We’ve talked a bit about the opportunities for entrepreneurs using the frames of emerging trends and new platforms, but might the best opportunities exist outside the United States?

Paul Saffo, Harvard Business Review, A Looming American Diaspora:

When young knowledge workers look for a job today, they seriously consider companies half a world away. Homegrown American talent is moving abroad, in what could become a huge shift in the world economic order.

…The U.S. monopoly on leading-edge opportunities is at an end. The world’s best and brightest no longer assume that their future lies exclusively in the United States, and America’s best are coming to agree: Their path to a dream career may well lead them overseas.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see American knowledge and business talent follow the increasingly strong economic opportunities around the world. But is there any data to support the idea? Or at least any anecdotal evidence from people you know?

Lately I’ve been thinking of re-joining the American diaspora…

Even though I’m trying to focus more on “translating business strategies into financial models”, I can’t help but explore. Pardon me for a bit of rambling thought…

Back in late November and early December I wrote two posts about new platforms and new trends for entrepreneurs to leverage.

While, yes, it is all about the network, the Internet is not the only network. The idea of creating and leveraging networks doesn’t need to only apply to consumer-oriented Internet applications.

Focusing on transportation networks for a minute…

What trends can entrepreneurs leverage to create new businesses? One of many:

Stabilizing the economy is going to fall to government intervention and investment.

What will the government invest in? What themes did we see in the campaigns? Off the top of my head: Iraq, energy independence, infrastructure investment and revitalization, economic and financial stabilization. Obama has already declared his intention to create jobs by investing in transportation and energy infrastructure projects. While these may not sounds like obvious areas for startups, they are probably more meaningful than another desktop or mobile Twitter client or a new way to share photos.

What is the next platform for new businesses? Pointing out one:

Transportation

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have traditionally stayed away from opportunities that require big, inflexible, systemic changes to succeed. The required scale is simply to large, the risks are simply to big, the timeframes too long. But how could the government create a new platform in public transportation for entrepreneurs to leverage? How could entrepreneurs develop businesses based on existing transportation networks?

As usual, I’m not the only one thinking about the concept; Chris Timmerman of Brand Avenue, Interstate Redux highlights Karrie Jacobs of Metropolis Magazine, Rethinking the Interstate:

[Obama] has been talking up a huge economic-stimulus package and saying he’ll “rebuild our crumbling roads and bridges.” Infrastructure is suddenly a buzzword…

The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, created when Ike signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, was a symbol of everything that was both right and wrong about this country. That we were able to plan and execute something so ambitious—more than 46,000 miles of highway—seems, at this juncture, wondrous. Of course, the system undermined our cities, encouraged suburbanization and sprawl, and solidified our dependence on the automobile. This tends to undercut the glory of the achievement.

But it’s time for us to look at the interstate system not as an aging network of highways in need of repair or replacement but instead as we might look at a navigable river.

… What if we thought of [interstates] as the backbone of a new, more diverse 21st-century transportation system? “It’s time for a different vision, Blumenauer says. “And a principle for that is how we coax more out of existing resources.”

How could the existing transportation network be leveraged?

Not Just Possible, But Likely | New Mexico, USA | Dec 2008

We’re living in low visibility reality at the moment…

Fred Wilson, talking about job loss and creation and Charlie O’Donnell’s post In this economy, we’re all entrepreneurs, Twenty-Two Years Of Job Creation Wiped Out In One Day:

The big companies are not going to be the answer. We are going to need more people going out on their own. Some will raise venture capital, but the vast majority will not. They’ll bootstrap a business that hopefully can cover their cost of living. I think that is a more scalable model for replacing 3mm to 5mm jobs per year.

In other words, instead of looking for a job, create your own. It won’t be the best strategy at all points in time, but it could be right now. Creating your own job is the best way to get hired.

Falls in line with something I’ve been thinking about for a bit…

Catching up on the road trip also known as my life…

A couple days ago on Twitter I compared 2007’s road trip to my current road trip:

I’ve been a little dark lately on the Drive-By Consulting / Non-Consulting cross-country road trip, but rest assured I am still on the road, still meeting the entrepreneurs, investors, creatives and change agents of our new economy.

