I totally agree and I believe this news is great. Tech media needs consolidation as it's very oversaturated.
Elite Daily is the perfect example of what the millennial generation is looking for. Shallow advice from fellow millennials with tech news sprinkled in with as much importance as think-pieces covering what it's like to be a millennial. Quantcast shows 30 million uniques for Elite Daily last month and that makes me think that it's going to continue to be difficult for tech-centric media to grow and gain sustained advertising dollars. I won't hide my disdain for fluff sites like Elite Daily, but my point is that Elite Daily is what these tech news websites are competing against, not each other.
I own and run ObjectiveSee.com and it receives about 1500 page views a month on average but is targeted and a good domain. Just don't have time to run it any more and someone with the passion and time could run that site. Or use the domain for their own project.
A free solution is use Cloudflare, which you can setup to serve a custom page when your server is unreachable. On that custom page include a feed from twitter / facebook / blogspot.com.
My own plug which I apologize for, but there's a good collection of interviews with iOS developers and the tools they use here: http://www.objectivesee.com/ that I genuinely think anyone reading these comments would find interesting.
I only have very specific first-hand knowledge, but Android's OneNote application is free, released by Microsoft. If you think about it you'll likely come to the conclusion that Word wouldn't be free, but at first blush I'd believe it.
I recall the 15" non-Unibody MBP batteries costing $149. So for $50 more you get a better battery, and because of a design that makes it a non-user replaceable battery, but also one of the thinnest laptops in the world with this kind of power, this story is getting voted up? Replacing batteries isn't a monthly ordeal, it's likely needed only once, possibly twice in the lifespan of the laptops usage.
As an example, here is a 12 cell HP laptop battery: http://www.hp.com/canada/products/landing/consumer-accessori.... Price, $159. User installed. I can understand people being annoyed they can't physically change the batteries themselves, but the pricing is not a scandal.
In my university years I worked at Best Buy part time and the HP rep who visited always openly acknowledged (and joked about) batteries as being overpriced as it's easier for people to justify a new laptop when the battery is approaching 1/4 of the price of a new one. Granted, this laptop we're speaking of is worth a lot more than $200 x4 but I think the point is clear.
It doesn't make good business sense to encourage people to spend $100 on a battery for a laptop they don't sell anymore when you could spend $800-$2000 on a new laptop.
The real question is: Why should a company provide better tech for their old machines when that tech has to be custom built for that and a small line of similar machines.
All the things you list are strongly influenced by Moore's law and things with a similar trajectory.
Batteries are on nothing like the same trajectory. I think the average rate of improvement is 10%/year. Not bad, but nothing compared to doubling every 18-24 months.
Chatroulette never became a commonly used service with its ease of anonymity. With Airtime putting a users identity in to the mix, I still can't imagine that people will hop on to video chat with strangers. I might be overly cynical about this, but video chat seems like a difficult service to build a user base around. Few people I know use Facebook's video service or even FaceTime to chat with others they already know, let alone strangers who just happen to like the same TV shows and bands that they do.
Yeah - I don't think many people will return to this again and again unless they can build an interesting product around live events. I could see people enjoying chat around sports or concerts.
Also, they haven't show anything beyond 1-1 conversation, which means Google+ and Skype have a significant advantage.
When you are connected to someone you aren't friends with, your profile is flipped to anonymous mode. So your identity is protected and you have the social freedom anonymity provides; but you are still held accountable for your actions for user safety.
I agree, at this point, my iPhone needs a new folder created specifically created for Facebook produced apps. I already have too many camera apps installed, many of which upload to Facebook.
I understand Facebook trying to keep users in their ecosystem, but separate apps for each part of their service seems a bit much to me as well and I don't see how it's a good long term strategy if they continue this cycle. We'll know they don't really have a strategy if they release an app solely for rejecting requests to play Words with Friends and Draw Something with others.
Elite Daily is the perfect example of what the millennial generation is looking for. Shallow advice from fellow millennials with tech news sprinkled in with as much importance as think-pieces covering what it's like to be a millennial. Quantcast shows 30 million uniques for Elite Daily last month and that makes me think that it's going to continue to be difficult for tech-centric media to grow and gain sustained advertising dollars. I won't hide my disdain for fluff sites like Elite Daily, but my point is that Elite Daily is what these tech news websites are competing against, not each other.