For a contrary opinion on the guy's ethics, see http://nancyrichards.org/ (hoisted from the comments on Cringely's site).

It's a list of twitter users sorted by follower count.

Therefore it just reinforces the existing popular users and doesn't expose you to interesting and new people.

Stupid-wank-fest.

Once upon a time, Kevin was not actually an asshole and would give credit to the people who did the work. Perhaps because of me, but more likely because of several years of advice from true assholes, he has risen to the occasion, and now says he "created" this site, when in fact I can 100% guarantee he paid others to do the actual work. Kevin couldn't write a line of code or build an html page to save his life.

I do this. I have been since about 2004. I don't make eBooks though. I'm a programmer so I make software, usually things to help with web-design, and then sell it using a similar site format.

Its been my sole source of income, and its not a bad living, although I personally know people who are making $1-$10 million a year in profit from sites like this.

They're not one-man shops though, they usually have about 5-10 employees to help run everything, but its still very profitable. Digital goods cost pretty much $0 to copy and distribute, so the profit margins are amazing.

It really amazes me how a lot of people, especially in a community as open-minded as this, are quick to label everybody who has a strange-looking site a scammer. I use the salesletter format for most of my sites, and it works. I don't care what it looks like as long as it gets results.

As for the Parrot guy, I know nothing about him so I have no idea if he really does ignore refund requests. I use http://www.clickbank.com/ as my payment processor, and they handle all that. They honor all refund requests, with or without an explanation, so I couldn't even deny one if I wanted to.

I'd be happy to answer any questions anybody has about this market. It's basically an evolution of the direct mail market from before the Internet. Its looks a little strange to the Web 2.0 people here, but its a valid market.

The Internet used to be a nice place for nerds to hide. Every day, we're losing turf to this . . . this narcissists' playground; wefollow.com is further evidence of the decay. Even the once-hallowed niche of geekdom is being overrun by zero-sum games of self-perpetuating egomaniacs who are entirely too obsessed with this concept of having "followers".

I should probably be somewhat careful what I say here, but I work for a commercial software company with one of the largest perforce databases (according to perforce) in existence. 3000 developers working on several million lines of code; I don't know how many MB offhand, but I'd guess O(1GB). Our central perforce server is a monster that we literally cannot keep fed with enough RAM, yet we frequently wait for a minute or two for a simple p4 submit, or p4 sync, to complete.

git on my local machine eats this tree for breakfast. I seceded from p4 a few months ago, and my workflow has never been smoother; I only ever interact with perforce for actual checkins, and to pull in other developers changes.

I guess the moral here is that to talk about whether something "scales", we need to be clear about what dimension we're trying to scale. In our experience, trying to get perforce to scale to huge numbers of developers has taken a lot of effort. Since git is numb to the number of developers, it has the potential to work better in our environment. YMMV.