Between Mountain View, CA and San Francisco, CA over the past couple weeks, I’ve met, seen, talked to:

• Gautam Gandhi, who gave me a great tour of the Google offices, a chance to sample the fabled Google cafeterias and introduced me to fellower Googler Preeti Uberoy. Great times as always.
• Very briefly, Megan Smith, Bill Maris and Mickey Kim of Google.
• Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures (thanks to Gautam for the introduction).
• Co-Founders Christopher Golda and Mike Montano of Backtype, who have created a great site for making sense of the disaggregated conversations and connections in the comments throughout the web.
• David Cohen of TechStars, prompting this post “Don’t prop them up”.
• Sean Tario (@eurotario), an “Evangelist of Transformative Technologies, All Things Entrepreneurial, and Building Authentic Communities” based out of Santa Cruz, CA. Sean’s passion, energy and authenticity made going to this SXSW party in San Francisco one of the best choices I’ve made on this trip.
• John Griffin, CEO of Cutcaster, an innovative photography and vector stock image agency that has created a bidding mechanism to create a more flexible market between buyers and sellers (thanks to Lee Torrens for originally pointing Cutcaster out to me via Twitter).
• Yossi Goldlust, a seriously talented and knowledgeable entrepreneur in online advertising.
• Entrepreneur Brad Wiemerslage of Stormpulse, a fantastic site for tracking hurricanes and extreme weather events.

What’s Next?
Good question. Besides a return trip to Los Angeles, and a trip to Austin to “speak” at SXSW on March 15th, I’m not entirely sure of my plans.

Right now I’m trying to figure how to cash in social capital for couches and lives to crash. *

If you have ideas on places to go or people to meet between San Francisco, Vancouver and Austin, drop me a line in the comments below, by email or Twitter.

—

* Seriously.

Looking backwards at a portion of a week’s reading…

• John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, The New Reality: Constant Disruption:

  Once businesses learn to harness the disruptive elements of today’s digital technologies—or so the conventional thinking goes—everything will settle back into equilibrium.

  But what if the historical pattern—disruption followed by stabilization—has itself been disrupted?

  Expanding on the post, Ethan Bauley:

  There’s enormous power and creative freedom in accepting that tomorrow will not be like today.

  Pure gold: both Ethan and Brooks Jordan picked up the exchange in the comments on the changing nature of organizations and the flow of talent:

  In the meantime, the growing gap between the aspirations of talented individuals and the needs of institutions designed for scalable efficiency will drive many of these talented individuals to strike out on their own. But we view this growth of independent contractors as largely a transitional phenomenon, reflecting the misalignment, rather than a permanent condition. Individuals over time will eagerly seek out institutional homes that can help them to accelerate the development of their talent and amplify their impact on the world around them.

• More thoughts on the nature and use of social capital:

  Alan Patrick, Karma Chameleons and the danger of whuffie based feudal systems. Food for thought; think of the post as a set of ingredients than a fully-baked meal.

  Alvin Toffler: The Thought Leader Interview:

  Thirty-six years after his book Future Shock, the world’s most influential futurist sees the informal economy as a basis of revolutionary wealth.

• Mike Bonifer on ChangeThis, Don’t Script, Improvise!
• Startonomics, a one-day workshop in Los Angeles, CA on Feb 6, 2009:
  

  Startonomics is a one-day workshop designed by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs on how to create simple, actionable metrics; and how to use them to make better product and marketing decisions for long-term growth and startup success.

• Alan Patrick, Paris Hilton, Twitter Flight and other viral afflictions of Social Media.
• Andrew Chen, How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)
• Basil Peters, How VCs Block Exits.
• Albert Wenger, No Such Thing as Too Much Seed Capital Availability (Reprise), (via Brooks Jordan).
• David Hornik, Will VCs Continue to Suspend Disbelief:
  

  The startup world is always a meritocracy but never more so than in a tough economy. Those companies that show results will continue to get funded. Those that don’t, won’t. My hope is to continue to invest in those that do. And then work hard to bridge the disbelief gap.

• Wall Street Journal, Media Firms Team Up to Test Online-Video Ad Formats:
  

  Starcom MediaVest and sister agency VivaKi say they are trying to create standards in the online-video market, which is popular with consumers but hasn’t turned into a serious money maker.

