DISQUS

It's all relative, Charlie -- my town, DC is another 3db down. Or maybe we just lag in time. Our recent Launchbox (DC version of YCombinator) was a watershed, and daresay the startups were more compelling than YC's latest batch. (Makes you wonder why a NY company -- MyGameMug -- came down to Launchbox for funding!?) Me, I'll be spending more time in NYC.

whoopsies . . . CHALLENJ meant for #6

Fred -- re: #7, our app CHALLENJ will do all that and more (Q4)

Hmm, not so sure about all this. If the companies are on an upward trajectory, it all seems fine. But what if they’re not? Think about employees cashing out in 2000 from Pets.com and the others. Lawsuits would fly. Maybe it sounds like sour grapes, but as someone who labored 8 years without so much as a whisper about liquidity prior to the IPO in 1989, I have to ask ‘are the rewards so deserving, so soon?’ I also paid sizeable taxes on phantom gains that never materialized in the 90s -- it’s not out of the realm of possibility that things can quickly turn upside-down in these scenarios.

One important reason for visibility among the TechCrunchies is distribution -- we want our app and API embedded in *their* apps. Sort of the B2B exception, but not exactly.

Great question! Easy to miss the subtlety -- not ‘Which is your favorite platform?’ prompting a lot of ‘I [heart] MySpace ‘cuz . . .’ responses -- but ‘which type?’ I do have a favorite type -- but since the thing I don’t like about most social application platforms was the reason I started a company to offer the type I do like (more on that below), I’ll start my answer with a rancorous discourse -- OK, not too rancorous -- on my least favorite type.

MMOGs (or MMOs, or MMORPGs or MUDs). They all sound like good names for when you throw up into your mouth a little bit. (Sorry.) What irks me is the implication that there’s a world in the machine that’s a better place to be than the physical world. Really! It must be so, because a lot of people spend more waking hours in front of their computer living in alternate realities than doing physical things in the actual world. (Unfortunately for some, it may be true . . . a sad fact.)

That notion first occurred to me when I had kids. I think it’s why we never bought a single console game. (OK, before you call the child-abuse hotline, they did get to play video games at friends’ houses . . . heck, we even broke down and got them GameBoys -- but only for vacation, kind of a bonus for long car and plane trips. Most of the time, in fact, they read. Books!)

Do you remember the first MUDs that pre-dated graphical programs? A screen full of text! I had friends who spent hours each night on them . . . and sometimes Friday night to Monday morning. Without showering, eating bowls of cereal for two days straight, in their underwear. So I knew there was a fascination (an addiction, really). But I never ‘got them’ (or they never got me). Though I’ve always been a computer geek, to me it was a cool tool, something of great utility -- more like a car. OK, a car I loved, worked on, accessorized, knew what was under the hood. I’ll never forget my first Mac . Kind of the way I feel about my iPhone . . .

But I digress. Back to social application as ‘gateway to another world.’ The problem with platforms like MMOGs (and their recent incarnations, Second Life, Habbo, the virtual worlds -- and especially the WeeWorlds and other kid-targeted online equivalents of HFCS) is that their primary purpose is the online activity itself. Far from the notion of computer as utility, helping you ‘organize your tasks to provide more free time,’ these social applications suck up your free time. (Facebook et al. seem like sinkholes for now . . . but I’ll reserve judgment!) You’ll definitely think harder about it if and when you have kids. Would you really want them spending most of the 16 hours they’re awake each day at a keyboard and screen? (Yeah, I -- and probably most of you reading this -- do, but then I’m running an internet start-up. Funny, neither of my kids opted for a tech career . . . probably because growing up, they saw how the evil machines robbed them of ‘quality’ time with dad.)

So, my favorite type of social platform? Ah! Those that help you manage or organize your offline activity (again, that utility thing) -- or even better, that are devoted to offline activity. On the fringe of this might be, say, Flickr -- sure, it offers a time-saver in organizing photos, but it also gets bonus points for showing people in the real world doing real things (all you Flickr trolls, go hang out at YouTube). Then there’s Twitter, which I, like many, thought was a ridiculous ‘get-a-life’ time waster -- until I got it. I don’t tweet much (some hyper-twitterers give cause for concern). But there’s something encouraging and oddly motivating about seeing people doing stuff. Physical things. And taking a moment between activities to tell you about it doesn’t seem so bad.

Still, more to my liking are sites like Sportsvite (for organizing pick-up games), and the competition-makers, like IBeatYou. Now we’re getting somewhere! Social applications need to encourage true social behavior -- interaction among people in the real world -- we need more of that, and less screen-love. Which is exactly why I started CHALLENJ (not launched yet . . . stay tuned!) -- to contribute something online that would encourage more activity offline.

Now stop reading, go outside and play with your friends!