For delicious – phew, I’ll continue to use the service in the hopes that this means innovation will come back to delicious. I think Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are solid visionaries who can build and ship product in a meaningful way. I hope they’re going to do something meaningful with Delicious and give it a great second act.

As for Yahoo, all I can do is sigh. I was upset when I first heard of Yahoo’s plans with Delicious but it’s not new. It’s more of the same at Yahoo. More sitting and wasting assets, not only product but the people who came with those products.

I wish Yahoo had empowered Stuart Butterfield, Caterina Fake – founders of flickr – Joshua Schachter (Delicious) Eric Marcoullier (mybloglog), Andy Baio (Upcoming) and the founders of the other great consumer web services they had acquired. Instead of making ex-MSFT, ex-Aol, Ex-Autodesk and even ex-Google executives head of products and innovation and R&D what Yahoo should have done is empowered these visionaries to think across product and across segments for truly revolutionary innovations. I recognise it’s not an easy task, most of these people preferred building start ups, but it can be done, if you put the right structures in place and incentivise correctly.

I truly believe Facebook is kick ass because a number of it’s product executives came from Friendfeed or from VC funds where they were connected to innovation closely. Facebook also has a visionary at the helm. This is something that Amazon, Apple and Google also have. Bezos, Jobs, Page and even Zuckerburg have created things and value true engineering innovation. For Yahoo to compete it will need to find a real visionary, not more managers.

Unfortunately, the reaction by the entrepreneurial community has been quite negative. Lots of negative comments on the website that’s apparently at the centre of the campaign. Issues about links to US companies and the execution of the site miss the point.

The point is that entrepreneurship is seen by the government as important and there is an opportunity to harness support, change policies and build networks to help support and give entrepreneurs a better chance at succeeding.

Which is why the cynicism directed at the campaign and the calls for heads for partnering with a US company really annoyed me. I cheekily tweeted that:

“#startupbritain cynicism shows the difference between US/UK! In the US, the response would be cool, let’s get to work.”

To be fair, I don’t think that would be the exact reaction, I just think the US is better at celebrating success and at not paying much attention to failure. As well Americans seem to treat programs that they don’t believe would work with indifference. When the government fails the start up community in the US there’s a powerful movement to solve it. From VCs meeting with heads of state to blog posts that end up turned into op-ed pieces in powerful media outposts. When an entrepreneur does something for the community in the US it seems like the community either helps him make it better or moves on quickly to making their own company a success.

This may be naïve, but I have seen a lot of mud slinging and not a lot of productive feedback. Don’t get me wrong there are some pockets it the UK that are supporting this and are encouraging the movement and there are some really snarky responses to government initiatives in the US as well, I just think the ratio of support : snark / cynicism is reversed and we’re holding our own community here in the UK back as a result of it.

So put aside the cynicism for a second, if you don’t like #startupBritain just move on. If you have a way to improve it give the feedback to the team, and if you’re supportive of the movement carry on. Building great companies in the UK is difficult, we’re going to need all the help we can get and knocking down

The commentator covering the story mentioned how most people under 30 probably don’t use a phone book. I would extend that and guess that most people under 50 don’t ever use the phone book for the purpose of finding numbers – using it as a doorstep or something else I’m sure is still done.

It reminds me of when I was a product manager in local government and we were considering a controversial decision to stop supporting some old version of Internet Explorer. The idea being that if many sites stopped supporting the old browser many people would upgrade.

I wish we had made the hard decision – which companies like Google made the year after we discussed it. I hope BT will stop making phone books and spend more on building great technology platforms to help people find this information online and helping the elderly or disconnected use technology more effectively. But I’m not holding my breath.

I still buy the occasional physical book, usually ones that I want to keep for posterity on our bookshelf, but more and more I’m reading books on the iPad/iPod/Blackberry through the Amazon Kindle applications. But books are probably the only medium that hasn’t moved to a digital one-use service.

For Television shows I can catch up online, for movies there are services where I can send the movie back, but no such service exists for books. Why hasn’t anyone launched a digital library, where you can rent books and perhaps either pay a small fee for a short term download or pay a per use fee that’s a fraction of the cost of the book, similar to the rental option on iTunes?

Am I missing something or is this an opportunity that is waiting to be developed?