  What a surprise: any chance the reason consumers like online video is because it doesn’t have ads that interrupt the “value stream”? How good can a business be if its value is primarily derived from interrupting what consumers are trying to do?

Recently I created a short financial model for a friend to help him understand how his newest startup “works” and estimate the basic operational and financial metrics behind his business.

After we went over the basic information about the product and business (a standard part of my initial data request before creating a startup financial model), I realized the crucial part in creating the financial model was going to be understanding the customer acquisition and engagement cycle. I started digging into viral marketing, viral loops and viral expansion loops to understand how to translate people’s behavior and usage of his product into a series of assumptions and equations.

Even though the estimates will undoubtedly be wrong, breaking down the operations into a series of equations forces one to take a very tactical look at product development choices and business strategies.

Maybe someday I’ll release a version of my viral loop customer acquisition and engagement model. Until then, I figured it might be valuable to share a bit of the research I found most interesting and valuable.

Yes, there are a lot of links to Andrew Chen, and as you read you’ll figure out why…

• Andrew Chen, What’s your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption: A viral loop is…

  …The steps a user goes through between entering the site to inviting the next set of new users.

  … Ultimately, viral loops are like induction proofs in that you are jumping to a steady state situation in which your viral widgets/emails/messages are already out there, and you are optimizing some set of steps that users have to jump through. Then, once you get this right, then you are figuring out how to build “on-ramps” into your viral loop so that you bootstrap the entire process.

• Fast Company, Ning’s Infinite Ambition:
  

  “Incorporating virality into the functionality of the product.”
  Ning grows because each new user begets more users. Every time someone sets up a social network, he has no choice but to invite friends, family, colleagues, and like-minded strangers to sign on as well. The company calculates that each person signed up for a Ning group is worth, on average, 2 people, compounded daily: On day two, that individual brings in 4 group members and on day three, 8; within a week, she has brought in 128 people. Which is how Ning has been able to grow at a daily average of more than .4% and add 500 new groups a day, doubling roughly every 137 days.

  … “double viral loop,” which spreads two ways, because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator.

  Andrew Chen: Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy:
  

  Viral marketing is not a marketing strategy
  Successful viral products don’t have viral marketing bolted on once the product has been developed. It’s not a marketing strategy. Instead, it’s designed into the product from the very beginning as part of the fundamental architecture of the experience.

  Viral marketing is not a product feature
  No single feature determines the virality of the product – instead, it’s part of a viral loop that connects a disparate set of functions into a cohesive motivation for the user to tell their friends. If the fundamental product doesn’t drive a viral motivation from its users, then it’s very hard to force it.

  Viral marketing is a fundamental product design discipline
  Instead of:

  We have product X, how do we virally spread it?

  … we ask:

  We have viral loop X, what’s the right product to put into it?

  The skillset for effective viral marketing
  Because of the above issues, “viral marketing” is not really something that ought to be in the domain of soft-skill folks like PR, advertising, and marketing people. Nor is it in the world of hardcore technical folks that can architect systems but not consumer interactions.

  Instead, it’s something that needs to bridge both soft and hard skills. You need an interesting combination of skills, including:

  1. Understanding the motivations behind user behaviors
  2. Understanding and exploiting the technical loopholes to create viral loops

  I think that the fundamental compartmentalization of these two skillsets is what ultimately drives huge companies being worse at viral products than startups.

  Eric Ries, Engagement loops: beyond viral:

  On synthetic notifications:

  The most blunt instrument is to simply reach out and contact your customers on a regular basis. …true ROI of a synthetic notification has to balance ROI, customer fatigue, and the engagement effects of the campaign itself.

  On organic notifications:

  … the mechanics of sending users notifications when new friends of theirs join the site is a great organic re-engagement tactic. From the point of view of the existing customer, it goes beyond reminding them that the site exists; it also provides social validation of their choice to become a member in the first place.

  The ultimate form of engagement is when the company doesn’t have to do anything explicit to make it happen

  Connecting engagement and viral loops:

  The two loops are intimately connected, in a figure-eight pattern. Customers exit the viral loop and become part of the engagement loop. As your engagement improves, it becomes easier and easier to get customers to reenter the viral loop process and bring even more friends in. And as in all dynamic systems, there’s no way to optimize a sub-part without sub-optimizing the whole. If you’re focused on viral loops without measuring the effect of your changes on other parts of your business (of which engagement is just one), you’re at risk of missing the truly big opportunities.

