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Well, after 10+ years of using USB widgets of every shape, size, and color - I just discovered from reading the article that the USB symbol is always on the top side. So, I certainly got my value out of HN today. :-)

I wish I could brand that as a fancy marketing scheme, but I think the answer is much simpler. It's simply transparent discovery and thinking. If it happens to work as advertising, that's a positive side-effect, but the main dish is coming to good conclusions.

I certainly grew more confident in the decision to dump OpenID after talking with lots and lots of people on Twitter about it. You get to test your ideas, see what the feedback is, tweak, and retry. All while making the decision process public.

Even better: Let the application also say why it needs the permission:

    * Read access
        We want to analyse your tweets
    * Read/write
        Because we want to spam your friends

I love what Amazon is doing with AWS, and I like this new service a lot. Plus I'm a happy customer.

But damn this is all getting very complicated. First they turn off email, so you have to find a provider, then they turn it back on, but you have to pay them. Looking at my AWS console, I've got 8 or 9 tabs on there -- each representing a little piece of what I might want in an app. Each has it's own help section with bunches of docs to read to get up to speed. Each has it's own forum category. Each has a usage policy.

Don't get me wrong -- it's all good stuff. But good luck trying to guestimate what kinds of prices you'll be paying. You're paying for data transfer in and out of the cloud, you're paying for disk storage, you're paying for a database, you're paying for basic email services, etc.

So I'm kind of stuck looking at the monthly bill and saying "Does this look about right?" instead of having some firm idea of what's going on without having to use a spreadsheet and 3 whiteboards. That's no good. It's probably completely acceptable for BigCorp, who has a guy dedicated to figuring all of this out and managing it, but I'm busy and pressed for time all I want is the big red button to push -- and a known price for pushing it.

I love what they're doing. Just wish they'd put a little more "simple" back into it, especially in terms of pricing and bundling.

"There’s something at Google for everyone"

...except for the 99% of applicants they reject.