"Venture Capitalists: Don't blame us" is the title of an 800-word essay at The Deal. This kind of headline always has an obvious, hidden meaning: Yes, VCs are to blame. Let's skip to the end and see how they did it:

Since Georges Doriot got the ball rolling in 1946, the venture business has remained a straightforward proposition. Invest long-term and earn a return for your limited partners. There have been structural changes, mostly involving VCs edging out of early-stage investment to focus on big bang later-stage deals. But venture investors have generally avoided the financial adventurism common to Wall Streeters.

Except, in one important respect: Many of the limited partners that fattened venture funds are the same pension funds, endowments and other institutions that in recent years levered up, piled into hedge and private equity funds, and otherwise made a big problem even bigger.

In turn, venture capitalists in recent years plowed much of that money into Web 2.0 companies, such as YouTube and Facebook Now that the economic crunch is affecting online advertising, these investments are no longer seen as can't-lose deals. It's time to pull out!

GoDaddy has just unveiled an amazing new service called SmartSpace which lets anyone register a domain name and then instantly turn it into a social web site which aggregates any of the following components onto one page: a blog, a photo album, a chat application, email, RSS feeds, and even components from social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn. All you have to do is register the domain name you want and all the technical work is done for you - the site builds itself automatically.

Sponsor

Dynamic, Social Content

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. Discuss

Facebook has integrated Microsoft LiveSearch into its site as part of a deal announced in July. Facebook users can now search the web without leaving the site.
[News.com]

Pandora Radio is now available on Chumby. All Chumby players can now tune into Pandora radio and have Pandora radio as the audio source for custom alarm clocks.
[CrunchGear]

Lightbulb networks could be the next WiFi, says Engadget. Light bulbs of the future could be the highway your data gets carried along.
[Engadget]

Mozilla released a new plugin called Geode for Firefox Tuesday that allows websites to figure out a person's approximate geographic location and use it in online services.
[News.com]

Google led another day of big tech losses. Technology stocks put in a disappointing performance on Tuesday.
[Marketwatch]

-Shannon Geis

When we first introduced you to Elgg two years ago, it was a new social networking platform whose focus was on e-learning. Since that time, the software has been rewritten and it has moved away from being strictly for educational use only. Today, the award-winning Elgg is one of the top open source social networking platforms available on the internet.

A little over a month ago, Elgg 1.0 was introduced to the world. In this newest release, several years in the making, the software has been improved from the inside out. It has a more attractive UI and design, for starters. But under the hood you'll find more changes like better plugin support, RSS and OpenDD views, and a new database schema.

We may have said that the next social networks would be powered by blogging CMS platforms like WordPress and Movable Type, but what we're really seeing is a shift towards making all web platforms more open and social experiences.

To that end, Elgg can help form the basis of a new generation of social networks. But their platform goes beyond just delivering a solution for the next web 2.0 hangout or social site, although that it a popular use for their software. The Enterprise 2.0 movement is also aided by Elgg as companies wanting to build and customize their own intranet-based social networks have begun to adopt the platform as well.

The Interview

We recently had the opportunity to follow up on our original interview with one of Elgg's founders, David Tosh. We talked about where Elgg stands today and what plans they have for the future.

How would you describe Elgg to someone who didn't know what it is?

Elgg is an open source social networking engine started by Ben Werdmuller and myself back in 2004. Elgg can be used by developers as a starting point from which to build out their own social applications (it handles common back-end functionality and has an extensive programming API), and out of the box as a useful social utility. This year, it was voted by a panel on InfoWorld as the best open source social networking platform 2008.

What's new with Elgg since we first spoke?

We have completely rewritten the Elgg core. This was necessary in order to future-proof the project, improve scalability and allow for greater customization. Over the past four years, we have found that one size really does not fit all, so we had to make sure Elgg was flexible enough to handle new demands being thrown at it, both now and in the future. The era of the monolithic social network is coming to a close; we want to make it easy for people to add social functionality into all kinds of applications.

Why did you move away from being focused just on being a platform for education?