  Todd Stephens, Viral Expansion Loop.

  Tony Wright, Value or Viral?
  

  It’s easier to build a great business on top of an existing viral engine than it is to build virality into an existing business”
  At the time, I found myself nodding. … It turns out that viral loops are HARD.

  But, as I think about it, I can name something that’s a LOT harder, and that’s building a product that people really want.

  Andrew Chen: Freemium business model case study: AdultFriendFinder ARPU, churn, and conversion rates:
  

  * Visitors -> Members: 6-15%
  * Members -> Subs: 10-22%
  * Subs -> Renewing Sub: ~80%
  * Revenue per member: $0.48-$0.95

And most recently, the latest from Andrew Chen on Freemium models, How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!). Worth a deep look…

Expanding on social capital and organizational design…

Learning how to design organizations that reduce (or even eliminate) the “deadweight loss” of the social capital transactions within and between companies may be the greatest opportunity for a 21st century capitalist.

Let’s start with an example: Social Venture Commons.

Michael Lewkowitz (@igniter on Twitter) is right now leading the development of a Social Venture Commons (SVC) to create an open-sourced micro-messaging based collaboration platform to help people “discover and make meaningful contributions to purposeful projects”.

Why is SVC important?

We’re in a world where more people can independently create organizations to create value, and while the technological and cultural trends are pointing toward a more distributed model of value creation, we’re lacking the infrastructural tools / platforms necessary to create the structures we need.

It’s a model that creates the transparency and kind of interactions necessary to help people trade their personal social capital near par value for corporate use.

And it’s not just about social entrepreneurship or creating better interaction methods for non-profits; the SVC community is also testing the potential of peer-producing a for-profit startup using the SVC platform and organizational model.

Our organizational structures need to adapt to the new reality of constant disruption, and SVC is one path, one of many potential business model designs that are based on change, adaptation and flexibility.

SVC is hardly the only effort in the area: I can’t hope to mention all of them, so please chime in with examples and links to other efforts in the comments below.

What is being created?

• A “broadly accessible” collaboration platform: easy (web-based), distributed (available in any site) and portable (sms compatible).

  The beauty of using micro-messaging to power the collaboration? To quote Michael:

  My experience with Twitter and the emerging projects have been that they allow really fluid entry and exit without having to ‘join’ something. Follow v. join (or friend) is a very important difference in this. Similarly this is not about destinations – rather it needs to show up where people and ventures are/do/happen.

  This fluidity nurtures interest and discovery which I think also will nurture the best, authentic, passionate and productive contributions.

• An “action-oriented” collaboration structure: every interaction is a contribution, every contribution builds relationships.

  How can an organization optimize for micro-interactions? Me:

  The SVC model is based on a different culture: contribute and stay in or get out, but contribute.

  Imagine how the organization model would be different if all interactions were contributions, if every interaction created value rather than allocated value. Is it possible to reduce the need / ability to dilute contributions with politicking, bureaucracy, et. al.?

• A self-organizing, “interest driven” organizational structure: the platform is the organization, empowering people to fluidly find, follow, and do things that *are* interesting at every moment

  This is not simply crowdsourcing using Twitter; whereas most crowdsourcing models transfer value from participants / creators to buyers, SVC is about empowering creators and allowing some of that value to transfer back to the contributors themselves in the form of social and / or financial capital.

  Developing new tools is a necessary start, but the real value is in creating new rules for interaction and value creation. Interestingly, SVC is testing these new rules in its own development, questioning and developing its own organizational structure and interaction systems along the way.

How can for-profit endeavours apply the SVC organizational and economic model?

How can for-profit ventures own the intellectual property? How can these new ventures capture customers and revenue? How will contributors get paid?

How do we create an equity structure to allocate future distributions of wealth to fairly compensate past, present and future contributors?

Creating value on the edge is hard; creating new societal conventions and organizational structures based on still-emerging methods for interaction and communication is even harder. Can our current corporate legal structures adapt to allow the kind of innovation in compensation and ownership rights necessary for new organizational possibilities like SVC?

I’ll return to this shortly…

—

Want to learn more or get involved?

