I have participated to several new companies both in the bar scene and online and have every time experienced this happening, not because of free sodas or food being cancelled. It’s a natural process in every high paced sector.

Most companies go through 3 different ‘generations’ of teams.

The Foundation

Every company starts with an initial crew of team members, together with it’s founders. Often the team members have previous experience in starting a company, business. These are people who thrive on building something new, it’s a rush. You can feel the adrenaline flow in the days before launch, opening and experiencing a successful launch after the preparation period is one of the greatest professional moments.

It doesn’t matter if you have been preparing this new venture for months or only joined in the last weeks, days before the place opened. In my years in bars I have known many people who wanted to be part of as many opening nights, weekends, as possible. It’s a special rush.
But more than just the opening night, serial ‘starters’ often are driven by the desire to improve. Although they very creative minds are, with a specific view on how they can help a new company and are hired for being people who just have that one thing more on other great minds: personality, character, the ability to bound, they are very open and can analyse signs. They know how to listen and continue improving after launch. A good starting crew does know how to turn a hot concept into a long lasting and successful company.

They know how to turn a hot concept into a long lasting and successful company

This crew, the ‘first generation’ in every company is the most important crew as they will establish the company, its reputation. These people thrive on starting something and usually only know one thing really well: work. It’s their drug, their addiction, their obsession. Gowalla and Foursquare are here.

But they get easily bored.

They want to build, not maintain. They do not like to fall in a regular routine and unless your startup regularly new features launches, they will become susceptible to listen to people who are starting a new company.
Contrarily to online startups in bars you often only need two months to get your name out there and become one of the hottest hotspots in town. You only have two months to put your own stamp on the spirit of the club. After this period everyone is talking about the location and people are lining up to get in to your place. Soon the most hardcore ‘starters’ will start to leave.

The gourmet kitchen has been replaced with a canteen

Life’s kicked in.

Consolidation

Our bar or startup is now several months in and has gathered street cred. People are starting to apply and want to work for your company, because you’re all everyone speaks about. They heard of the spirit and fun at work, the culture and want to be part of it. These are top professionals and you to add them to your crew because they can take your company to the next level you think.

Wrong.

If they are that great professionals, able to take your company to the next level, why did you not hire them in the first place?
The new hires will help you consolidate growth. They are driven and a real asset to every team but would not be great members of the ‘first generation’ team.

As your company grows, the focus changes. You are not working at the next hot thing anymore, instead you are keeping the place on the list of hotspots. You are consolidation your startup, your company, your club. This will have a direct impact on your initial crew.
Your company has become just another successful enterprise for your first crew. You are not the newest and hottest kid on the block anymore, the kick is slowly disappearing.

The sodas are taken away

I have seen people leave for the rumoured new place around the corner as soon as after three months in bars and clubs. I have been one of them. Usually the exodus will happen in the second six months of the company. Online it takes twice as long before this process kicks in. Your crew are some of the most wanted and best professionals out there and launching your venture has only fortified their reputation. They will be headhunted. They will leave and there’s nothing you can do. It’ in their blood.
They thrive on taking care of everything needed, filling in gaps, working in small crews. Working very hard and many hours.

The popularity of your startup leaves you no other choice than hiring more staff and while your company grows, new hires, highly valued professionals, will slowly replace every member of the initial crew. The second crew tends to stay twice as long as the first crew: 1-2 years. It still is too early to analyse how long this scheme takes among hot online startups (because the first stage takes 1-2 years), but it seems that twice as long as in bars the measure is. Facebook is at around 55-60% of this stage, Twitter one third in, the exodus is about to start.

Hibernation

The ‘second generation’ takes your bar into its 3rd year, 5th year on average for your online startup. It doesn’t really matter anymore who you hire now, your startup, company, bar, club has become part of the daily life, routine of your visitors, clients. Your company doesn’t need people who live and breathe your enterprise anymore, as long as they are knowledgeable workers.

You are nothing special anymore

A great example of companies in this stage are Yahoo!, Google and Amazon, both are already experiencing the exodus of the second generation.

But I do not see a link between suffering the bane of being an early adopter and getting banned for not respecting the rules, guidelines.
Early adopterism has been the topic on this blog before, and even nowadays, in my days of blogging retirement, I continue to be an avid tester of applications and spam my colleagues with any new service I discover and like. Around 3% of the stuff I test. My Holy Shit Tools.

And sometimes, I realize I better had waited before switching, before implementing a new, beta service in my daily workflow, as the Chyrp experience has shown me once more.

Never though have I been banned from a site, been confronted with a restriction other than my own stupidity. Not because I was an early adopter.
Honestly, I would be happy if Twitter made the decision for me that following more than 2000 tweeps is insane is. Then again, probably I am not interested enough in everyone’s lifestream.

