Once someone gets their site set up, what is the plan for actually getting eyeballs on it? If you can figure that out then you are on to something.
I see that you are using social networking with Twitter/FB, etc, but that is a chicken/egg problem. To use social networking to advertise your site, you need to actually have an audience to begin with. In which case, you probably wouldn't be interested in this type of product.
What would be really valuable, I think, is a way to get people you have no social networking connection with on the site, ie, via AdWords. Using AdWords is some kind of alchemy - find a way to simplify and integrate with that, and that is a fine product.
Does HTML5 have an element that is similar to an scrollable editable grid, with column headers that don't scroll? I know a lot of people hate that UI idiom, but it's very common and as long as people like to use Excel, this idiom isn't going anywhere.
Doing grids are a breeze w/ .NET. I don't think "use jqgrid" is an acceptable solution here... I'm asking about native HTML, the stuff that everyone is bragging about.
ExtJS's set of grid panels was just about the most impressive one I've seen thus far (tree grids, group grids, paging grids, features for filtering/searching, sorting, hide/show columns, binding to xml/json/direct, etc). Though it would probably huge overkill to tie yourself into the whole framework just for one widget.
Not much really, especially if you limit the XAML to basic layouts. If you do everything in C#, it's not too much different from something like, say, WinForms. Which is why people like it.
But what would that CSS end up looking like? There will be a lot of proprietary extensions (at least their should be) and a lot of quixotic classes and element id's that you'd probably have to work around. I envision something like Office's awful "open" format - the same people are driving this bus.
I've done the MS HTML/JS client route for a long time - I've set up a lot of gadgets, and InfoPath(!) has an HTML/XML/JS programming model. Truth be told this model is actually really painful to work with if all you have is HTML/JS. Keep in mind that the "web" isn't just HTML. It's Perl, Rails, Json, JS, Google, Wikipedia, RSS, etc.
Now, if these tiles are something akin to mini-web browsers, where you can use the full power of the web & web technologies (is this what they are actually saying?), that is a different story.
The difference though is if the intent is for the markup to be styled, it will be written differently.
For example, take a look at the WPF built-in controls. Those are written in very clean XAML. Easy to read, style, and modify. I'm sure they could have made it difficult, but their intent was that you'd modify the built-in controls.
If they want to do this with the UI, they could do it. The theming you could do with this could be incredible.
I doubt this is something they're going to do for V1 (if ever), but I can dream.
No, Windows phones predate iOS and Android. Android really isn't that much different than Windows Mobile 6.5, aside from touch screen interaction and a superior web browser. (WM 6.5 has better email/messaging, actually).
The developer issue is the thorniest issue with choosing the .NET ecosystem. It's easier to find a .NET developer than a Ruby/Python/what have you, but it's harder to find a good .NET developer.
What I like to do is advertise for Python and .NET skills. That weeds a lot of bad ones out.
It's best to look at it like most of Microsoft version 1 products - it's going to be painful to use. But it has tons of potential - more so than any product in recent memory. And it's actually pretty reasonably priced, even if you aren't in BizSpark.
You really don't need to worry about roles that much. A web role is a website, and a worker role is a non-website service (though you can connect to a worker role via http). In theory, load balancing his handled for you so you can achieve redundancy with at least two instances.
Now, there are some real painful points with azure as it stands. My two two specific points are these: deploying takes a long time - some times over 10 minutes. So forget about agile build processes or continuous deployment or even making a quick, simple text change.
The other major problem I have is you have to run the debugger to get access to the development storage ( blob & tables). Both of these are really useful. But running the debugger all the time is torture.
Developer tools are hugely important to all of the MS ecosystem, and I bet these concerns get addressed - this is the big advantage for moving ScottGu over to the azure team. Azure is a big part of the future of that company.
You don't have to run to the debugger to get dev storage, just start it separately. It should put something in your start menu like Storage Emulator. It varies with version.
I just tried this out. Did a search for "golf clubs" in my location. Craiggers gives me 6 results. Craigslist gave me 273.
Also, I still think the craigslist ui is actually better (I've never had a problem with it). To me, categories work better as a list to drill into, not as something to discover via search box.
Craigslist is a highly useful service, and as such, spam is inevitable (has this been codified anywhere?). I hope that they get the spam under control. But in a lot of categories, craigslist is still great.
I work on the project. It would help me out greatly if you could email the details of your search to me at dfoley@3taps.com. We really should have all of the data.
Were you typing your location into the search box? That might explain the difference. We don't currently support typing your location into the text box, but maybe we should.
I often wonder if there is there any volume at all in businesses that sell to startups. The startup market as a whole has to be pretty small. The startup market that will actually buy something has to be smaller still (I'd reckon a lot of startups would rather than make it themselves or use free software).
The site looks great. I assume you are working on this - but do you have screen shots of your admin interface or a list of available images? (You are probably well aware of this, but creating EC2-Windows images on a micro instance is ridiculously painful).
Not sure what you could do with AppHarbor that you couldn't do with this. You could set up a build server image that pulls from a Git or Hg repo, and repoints IIS...
I see that you are using social networking with Twitter/FB, etc, but that is a chicken/egg problem. To use social networking to advertise your site, you need to actually have an audience to begin with. In which case, you probably wouldn't be interested in this type of product.
What would be really valuable, I think, is a way to get people you have no social networking connection with on the site, ie, via AdWords. Using AdWords is some kind of alchemy - find a way to simplify and integrate with that, and that is a fine product.