Although we've always had an educational base, a lot of users from other fields began picking up on Elgg. As a result, we were securing contracts to build custom networks on Elgg for groups that were not part of the educational circle, and feeding those developments back into the product. Gradually, interest in Elgg became greater outside of education, so we adapted to that change.

How does Elgg compare to its commercial competition?

With its new architecture and open standards at its core, we feel it is best placed to handle changing expectations in the social arena. It's a very competitive space, but a lot of products have just bolted social features on top of their existing systems - Elgg has social functionality built into the core and was designed from the ground up to support it. That allows us to create deeper features, and also plan ahead for new kinds of social applications. As the types of social applications and uses for them grow, we feel our approach will pay dividends.

Some employers are even letting employees use Facebook at work now. Do you worry that will affect the number of potential customers for your product?

Not really. If anything, I think this increases the potential and opportunity. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc play an important role in bringing the concept of social technology to new audiences. For groups like us, who provide niche services, this is great. For example, companies try out Facebook and then start releasing that they want to improve their internal communications to be more Facebook-like; we can help them with that.

Why should someone consider Elgg for their network?

I think there are three main reasons: simplicity, extensibility and openness. The basic version of Elgg is deliberately very simple and clean. Our architecture allows you to easily extend Elgg's functionality to meet your specific requirements. Lastly, we fully embrace open standards such as OpenDD, FOAF, RSS, Open Social and OpenID, allowing you to interact with other applications.

Who is using Elgg today?

Elgg users range from sports networks to corporate companies, university intranets to school districts. There is a wide cross section picking up the software and applying it to their own niche. Increasingly, companies are also using Elgg to build social sites for their clients; we're keen to promote and support this.

What's in store for Elgg's future?

We have a couple of things in the pipeline:

• Firstly, we're going to launch an Elgg supporter scheme. This will give companies who are providing Elgg-related services the chance to form closer links with the core project.
• We are working on a new mobile intranet platform, powered by Elgg, that allows users to share status updates, photos, documents and media via MMS, SMS, email or the web. It also handles simple notes and shared tasks.
• We decided we needed a system within Curverider to improve our communication while on the move, and built it for our own use; it's been so successful that we thought other companies and organizations might find it useful as well. So far, the reaction from people we've shown it to has been extremely positive.
• All Elgg-powered services have the Open Data Definition built into their core, which allows for full import and export of users, content and connections as well as the ability to syndicate friends' activity in a distributed way.
• Lastly, we have just announced an advisory board that is packed with experts with excellent track records, in order to ensure Elgg and Elgg-powered services continue to develop and grow.

The whispers have started: How much money did Kevin Rose make personally by selling shares in Digg's latest round of VC funding? The talk that Rose has sold shares is driven by equal parts envy and admiration. To understand the reaction, it helps to realize that the notion of an entrepreneur selling his own shares directly to investors before a public offering getting out of the company just as other investors were getting in used to be taboo in Silicon Valley. But that was before Wall Street's IPO machine broke down, and before merger activity dried up. Rose is at the vanguard of a seismic shift in how the Valley pays off its entrepreneurs.

Rose, whose stake in Digg was famously estimated by BusinessWeek as worth $60 million, may be a unique case. More driven entrepreneurs must be frustrated by Rose, the fun-loving rock climber, on-screen beer drinker, and legendary lothario. His company's rise has seemed effortlessly successful, driven more by the former TV host's fan following than Digg's innovations.

But Rose has gotten good business advice, chiefly from Digg CEO Jay Adelson, a longtime friend. Adelson feels he gave up too much control to investors at his previous company, Equinix; he strove to protect Rose from the same fate, an effort which Sarah Lacy chronicles in her recent book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. As a result, Rose still holds a substantial stake in Digg.

Rose is already believed to have taken $1 million in a previous financing. It's not clear how much he's taken in this round, if any but it stretches credulity to think he hasn't cashed out to some extent.

Here's why: Normally, a company raising $28.7 million in a third round of financing, as Digg just did, would be giving up a substantial chunk to outside investors. But when the founder controls as much as Rose does, the math doesn't work. Former Digg engineer Owen Byrne, who complains that he hasn't had access to Digg's financials in some time, speculates that the round involved massive dilution the reduction in value suffered by existing shareholders when new shares are issued.

