http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_22/b4086085715448.htm
Google Stifles Innovation. All this largesse might be understandable if Google weren’t so nefariously bent on snuffing out progress. As Google hoards 70% of the lucrative U.S. search market, the company is using its heft and excess cash to promote free for free’s sake—a nihilist m.o. if there ever was one. We’re all the worse for it.

$0.02

Red Herring evicted, looking for new home
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9949094-7.html

Friendster would need to radically revamp their system to beat facebook. But with Google, they may stand a chance…

If you notice Google has a lot of products/services but the rate of functional releases per product is rather slow compared to other Web 2.0 companies.

But seriously, I respect the fact that a lot of startup founders are also idealists – they want to create something that makes a difference and see it grow to the end.

It will take a lot of convincing (and a lot of money) to get them to sell. And that’s how startups miss their exit windows.

I always wondered what would the social networking scene be like today if Friendster sold out to Google for $30 million in 2003. Would Facebook still be top dog today?

Basically grab the cash and start a new idea. Wait any longer beyond the critical mass or peak of everyone’s attention, the startup will be crushed ! The dotCom days are littered with dead companies.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10787_3-9946149-60.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

True, all the more it is for startups to engage, listen and provide timely answers to it’s community. Open to communication. Launching a new service is only the beginning.

You know Twitter is at the “alphadog” level when, a) almost everyone you care about following online is using their service, and b) a cottage industry of services and applications sprung up around Twitter (Twhirl, TweetScan, TwitterFeed, etc.)

I guess when a startup is at that level, it can withstand an outage or two, provided that it shows that it is upfront with the community and that they are sincere about solving the problems. And to Twitter’s credit, that’s exactly what they are doing.

However, Twitter defies the quality aspect. It’s not the most stable web services out there with many outages recently but that hasn’t turn many of it’s loyal users away. It has, for some reasons became a part of their social life online.