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.
… There are no restrictions in terms of what you can listen to or when. Forget about the hassle of waiting for files to download and fill up your hard drive before you get round to organising them. Spotify is instant, fun and simple.

Seems like I have heard that before. Pandora? Music recommendation platforms, nowadays as easy to find as social networks.

So what’s special about Spotify? It’s fast. At times. The sound quality is highly acceptable and they have a huge library. MOD. You can listen to complete albums at once, without having to click every track like at Last.fm. You can skip as many tracks as you want unlike with Pandora. The radio service is not too bad. You can build your playlists and share them online.

But I miss things, I love the recommendation platform from both last.fm and Pandora. especially because I can listen to ‘similar artists’ station. I love having a profile I can submit everything I listen to. And most of all, even though last.fm has not announced the pricing structure for unlimited MOD, Spotify seems expensive. Right now, all you need is an invite code to access the platform. Some days you might see the occasional ad in the player, other days you might not see advertising at all. If you want an ad free platform it’ll cost you $.99/day or $9.99/month. I just can’t see why I would pay (yet). Maybe if more features are implemented in the near future I might change opinion, until then I will stick with last.fm.
To be entirely honest… what’s the hype about Spotify about? And no I have no Spotify invites.

• Gmail: Would I pay for GMail? Yes. But more even I’d pay for the hosted GMail. If it came with push to, because the hosted GMail actually is the only reason to pay for Google’s email service. Agreed the UI is great compared to other, although my preferred hating platform, Yahell, has become better with time.
  Why would I pay for a hosted email platform?
• Google Maps: Google Maps is a great service, but again… why would I pay for a service provided by others for free? Especially considered I already pay yearly to have my TomTom updated.
• WordPress.org: I would never consider paying for WordPress. The beauty of WordPress is the GPU/GNL spirit. If it weren’t for those, I’d rather pay for ExpressionEngine than for WP. Just because the platform is more mature.
• Statistic platforms/plugins:To be honest, although I have both Statcounter and Google Analytics installed here, I couldn’t care less for stats. I’m a huge fan of CrazyEgg though and pay for this service on several sites I manage.
• Craigslist: Considered I’m in Europe, Craigslist is pretty much useless to me. Even its European counter part, Gumtree is rather useless because I have an active social life and usually just have to tell/ask friends to sell/obtain something.

Several more, specifically US focused services are mentioned in the article, such as MLB, so it is very hard to comment on those. The only services I actually do pay for and enjoy paying for are:

• Flickr. I do pay for flickr, although I do consider switching to SmugMug, having the option to keep all my pictures somewhere as a backup option other than my hard drives and my own (soon to come) photoblog, is perfect to me.
• Last.fm: I do pay for the freedom of having my own radio station, based on what I listen to.
• Web hosting: Rather than using WP.com I pay for my own web hosting and like to have all my stuff in my own control.

To be entirely honest, there are only few I would pay for. Most involve platforms I use for websites, but otherwise I can perfectly live without many of the services which have become all day usage to me.

[Via WLTC]

Photophlow certainly is a great addition to flickr, but in the end it’s nothing more than _one more social network_. A waste of time.

Unless… flickr had something more…

What flickr really needs are blogs. Yes, one step _back_ and be prepared to the already traditional flickr members backlash, but blogs are needed.
Why?

Not every flickr user will daily post new pictures, but sometimes they might live events which could be directly linked to their flickr presence. Like Andy and I did yesterday. So far the only way to link this up with my flickr account is to write an entry on my own blog. An entry totally independent from my flickr account. And from our mutual social network contacts. Differently said, noone on flickr really is aware about how our firstly virtual social contact now became reality. IRL reality.

Was it worth it? Yes!
Was it wirth blogging about? Frakkin’ yes!
Is it an experience to share with my flickr contacts who only follow our pictures and not our personal blogs? FFS YES!

But there’s no way to do so.

But the real matter here is not the great platform for spammers created by twitter, but rather the recluse the twitterati live in. Maybe, some day the top Web2.0 posterboys will get some rationalism in their bones too. Hopefully even while they still are hyped by their latest discovery.

The error I made was to jump on the bandwagon based on the technical aspect of the platform and even a small, but rather active community. Most important factor though, the main developer behind the platform, was an element I didn’t analyze well enough before making my choice and decision for Chyrp.

As beautiful as Chyrp may be, its problem lays in how Alex Suraci rushes, or not, things.

