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

It really strikes me as odd that no one is talking about the iPod Touch and how this is a strong seller and growing amongst younger users. Sure, teens love BBM, I’ve seen this on the train repeatedly (where I conduct most of my user observations with people sending me weird looks repeatedly), and this makes a lot of sense as BBM is “cool” and teens like using something their parents aren’t using (parents using iPhones, teens wanting blackberrys). With roughly 2 iPod Touch units sold for every 3 iPhones this is a pretty big user base.

I’m seeing lots of younger teens and kids using iPod touch’s. From as young as our 18 month old (who can unlock, start an app and watch YouTube) to friends’ 4 year olds, 7 year olds to older kids whose parents have deemed these kids as too young to have a phone, an iPod touch is this generation’s game boy. With one exception – it’s still a communication device. As kids get older their using apps as messaging tools.

With recent investments by both Fred Wilson and Mark Suster in “group messaging platforms “(Kik.com and Gogii – which makes textplus.com respectively) and our own in-house use of whatsapp, not to mention Skype, iCall and other messaging applicationsI can see this trend growing.

RIM’s BBM is nice, I’ve long maintained it’s the one killer app that keeps people on BBs, but as this teenage segment becomes young adults and the next generation of teenagers move on from the iPod touch to phones my guess is they’re going to want to stick with an OS they’re familiar with and groups and contacts that move seamlessly from the iPod touch they’ve been using for the past few years, wonder which phones they’ll choose?

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?

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.

I really, really, really hope Yahoo! does not merge with Aol or get’s involved with News corp. The rumour is that Private Equity houses are getting involved and Aol/News Corp is looking at buying Yahoo!. Mergers and acquisitions have not been Aol or Yahoo!’s strong point. They only work when the target is something that’s going to be core and is not being done by the acquirer before the transaction. When Aol acquired Advertising.com or when Yahoo! acquired Right Media, those transactions worked fairly well, because it was about rebranding and incorporating a new technology and it was going to be a core part of the business.

An acquisition makes sense on paper, Yahoo! is priced at a point that would make it attractive. Even if the strategy isn’t clear; the value of its assets alone make it a pretty compelling story. But price is only one factor, what you need is execution. And an acquisition by Aol would handcuff execution at a point where Google, Facebook and other competitors are firing on all cylinders. Just the thought of dealing with the search deals that the different companies have in place is giving me a headache.

I like Carol Bartz style and she was a breath of fresh air in terms of management ethos. But I’m not sure she totally get’s the Internet and has the vision of someone like Schmidt or even Zuckerburg. I’m not sure who the right visionary is but I’m not sure it’s anyone who’s in either Aol or Yahoo! today.

I definitely think Yahoo! would benefit from becoming a private company, I think the lack of having to answer to investors on short term numbers and being able to invest and focus in a longer term strategy would work well for the company. Also having employees move away from being fixated on the stock price and start thinking about how to really disrupt, design or deliver would help the company move a lot quicker. I just don’t believe a merger/acquisition with another internet beast is the right way to make this happen.

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.

I had a conversation with a friend a couple of months ago about how the term “Lifestyle business” get’s such a bad knock in business schools and in the investor/tech entrepreneur communities. The truth is lifestyle businesses should be admired not dissed. If someone can create enough wealth for him or herself and in the process create a few jobs, in this economy especially, we should celebrate their success rather than dismiss them for creating a lifestyle business.

I didn’t question it that much when I was in business school. I took entrepreneurship classes that focused on building big businesses, looking at scalability, looking at exits, and investment classes that looked at bottom lines and quickly showed which investments would have a trajectory that would land them into public markets or in a valuable trade sale, I can’t remember once ever looking at the amount of jobs created or the amount of wealth for an individual in a simple but effective business. Although my guess is that a significant portion of successful businesses are in fact lifestyle businesses.

I used to work for a lifestyle business and one of the reasons I left was that the business wasn’t scaling and wasn’t trying to be a really big business. In hindsight, so what? The company had created jobs for over 20 people and the founder was making a significant income for himself. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. In fact in this economy we need more people creating companies like this.

As the economy contracts, as getting listed on public markets is getting more difficult, maybe it’s the right time for business schools, investors, people and banks (I’m leaving the investment for smaller businesses rant for another day) to take another more favourable look at “lifestyle” businesses.

Here’s the thing, all websites either sell something or match up parties. Dating websites sell their audiences but they differ in how wide or deep they want those audiences to be engaged. I think the spectrum goes from a site like plentyoffish.com at the low end, dead easy, low bells and whistles really simple and you get what the tin tells you plenty of fish. On the other end you have a site like okcupid which markets itself as a matchmaker asking deeper questions to help you find your match. I’m not in the market for dating websites (thankfully being married to the greatest wife ever means I don’t have to visit sites like these) but even I was interested in OK Cupid’s blog post on the real stuff white people like. I had come across this post just before my conversation with Josh so it helped me see the common line between dating websites and the rest of the web. The question is; are you a plenty of fish or an Ok Cupid? Or rather are you a for the masses or a for the value site.

Let’s look at social networks, Facebook is a for the masses, everyone’s on it and it’s connections are madness, Linkedin is a value where there’s deeper engagement. Question and answer sites, Yahoo! Answers is a for the masses, Quora is a value rich model. Other social networks like Twitter, and Q&A sites like Mahalo, fall inbetween.

Knowing which end of the spectrum you want to be can help you dictate content and marketing strategy. Questions like should you invest more in SEO or in Buzz and PR can be answered by know what kind of dating site you are.
It’s an interesting concept and I wonder what others think.