This is nothing new to us at Stack Overflow, which purported to cover the exact same material as hundreds (if not thousands) of other programming sites. There’s no rule that says that there needs to be exactly one Q&A website per topic.

There is, however, a compelling case for the Stack Exchange technology. WordPress.org’s forums don’t have voting, so you have to read through every answer and decide for yourself which one might solve your problem. They don’t have reputation, so there’s no way to see whether you’re getting an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about. They don’t have wiki-style editing, so collaboration is impossible. You have to log on to ask or answer a question, so the burden of participation is higher. Stack Overflow is simply better than traditional forums, which is why it largely replaced proprietary forums. I remember hours of discussion with John Resig and the folks at jQuery who couldn’t decide whether to replace the jQuery Google Group with a forum or with a Stack Exchange. Ultimately it didn’t matter that much, because most of the jQuery Q&A activity happens on Stack Overflow  anyway.

One day, the features that are standard on Stack Exchange will be copied everywhere. Until then, we’ll keep churning out new sites .

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board : Great software jobs, great people.

• Gaming
• Cooking
• Pro Webmasters

“Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.



“Which button do you press?”

Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.

Also, how are they going to make money?

I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.



Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched :

I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.

We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:



Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.



Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board : Great software jobs, great people.

• The Case Event Edit Plugin now lets you edit cases (instead of just appending to them).
• Bulk Reply, so you can respond to multiple emails with the same response. You can even flip through the outgoing responses and customize each one if you want.
• Width of the case area is now resizable.
• We now support IMAP (in addition to POP3) for incoming email
• Project backlog editing (for scrum/agile shops) is now much faster.

1. Stack Exchange will now be free.
2. We’re changing the way that new Stack Exchange sites are created to move to a more democratic, community process.
3. The content of these new, community-created Stack Exchange sites will be publically owned under a Creative Commons license, instead of being owned by individuals or businesses.

• I’m drastically cutting back on speaking engagements. I already committed to speak at Business of Software 2010 , in Boston in October, so that’s still on.
• This week’s StackOverflow Podcast will be the last in that format. Jeff and I are working on a new format and will come up with something exciting, new and different, so stay tuned for the details, but the current format is getting kind of tired.
• Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
• The Joel on Software discussion group , in long decline, will close. The Business of Software group will remain open.

flickr.com/photos/niznoz / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

1. There’s a land grab going on. The business is in a new field with no competition, but the field has proven itself, and is obviously going to get very crowded very soon, so the faster you can grab territory, the better.
2. There is a provable concept that’s repeatable. I always point to the example of the Starbucks IPO, which was brilliant because it was so simple. Every new Starbucks store that opened in Seattle became profitable in a matter of months. They tried a couple of stores in Chicago and Washington just to make sure it wasn’t a Seattle thing, and those worked even better. Thus, the formula of opening as many stores as possible was as close to a sure-thing as possible, so raising money was a no-brainer.
3. The business itself could benefit from the publicity of getting an investment from someone who is thought of as being a savvy investor.
4. The investor will add substantial value to the business in advice, connections, and introductions.
5. The business can potentially have a big exit or become a large, publically traded company.
6. The founders are not in it for their own personal aggrandizement and are happy to give up some control to make the business more successful.

1. If the founders are risk-averse and are willing to trade a much smaller payout for lower risk.
2. If the founders are technical without substantial business experience and wish to maintain absolute control forever.
3. If the investor is mostly “dumb money,” i.e., someone who doesn’t know about the field. The proverbial dentist, who is happy to give you a half million bucks, but doesn’t know the first thing about CPMs and CPCs and CTOs, so you might as well not bother.
4. If you’re going into an established field with a lot of competition, there’s no benefit to speed; you’re better off slowly building a niche business and growing from there, quietly taking one customer at a time away from the competitors.
5. If the product is immature and unproven, in which case, expensive marketing efforts will be wasted proving to the world how bad your product is.
6. If the founders don’t have enough of the right kinds of industry connections, or the idea is not compelling enough, so that raising VC would take months or years
7. If there is any other way to raise the kind of money you need, for example, by selling actual products to customers.

• Scientific
• Loves a good puzzle, even the kind that takes days to solve
• Likes to think about things methodically
• Generally likes working with software and computers

• Love software and computers
• Want to work on a software team, and
• Don’t particularly like programming