone, or is it just read-only support?
Yeah, we're invite only right now so our sales & sign up flow is only given to people we let in. There's an application form if you're interested.
The pricing isn't a secret though, just not advertised. Memberly takes 5% (like Kickstarter) and then Amazon takes their payment processing fee which varies according to volume but is typically 2.9% + $0.30.
Not yet, we're focused on the provider workflow side of hte product at the moment. The discovery end will come later, when we have more momentum. We're only working with providers that drive their own traffic right now.
I did some UX consulting for The Colbert Report that required me to research their entire writing and production workflow and my understanding is that the executive producers of the shows might check in with each other, but it's true that there's essentially no overlap, and there's no effort to coordinate topics.
Designer of the site here. (Thank you for the kind words.) We wanted to do something upbeat and positive, a kind of join-the-movement and do-your-part vibe. If it were a story just about Amit, we might be more dire, but this is a much bigger cause and we wanted to express that.
You're suggesting that "mister visual UX dudes" (like me, for example) don't take complexity of implementation into account when making design decisions. We do. It's part of the process. Note that he said to send the designer the e-mail, not the developer. The designer on a project should always know where the current UX problems in the product are, even if they are too expensive to fix at the time.
Then I applaud you for having awareness of issues outside your immediate domain. I know quite a few UX people who know nothing about implementation and think everything is easy to do.
I don't even think it takes knowledge of implementation, just respect for it. I've had engineers ask me to fix certain design problems that would take weeks of prototyping and user testing to actually nail down in a meaningful way. Good devs appreciate the difficulty and we find a solution that fits the schedule, bad devs think design is easy to do. It runs both ways. Let's avoid making needless blanket statements and concentrate on working together.
Their criticism stems more from the "don't make me think" philosophy. If you're quickly fetching something from the kitchen, it's totally understandable if your mind is elsewhere. It's not so much that it's impossible to know if it's on, it's that it could be much, much more obvious.
This is analogous to a row of unlabeled buttons that only show their meaning on hover. Sure, if the user stopped for a moment and surveyed the scene, it would be possible to know what everything does. But to what end? There are no benefits and the cost is high: you interrupt the user's train of thought. More on that:
Also, it's not authorship over "red on white" as a concept, it's authorship over this specific combination of type, size, layout, & copy that implies association with Facebook. If they just wanted to maintain the message, and not the association, they wouldn't have kept the visual style. Implying an association (with Facebook, or Ben) that isn't really there is the dishonest part.