Alex is a talented coder and has built an awesome platform, but sadly his ambitions are too personal and too little focused on Chyrp for the lightweight blogging platform to become really successful. Alex is ambitious and as a young developer, constantly learning and discovering new coding languages. This sadly to the inconvenience of the Chyrp community and adopters. Some details: a PHP5 is coming… and pending. So is a Ruby port.
The community forums have been changed to a new, non Chyrp related, and unmoderated location at toogeneric. All in all Chyrp is a nice platform, one I will continue to watch, but for now the uncertainties made me switch back to good ol’ WordPress.

I should have known better being a regular early adopter.

Interesting is the conversation which had grown/could have continued in the comments had I hijacked the comments even more.

Sure, it’s peanuts, but it’s a significant step up compared to nothing at all. Also, $35/year for hosting, if that was static, is nothing compared to hosting on your own and potentially seeing your hosting costs skyrocket to hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.
On the whole, though, I just don’t think the comparison with Sourceforge will hold once this all goes live. The two have very different (developer) communities and, more importantly, audiences. [Faruk]

The point of this comment was my comparison to an eventual Sourceforge alike, jungle which might grow based on $.99 applications.

I entirely agree with Faruk that both platforms (iPhone and Sourceforge) have a different audience. But the iPhone platform is only 10 months old and already heading for 10m users (not counting the multiple iPod Touch users – I use a touch at work as well, an iPhone in private life).

What does this mean? The iPhone/Apps Store surely has the potential to reach out to even more people than Sourceforge does. Not that long ago it costed $35/year to host an (open source) application at Sourceforge. The Apple digital certificate costs $99 (for a lifetime probably since no edits pointing at a yearly fee have been made since yesterday).

Let’s bring things back to reality now. Until little more than 2 years ago I ran several Windows communities, with around 20 k members and more than 4k daily active forum nerds. My voice pretty much was law in those communities. Yesterday I applied as Enterprise developer for the iPhone platform. It cost me $99.
If I hadn’t sold on those Windows communities (I’m on Mac now), I could have pitched no matter what sh|tty iPhone application to around 20k people without much of an effort. Apple takes care of the effort hosting and distribution. And highly improves the visibility of my crappy application, even more than the 2-3k nerds who will blindly throw in a buck to test/use my stuff.

Does my popularity guarantee that I deliver quality? Nope, but probably the fact of running a community soon will see my application among the most popular apps and boost my sales even more.

Did I say Sourceforge Jungle? $99 Is nothing compared to hosting on your own and potentially seeing your hosting costs skyrocket to hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month.

Second, on the issue of community – I don’t know how to respond to this exactly. The problem isn’t that our community is growing. The problem is that growth, by definition, leads to the degradation of a community. The wingnuts arrive, and the trolls take up residence. Our challenge is to find a way to engage a larger audience while keeping the interest of our core readers. That may be impossible – and someday I may spin myself out of TechCrunch and start a new blog. The topic – new startups.
[Crunchnotes]

Michael, do it. Do it now.
The stealth way. Give yourself 6-9 months time and write as you did at the start of TC. Go the uncov way after all the TC experience you gathered.

Together with the community gathering the trolls, your crew also did. Don’t get me wrong, I love Duncan, I’ve been reading Duncan for more than 3 years now and always will continue, but people like you, people like Ted, people with inside knowledge or extended coding knowledge, should go solo again.

And if you do, screw the echo chamber Techmeme-osphere, you’ll be surprised of the following you could gather within only some weeks.

TC, the magazine, works well and does its job, now it’s time for hardcore opinions again.

But, this week the redistribution of Mimbo was taken a step further by Michael Oeser, who changed the name to Branford Magazine, thus relieving him of any GPL issues. He also added some bits from Structure (Justin Tadlock) and Revolution (Brian Gardner), though anyone viewing the source code can see it’s 90% Mimbo with a new paint job.

Darren Hoyt, creator of the wonderful Mimbo theme for WordPress after the release of his Blandford theme. But so many points are wrong in Darren’s whine reasoning:

• A name change does not relieve of the GPL issues
• GPL license allows to redistribute, with or without links. Whether in altered form or in original form
• Brian Gardner’s revolution is copyrighted.

To resume, a whine. A whine because the GPL *does call* for ethics, and likes the source to be credited (in code is sufficient – although I do doubt the Blandford theme credits in the code), but this is no license requirement and the GPL *does allow* any credit to be removed.

• A bunch of housewives enjoying the site and commenting
• A gaggle of whiny whores commenting, mostly loving flames
• In the background I discovered several awesome people and made one error. The most unpublished story.
• Paid blogging gigs, on blogging, design, video tutorials and some more
• URL hopping and several domain sales
• Drama, backstabbing and more drama
• Some awesome totally personal and private entries

Most of all, this, and the other blogs, are characterized with a really low level of quality content, not to say there’s no quality at all. I’ve tried several things: sarcasm, irony, flames, my so loved geekery and then some utter nonsense lately.