• Track the #SVC hashtag to follow the progress, thoughts and people on Twitter
• Contact Michael via the web or twitter via @igniter
• Contact the current core contributors building SVC: Joe Dee, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Dan Williams and Peter Flaschner. Expect more to join…

Industries change and evolve over time; why should venture investing be different from other industries?

Recent declines in venture fundraising…

Shouldn’t we be worried about the recent decline in venture fundraising?

Venture capital funds raised only $3.4 billion in the last three months of 2008, according to new data from Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. Unsurprisingly, this is a big drop (about 70.9 percent) from the same period in 2007, when venture firms raised $11.7 billion, and also a substantial decline from the $8.4 billion raised in Q3 of 2008.

Was the amount of capital raised in Q4 2007 or Q3 2008 a meaningful base for comparison? Is a measure of venture fundraising over a short period of time meaningful? Is this a signal or just noise?

Wouldn’t we expect some venture capital funds to fail, struggle and close up shop in an economic downturn? Isn’t that part of a healthy cycle of creative destruction?

In any case, less venture capital isn’t necessarily a bad thing; more money doesn’t necessarily lead to better startups and innovation.

David Hornik, Innovation doesn’t take a vacation in an economic downturn:

So why am I optimistic about investing in 2009? Because entrepreneurship is an addiction, it isn’t a choice. Great entrepreneurs aren’t driven to create companies because it is easy, or because capital is plentiful, or because the public markets are swallowing anything the venture community will throw at them. Great entrepreneurs start companies because they can’t help themselves. They see a problem or a solution or white space or an opportunity and they have to do something about it.

Innovation doesn’t take a vacation during an economic downturn. Innovation is a constant. While the resources an entrepreneur may be able to bring to bear on a problem may vary with the economic climate, the desire — the need — to innovate never goes away. And Venture Capital is the fuel of that innovation.

… combined with a shift in investment strategy…

A more meaningful trend, however, may be the increasing deployment of “risk capital” to fund follow-on investments, even as seed-stage valuations are decreasing.

Based on everything I’ve heard, venture investors are using funds to keep their current bets alive rather than making new bets. It’s a reasonable strategy given the structural math behind venture investing, the Darwinian nature of startups and the resulting need to give possible successes the chance to be “moonshots”.

… is helping create a gap between funding for “testing ideas” and “building businesses”.

A wide range of business, cultural and technological trends created the need for new models to support early-stage ventures, and the resulting rise of seed-stage and venture-launch funds investing in the $5K – $25K range have created many new opportunities and paths for entrepreneurs to test ideas.

But what comes after the ideas have been tested and “proven”? From what I have heard, entrepreneurs are finding it difficult to raise funding in the next level of investment, the more traditional seed-stage $100K to $500K range. If I’m wrong, please correct me.

Why?

Is this funding gap a sign of economic conditions or a deeper structural problem in venture investing?

As usual, the answer is not either / or but both. In the last decade (especially the last five years) the M&A market has been a popular exit strategy for startups looking for funds in this range, but current economic conditions have forced many strategic investors to the sidelines. Traditional Series A institutional capital will find it difficult to make the math “work” for deploying smaller amounts of capital. And even though the recent shift has been towards focusing on follow-on investments, the new early seed-stage funds really do not have the capital or the investment focus to make the follow-on investments to take their “proven ideas” into businesses.

Which leads me to ask: what is a bigger problem for the venture community: not being able to find funding to test an idea, or not being able to find funding to take a promising idea forward?

Bemoaning the structural gap between venture capital math and the new operational and economic realities behind new ventures is pointless.

What’s the path forward?

If it’s a structural problem, venture investors will figure out an operational and investment model that works. The recent rise of the early seed / test / launch phase investors is one of the newer evolutions in venture investing but hardly the last. I would be surprised if investors do not figure out how to bridge this seed-stage gap. Perhaps we’ll see tighter angel networks, strategic shifts from institutional Series A-stage investors, follow-on funds run by the early-seed funds or even new entrants with new investment models.

If it’s part of the broader economic downturn, then we’ll see good investors succeed and less-successful investors fail until the next run-up in venture fundraising and investment creates new opportunities. It’s not the death of the industry.