There’s a right time to do a lot of things, like send thank you cards, invitations, Christmas cards, leave one job for another, start an MBA, read a book etc. But for some things if you wait until the time is right you’ll never really do it.

Having a child, and starting a business are two things that I don’t think you would do if you were waiting for the perfect storm. You might not be in the right property, the right country, the right job, or the right social situation, whatever it might be. Some friends of mine had children earlier and some friends have had children later, either way you end up with crazy highs and crazy lows when you have kids. The key I believe is to enjoy the highs and know that had things been different you probably would have had different lows.

Starting a business is similar. Of course every opportunity is different and there are times when markets are matured and when infrastructure either cheapens or new things are introduced to make a business more likely to succeed but, like having children, if you wait for the stars to align you’re likely to miss the opportunity entirely. I know fellow entrepreneurs who started companies before having children and I know people who have waited till their children had left home to start businesses. Either way the right time is when you have the idea and the ability to execute.

Sure there can be things that help make the decision easier to make, being made redundant and finding the job market to entirely welcoming has been a key driver for some businesses, but the real thing is knowing that these decisions require a lot of patience and hard work and if you’re ready to put the work in both can be amazing experiences regardless of the timing.

You’re screwed because you’ve shown that you don’t care about your users. The latest announcement to close delicious.com was the final straw and signal to the community that you just don’t get it. You don’t sunset a community, you open source it, spin it off, allow someone else to run with it, to do something with it, to monetise it – even if that means adding a small fee for people to use it. As my wife said when I informed her that you were closing delicious “That’s stupid, even I use it”.

I went to delicious.com and saw people had bookmarked the announcement from Techcrunch, but no post from yourselves, no notes saying how people can maintain their bookmarks or how you’ve worked with another service to allow people to move their bookmarks from delicious to whatever it might be. In the words of Julia Roberts, “Big mistake, BIG, HUGE”. Geeks are the ones who started using facebook when it opened itself outside of Harvard, geeks are the ones who started using twitter years ago, geeks are the innovative first users you need to get on board if a product is going to take off. Why did Buzz stink? It never took off because the geeks were all already using delicious. So if you get rid of delicious.com you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll never ever be able to launch a new product again.

Here’s how you can save your face, give delicious away, either make it open source or sell it to someone for a song (Waving my hand enthusiastically). Why am I so passionate about Yahoo! allowing delicious to stick around and not just letting users move to other services? Because the fact is that Delicious has a lot of users. It has active users and passive users. It has super active users who would be willing to pay a small fee annually, and other users who wouldn’t mind ads on it to keep it around. You’re leaving money on the table, and you’re not really helping anyone by closing off the service. Let’s say 10% of delicious users move to another service and 15% move to another service and 20% move to another service and the rest all start keeping their bookmarks locally (in all likelihood the % of users to move is likely to be waaaaay less) then that’s 3 communities that might be a little bit stronger, instead of the community on delicious.com that could actually provide real value to the internet and (shock, horror) to advertisers.

Look we get it, we understand you need to save some money and services like mybloglog and upcoming will need to bite the bullet, makes sense. Buzz as well – though why you invested in creating Buzz when you had Delicious sitting there I never did understand and was never able to get a straight answer from anyone on. We’re all for capitalism and for you trying to get back on your feet but please, please don’t kill one of the only things that gives you any credibility. What next Flickr? That just gives me the shivers.

So thanks Yahoo! for showing the world once again that you don’t really get it and thanks for getting me to get my butt in gear and to start writing on my blog again – 42 days is way too much, hopefully never again.

Disclaimer: I worked for Yahoo! for 3 years from 2007 to 2010 in London and in Rolle, Switzerland. I have not discussed this with anyone at Yahoo! I am no longer doing any consulting or any other work for the company and I don’t hold any Yahoo! stock anymore, I only have friends at the company and a love for the brand that was home to one of my first interactions with the internet.

I’m all in favour of the efforts and the investment that the government is putting in; I’d just like to see more encouragement of private investment and of the banking sector to invest in individuals who have the next big idea. The whole idea that the next Facebook or Google can come out of the UK with this framework is not realistic today. There’s a substantial change that needs to happen in angel investment, banking and culture before a big consumer tech company will come out of the UK. The guardian article with comments from Joe White is the only article I’ve read that points this out well.

