Cool, thanks for the clarification. I checked it out and its pretty cool, It looks pretty complete as far as my friends list goes and definitely accurate.
The one suggestion I'd make is to see what you can do as far as adding more to the location markers. Ideally, something that IDs my friends without requiring me to click would be best. Maybe incorporating tiny profile images, or names (maybe truncated). I know it could get crowded pretty quickly so it would be something to experiment with for sure.
Hmm, I just switched from click to mouseover- I'm not sure if it's better or not. It makes it jump around a bit. I'll leave it up and let me know what you think.
Are you able to reserve a space outside of the map that is dedicated to displaying friend thumbnails? You could update that section with new thumbnails when the mouse hovers over one of the nav markers. It would prevent the pop up/map position adjustment from being necessary.
I once had an interview with Pivotal labs in which I paired with their devs to do some TDD. We spent about 20% of the time writing code and 80% writing tests and fixing bugs in the test cases. I can see how it works for what Pivotal does but this would definitely not fly when you're trying to ship and iterate as fast as possible.
Keep in mind that sometimes the alternative is to spend 20% of the time writing code, and 80% of the time fixing bugs that made it into the live environment and are affecting customers.
I think one of the hard decisions to time correctly when a startup gains traction is "when do we stop being cowboys, and adopt proper development practices?". I see (in mysef as well as others) _way_ too much clinging to the "Oh, I' just ssh into the live server and fix that" kind of behaviour, often way past the point where that's clearly no longer the right way to proceed... (and yes, I bit myself with that just last week, again... Ouch!)
I wish he had addressed the fact that school is incredibly expensive. It's much harder to start a business when you are 100k in debt from your expensive MBA (or your undergrad for that matter).
I love the green boxes. Last time I moved my roommate spent almost $50 on cardboard boxes. After unpacking we immediately threw them away (with the additional hassel of disassembling them). This is a far better solution.
I hope they become available in my state next time I have to move.
I think the idea is great also. http://frogbox.com/ is a company started here in Vancouver who does the same thing. they also have started franchising it.
I have never used them but had a friend looked into using them and said it was too expensive compared to regular boxes. It looks like it cost about $110 for boxes for a two bedroom rental. Guess the convenience and green benefits are the selling factors.
