Gawker: valleywag, weebly

Weebly, the worst Web 2.0 app to make an escort site with ever

Melissa Gira Grant — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:20:00 EDT

If there's a legitimate use for Weebly, it has been seared from my brain by the one-two assault of Pierce89's escort site, which is also one of the webpage-building service's most-trafficked subdomains. It's not that running a girl-for-hire agency off of a free website generator backed by Paul Graham's Y Combinator is illegitimate. It's just that Pierce89 is doing it wrong, with an autoplaying loop of Mariah Carey and the Slide-powered rotation of escort photos with dancing flower blossoms layered over them. User-generated Ajax-and-widgets nonsense has lowered the barrier for every aspiring player with a Boost mobile phone and an Internet connection, but this is a new sex-trade low. For god's sakes, if you can't be bothered with a real URL, why not just really let yourself go and cobble together Xanga and Photobucket?

And no, hiring a girl who is so brazenly branded with sex-shorthand like "BBBJ" is not a safe idea, as much as I don't want to lose these ladies any business. Girls, discretion — and getting your own blog — is advised.

Y Combinator's webcam can't touch MC Hammer

Tim Faulkner — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:32:18 EDT

MC Hammer's rap career may have been over more than a decade ago, but to the startup kids at Y Combinator, he'll always be a superstar. First, he awkwardly pitched Weebly's MySpace profile editor SnapLayout to lifecaster Justine Ezarik, better known as iJustine of Justin.tv. Now, Hammer has made an iminlikewithyou profile. The washed-out rapper hopes to extend his attempts to revive his career beyond being a hanger-on of startups by fighting Vanilla Ice. Only problem — he needs someone with a videocamera, and he's trolling the iminlikewithyou community for volunteers. So what does that tell us about the state of Hammer's career?

The Y Combinator guys may be acting starstruck, but maybe its MC Hammer who's playing the fanboy here. Y Combinator's coterie of entrpreneurs could easily return the favor by providing the rapper with real video services. Everyone, including MC Hammer, knows they can. Why would the startuppers reduce the Hammer to begging for volunteers — if not to subtly put him in his place?

(SnapLayout Demo Video by Dan Veltri)

Crystal Tower, the startup dorm, loses elevator service

Owen Thomas — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:01:35 EDT

Ever since Justin.tv moved in, Crystal Tower Apartments in San Francisco's Russian Hill neighborhood has gotten the reputation as a dorm for 20something startuppers. A recent elevator breakdown, now fixed, left some residents to hoof it all the way up the 12-story building. Justin.tv has moved out, but current residents include the entire staff of email startup Xobni and Web-page builder Weebly, as well as employees of Snipshot and Scribd. The connection? All four companies were backed by entrepreneur Paul Graham's Y Combinator incubator. And more are moving in soon, Weebly CEO David Rusenko says. The proximity is a bonus for the tightly networked group of companies — but the elevator episode should be a sobering reminder to all of them of what happens when your startup has a single point of failure.

Game the system

Tim Faulkner — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:27:52 EDT

We've dissected Time's list of the five worst websites. Now it's your turn to tweak their poll for the best ones to your satisfaction. (Time.com is still using the same weakly protected polling system as the heavily gamed People Who Matter Now poll from Business 2.0.) The kids from Y Combinator, entrepreneur Paul Graham's startup camp, have already admitted to artificially beefing up the votes for Weebly, a Y Combinator-backed startup — but why let them have all the fun? Here are Valleywag's picks on whose ballots to stuff.

Weebly: It has a head start, so let's see if we can push them back down!
ING Direct: A boring bank, but its fees are low, so vote it up.
StumbleUpon: Take pity on the StumbleUpon guys: They just got bought by eBay, so they could use some cheering up.
Bix: How meta — voting for Yahoo's online version of the American Idol vote-a-thon. We're betting this one doesn't come back next week.