A company needs much less capital today to get started. While the government looks at raising funds for investment what they really should be doing is passing on tax relief for investors who are investing in truly early stage companies. As well as changing and encouraging the banking sector to lend to early stage companies with solid teams and markets and help take on some of the risk. The UK government has some of the levers in place with the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Enterprise Finance Guarantee but they’ve made these schemes so convoluted and so complicated that it’s really difficult for anyone to really take advantage of these levers.

The UK culture towards entrepreneurship is changing, but failure is still seen as a bad thing rather than a badge of having the courage to try something new. The media, with it’s programs like Dragon’s Den, doesn’t help this by making 4 entrepreneurs seem like bumbling idiots compared to every 1 who has their head screwed on right.

That being said, I do believe London is one of the top three places in the world to start a company – with the Valley and New York being the other two – and while this is a great step towards ensuring that London continues to compete globally on the technology front, there’s still some work on the other side of the spectrum that the government needs to do to take a leadership position globally.

What writing a blog post there showed me is the real viral nature of the web, especially the social web. The post talks about how companies should be ambitious and try to disrupt like Google, design like Apple and deliver like Zappos. This wasn’t the first time I’d referenced these companies and these principles as people who regularly read my blog would know. But what followed was really interesting. Before I even sent out a tweet about the article, 3 people put the post out to twitter, and someone came up with a great hashtag, #3DValue, I really like this short term to describe my thinking. And I really love the fact that a search for #3DValue on twitter brings up a whole stream of people who are referencing this principle.

This is what’s great about social media, instead of communication being one way, multiple people can adapt and reference the thinking in a way that benefits everyone.

It’s great to have one more personal example of how many people can spread and idea as well as making it more succinct using social media.

Founders can adapt, by committing to find a mentor, realise their weaknesses and bring in senior management who can plug their gaps and give them really good guidance. Think this has worked a fair bit for Mark Zuckerburg, Mark has a great board, including people like Marc Andreesen, he’s brought in some great leadership (eg. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, is a legend). It works for Facebook, Mark might be the face and he might be the subject of films, but I would bet that Sheryl and the other senior managers are able to secure the right partnerships and help the company scale effectively.

On the flip side founders can bring in people and then hand off responsibility when it grows beyond their capabilities. Regardless of how the handovers have happened at Twitter, Ev knows that Dick is a better front man for the company as it scales beyond Ev’s capabilities and putting Costolo in place is a great strategy as the company grows on to the next level.

This all goes back to self-awareness. Are you a Jack Dorsey, an ideas guy who can establish a product? An Ev Williams, who can help scale and grow a company? A Dick Costolo who can take a really big company and really grow it into a potential 9-figure exit or even an IPO? Or are you a Mark (or for that matter a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a few other special leaders), who can take the company from idea to real scale at a point where the world is coming into contact with your company everywhere? Knowing if you can and want to adapt as the company grows is really important and ultimately will help dictate the level of success the company will have.

That said both of them are missing key points when it comes to social media.

Seth,In Lynchpin, thinks social media is a giant time suck and people would be better served spending their time making stuff happen. Gladwell thinks social media’s reach is limited and that we won’t we see a revolution through a medium like Twitter. They’re both right but they’re wrong as well.

They’re right in that social media CAN be a time suck and that a giant movement needs a lot more channels than twitter, but what their both missing is that social media connects and makes people far more aware than ever before. Being connected and being aware helps inform and create in a way that was not possible a while ago. Gladwell and Godin are not active on twitter or any other social media channel (I’d link to their twitter feeds but their both useless on twitter).

Personally, I think Steven Johnson’s research and thinking on connectedness is bang on, when Steven says “Chance favours the connected mind” that totally resonates with me and my experiences. Do yourself a favour and watch this four-minute video from Steven Johnson about “good ideas”.

The key with social media is to know what you’re using different mediums and channels for. For me personally, Twitter is for building connections and information (reception and distribution), facebook is for interesting personal and social matters, Linkedin is professional contact building and maintaining and so on and so fourth. I don’t look at any of these channels as a time suck or as a revolutionary device, I look at them as channels within a new marketing mix and I think Gladwell and Godin would do well to try and understand the mediums better before waving them off as irrelevant.