But Byrne has this exactly wrong: Allowing the VCs to put in enough money to make the investment worth their time, at a high valuation, would require substantial dilution, which would disadvantage employees and early investors. Much simpler to transfer shares directly from one large shareholder Rose to another.

What's the effect? Already, employees at Facebook have been agitating to sell their shares, and the company is creating an internal market to let them do so. Rose, as another high-profile example, will put further pressure on startups' management to let their workers cash out. This seems dangerous: Digg, with its high traffic and Microsoft ad deal, has achieved some success but it's hard to envision it lasting long as an independent concern. What will the boards of even less developed startups tell their founders, when they want to sell, too that they're just not as cool as Kevin Rose?

On October 28, 2008 I will be hosting the first of a series of seminars where I will be sharing my perspective on the state of Social Media and it's impact on the future of Business Communication.

Back in 1995 I was one of the first people who as a hobbyist and a user of Internet Telephony saw the future impact of the technology on the future of communications. For me it was the thought of telephony as a software rather than a service that caught my attention. Thirteen years later as a person who uses social media in his everyday life, I believe that social media will have a huge impact in the way we communicate in the months and years ahead.

In this seminar I will be sharing some of my social media experiences and connecting some of the dots in terms of how I see various social media platforms having an impact on the future of business communication. Back in the late 1980s through the mid 1990s we all dealt with the introduction and dependence of email on our corporate and personal life. I believe that social media will have an even stronger impact in our immediate future.

The first seminar will be held on Long Island in Melville, New York at the pulver.com offices on October 28th. The morning will be an interactive lecture followed by lunch and an afternoon questions and answers session.

Seating will be limited to keep this as a intimate experience with the people attending.

The cost to register is $995 if you register by October 17th, $1195 afterwards. If you would like to attend, please contact me and I will follow up with you.

Tags: Social Media, Social Communications, Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, Jeff Pulver

Add to iTunes | Add to YouTube | Add to Google | RSS Feed

You might remember awhile ago, I took a telemarketing call from a company that claimed to provide Web 2.0 services. I strung them along, just to mess with them. On Sept 10th, I did a remote panel session from my home. The panel discussed Web 2.0 technology and its interplay with the government. Ahead of time, the facilitator sent me a list of questions to consider, which I thought would make a good video.

• Do you consider yourself an early adopter/digital immigrant/digital native? - I'm kind of an edge case. Since the day I realized I could do live video all the time, I've been doing it. I consider myself an early adopter in most instances. When it comes to hardware, definitely. With software and web services, not so much. I know that I'll get tied into one website or another, and it could just disappear. That happened a lot with the .com boom. I'm a little more careful these days about giving attention to one website over another.
• Is web 2.0 a fad? If it is, is it necessarily bad? - I don't think it's a fad, I think it's a conference. I think the idea is a little disingenuous when it comes to the Internet. We haven't seen a massive amount of browser innovation. Google Chrome has stepped it up a couple of notches. It has nothing to do with the Internet though. It has to do with the desktop. With the digital divide closing, we've come to rely on different services online. I would rather call it a renaissance, than to label it with a number like 2.0.
• When did you make the switch into the web 2.0 world? Was it a business or personal switch at first? Do you even compartmentalize the two? - No, I don't compartmentalize the two. No one makes a switch into the 2.0 world, it just happens.
• How do you find out about new web 2.0 tools? - I find them the same way I find out about anything. I find out from friends, such as via email invitations, the chat room and even from Geeks. The more people talk about something, the more aware I become of it. I would just as soon turn to my community to learn about new things. It's funny because I talk out loud to myself all the time. With the camera running live all the time, I'll mutter about needing to find or do something. Nearly instantly, someone is telling me they can help. That is awesome.
• What web 2.0 tool could you not live without? What is your essential business tool? - Email, honestly. Instant messaging. Those really haven't changed. The tools have evolved to a certain degree. But instant messaging is still so far behind. I can't think of the last time that I ran a client that was created by an IM distributor, such as Yahoo or AIM. I use Adium, and I used Trillian before that. I still see the web and the Internet as being predicated on a closed, proprietary model. Eventually, though, all software will be open source. I really believe that.
• It seems like a new web 2.0 comes tool or site out every week, do you try them all or do you wait for the early adopters to weed out the time-wasters? - I'll take a look. If it seems ok on the surface, it'll stay on my radar. I don't stick with one tool or another unless it is of huge value to me. If enough people talk about it, I'll end up caving in just like with adding MySpace and Facebook. It depends on where something fits, and what I get from it. It depends on the momentum behind it, and whether it will help me in my endeavors.
• The twitter effect breaking news, disseminating information instantly vs. the old methods. - Twitter has been interesting. I don't really complain about the downtime. I love complaining about the people who complain about the downtime. It's free! Why are you complaining about something you're getting for nothing? Anyway, I digress. I made a statement about Twitter during Gnomedex: Twitter is a place for you to say, before thinking about what you actually think. You see that somewhat in blogs, but Twitter exacerbates the problem. It can be a serious issue when people are feeling emotional about something.