And on the other side of the coin, entrepreneurs will figure out how to build new businesses regardless of the funding climate. All new ventures have to have a business model “built-in” from the start; it’s the entrepreneur’s choice when to turn it on. [1] Right now is the time for entrepreneurs to focus less on raising nonexistent capital and focus more on turning on their “built-in” business models.

Need help figuring it out?

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[1] I think I read that line somewhere, but I can’t seem to remember where…

An interlude from “serious business”, a bit of light-hearted thought…

This started with a random tweet of mine:

I see tons of “twitter for business” tips and links. I want to see “twitter for dating” apps

I’m hardly the first to float the idea of using Twitter for dating; I’ve seen a number of thoughts from Howard Lindzon on the subject, Aaron Chua mentioned an idea using Twitter plus a “virtual gift” component as foundation for a dating service, and Olivia Hayes mentioned Twitter as part of the broader opportunity to use social media to find dates, to which I left the following comment:

But think if Twitter could match up substance better; everyone that uses the web (including Twitter) creates a lot of information about themselves that could be very powerful to use in matching up people.

We don’t need to replace the serendipity of life, just add to it…

There’s even an old, abandoned @twirting account (Twitter + flirting), indicating an old idea.

After my first tweet about my desire to see a “Twitter for dating” service I traded ideas with Scott Lundgren (@capitalfellow on Twitter), and since neither of us is really going to do anything with the ideas, we decided we would open up the conversation to a broader audience. If you feel like doing anything with it, go for it; all I ask is that I get a free account [1]…

Basically, it’s just a big database that collects information on people that want to use @TwitterDating and then matches up people based on their supplied personal information and a magical contextual analysis of people’s last 1-2 pages of tweets to create potential matches.

After that, @Twitterdating passes on the information on potential matches using the direct message backchannel and allows people to follow up on their own, perhaps direct messaging through @Twitterdating to eliminate the need for the public follow to create the backchannel conversation path.

Anyway: I’ve tried to do is condense the key points from our email conversations to focus on the key points; and to be clear, most of the real thinking is from Scott…

Key Points

• “The real “juice” of the application has to be the contextual analysis of one’s tweets for the matching”
• What fundamental pieces of information does one need to make a date/no date decision? Which ones are missing from Twitter? How can those be added? Hashtags? Custom application that uses Twitter for message passing & discovery?
• How can one parse intention from content?

Interaction Model

• Express interest: I follow @twitterdating
• Supply additional information: I d @twitterdating the necessary additional information, including my sex, my desired sex, geo, age, etc.
• Collect additional information: integrate Facebook Connect et. al. to access and collect relevant personal information?
• Contextual analysis: @Twitterdating indexes Twitter data page of users that have expressed interest (by following @twitterdating) and the additional information supplied to create a user profile. Past tweets are then indexed with the matching user profiles to create the content necessary to match people.
• Introduction: Twitterdating bot sends d to people to introduce, explaining why (in 140 characters) they might be interested in the other person, without giving away the other person’s username. If both people d back to @twitterdating indicating they want to hear more, both users receive a d with a link to a page explaining the match and giving the basic user profile details and twitter IDs to allow users to carry on the conversation themselves.

Implications

• Non-public intent: only the user knows they have expressed interest to participate, and the user information is not supplied to the public. Easier for people to try and test without people knowing they are trying, and keeping the information private reduces the incentive to game or lie on user profiles.
• Links create destinations: using the link approach allows @twitterdating to provide a destination page with more information for the users that can also be monetized using highly-targeted advertising, per-interaction promotional strategies and per-month payment options. Imagine using Tipjoy as a micropayment mechanism to get access to potential matches by “paying” @twitterdating…
• Link pages can pull in information from other, non-Twitter sites: if the user provides additional data on their profile with links to other pages, the pages will be able to pull in other data from Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect (right?).
• Profiles can store user preferences: users could select notification frequency and store potential matches to allow users to look back at suggested matches and the reasons why they were matched, helping users modify what they tweet about.

Comparisons and Reference points

• Mr. Tweet
• Twitterbirds
• My Tweetheart
• Hot or Not

Extensions

• Could Twitter be used to match up business partners in the same way, using contextual analysis of tweets, links, user data and location to parse intent, capabilities and potential partnerships?

Thoughts?

—

[1] Seriously. I could use it.