So, those are my quick thoughts about web 2.0. What's yours?

• OneClickSiteCreatoR.

Want to embed this video on your own site, blog, or forum? Use this code or download the video:

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rQKKlR7TcCQ"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rQKKlR7TcCQ" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><a href="http://chris.pirillo.com/">Chris</a> | <a href="http://live.pirillo.com/">Live Tech Support</a> | <a href="http://media.pirillo.com/">Video Help</a> | <a href="http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow">Add to iTunes</a>

• Okay, Maybe I'm the Idiot
• This is Why I'm F'ing Sick of Web 2.0
• What is Web 2.0?

a

Does Web 2.0 Really Exist?

If you think the new Mashable site rocks, vote ROCKS below or Twitter @mashable design rocks

If you think the new Mashable site sucks, vote SUCKS below or Twitter @mashable design sucks

So apparently I've been dragged, kicking and screaming, back into the editorial department of this humble blog. First assignment: review the freshly redesigned Mashable.com from an objective perspective, in less than 400 words

Rocks: Out With the Old

It's better than the old one. Mashable's layout was, up until this facelift, full of fail; a veritable bastion of bloat. A 3-column design crammed a narrow content column between two pillars of ads, topped by an utterly nonsensical navigation bar. Load times were laughable: anything between 8 and 12 seconds before the content popped into view.

The new version clearly takes a stab at improving the speed issue: a relatively lightweight design that emphasizes the blog's core asset: its content.

Sucks: A Touch Too Much?

And yet the homepage, while undoubtedly cleaner than the old one, could be further refined. Why not standardize image sizes and their alignment? Why so many font sizes and styles?

Rocks: Tag Pages

These delicious tag pages, for exploring archived content on a certain topic, are carved from slabs of the purest Awesome. See for yourself: browse stories about Google, YouTube or Facebook.

Rocks: Related Posts

The related posts feature automagically serves up content from the Mashable archives, accompanied by a pretty little thumbnail image. Great for digging deeper into a topic, with a tempting visual prompt.

Sucks: Overshare?

I know every Mashable reader is on a zillion social media sites, but is it overkill to have this many sharing options? You tell me!

Rocks: Search!

Easy-to-find search box. Good search results. Finally!

Rocks: Comment Cleanup

It took a brave soul to venture into Mashable's previous, haphazardly arranged comments system: glad to see this has improved. Keep it simple, stupid! (And they did.)

Ribbon Rocks! Ribbon Sucks?

Somewhere on the ROCKS / SUCKS borderline lies the Ribbon, an expandable content selector along the top of the site. While extra javascript on a page sometimes feels like extra baggage, I'm finding I love to browse stories in this way. A somewhat hesitant Rocks from me - how about you?

OMG, it's the Conclusion

The New Mashable deftly avoids the fate of New Coke; it's a return to focus, rather than a bloated feature-fest. If anything, I long for even less: with html websites becoming one of many outlets for the content they house, there's little need for added extras.

And yet, there's also ample room for innovation: blogs breaking away completely from the template format; re-finding themselves in an era of ever-shorter attention spans and increasingly fragmented media consumption. What would you like to see here? What is the future of the blog format?

Does the New Mashable ROCK or SUCK?
( surveys)

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