Right now, I can not say that I want to focus on one topic, not at all. I want to tumblelog, spam your feedreader with links to all over the place and hopefully even occasionally craft a great entry.

Actually, I want to start creating quality again and maybe some day pick up the problogging thing again.
Right now I still have several domains, some known ones and other ones unknown, but I have no idea how to spread the content, hence why I resorted to the good old fashioned AIFN. I will try to pick up a blogging rhythm again over the next days, week, but don’t hold your breath if you’re hoping to read many personal entries. Not here or at any other site you might have squatted.

I do know that no one reads this site right now and I can’t say I’m really bothered by this. I like my little quiet garden and will just blog as I feel like.

Until I have a little more clue again.

And the design? I love the sarcasm in it and might keep it up a little longer.

Anne Zelenka worries that Facebook could take over the Internet after the introduction of the F8 platform. And as I’ve written here before MZ made a strategically very smart move.

But today, only some days of Facebook fun with friends later, I think that FaceBook also has dugg its own graveyard. Let me correct that : battlefield.
Due to the nature of Facebook, every day more applications go viral and application developers, sometimes even already existing platforms such as iLike get deeper in trouble. In trouble due to their popularity.
Over the weekend iLike sent out an email to Valley companies, asking for servers until they could buy new own servers, only because of the popularity of their FB application. Read more at pmarca (scroll down to #4 of the Cons).

Together with the very viral nature of F8 many smaller overnight built applications, such as iGift, SuperPoke or FoodFight, and their developers have gotten in trouble : F8 requires the developer to host its own application, on own servers.
Exactly this could turn FB in to a battlefield over the next months, years. Most developers won’t be able to afford the hosting costs for their quickly whipped up application and we will see VC money and a whole new economy around FB/F8.
Applications will be sold and with time the Big 5 (think Google, Yahoo!, MS, Amazon and Ebay) will become more present at F8, not only with their own applications (Amazon already has a book review app on FB), but also with acquisitions.
Dollars will flow towards developers and the Big 5 will fight to increase their influence on the F8 platform.

I see only 2 possibilities right at the moment:

1. MZ is REALLY smart and sells out now. Not going to happen.
2. Within 18 months FB is an economical, influence Internet warfield. And MZ will be the loser of the year. Due to FB’s growing dependence on external applications, applications then owned by the Big 5, a sell out strategy has become impossible for FaceBook.
   Any major investment in FaceBook would be too risky, because any other player could pull its own platform of applications from FaceBook.

Contrary to what Mark Andreesen wrote at pmarca [via Mathew Ingram], the platform will not win in latter case.

Drama scenario for my thesis were if FaceBook really has the money to buy omst platforms themselves. To pull a Myspace.
But I can’t find any revenue stream at Facebook, big enough to compete with the Big 5 and the likes of CBS (last.fm).

Update: Finally it seems other people start to think buy Facebook applications.

The integration of multiple mini-sites was a major buzz and of course every Facebook member will love it to be able to show off all their web20-geekiness, without having to leave Facebook.
But if we put down the buzz and hype for some minutes, at least the time needed to read this entry, we can analyze a little better what happened last night. And before I pound my egg, let me tell you that from now on I consider Zuckerberg, AKA the guy who is rumored to have turned down a $1bn bid, a master strategist is.

Probably the creators of most implemented platforms are still after-buzzing and seeing vertical statistic lines instead of USD signs in their best nightmares, maybe even finally dream of dollars too.
Several of the implemented platforms are still without a real revenue stream and might now hope to finally generate some revenue.

WRONG!
Zuckerberg doesn’t need all 30 for Facebook. Zuckerberg isn’t interested in helping to develop their platform and user base. No, the only thing that counts is to continue the development of Facebook.
Facebook as a platform. Facebook as the new and geeky MySpace. Open to anyone and everything you want to, is available. A little like Virb, except… well, Zuckerberg is smarter.
Instead of building everything himself, he lets existing and rather popular services join the popularity and fame of Facebook. Smart and proven dev-team integrate their platform into Facebook.

One $mart dude, Mark. So, actually Zuckerberg just pulled a MySpace. But still a number smarter : without investment.

I wonder if that’s the reason wy last.fm isn’t part of the party, although they have announced that something was/is in the works.
There is no doubt that Facebook’s F8 will boost the popularity of many of the 30 integrated sites/services/applications, but what will their value be after 12 months if they had to live without facebook? Null, zilch, nada, noppes.
Suddenly X million of users would disappear from their [falsely inflated] user base, because they have never signed up for any of the services, but used them within Facebook, statistics would drop even faster than they will grow over the next weeks.

Nothing more or less than a master stroke of genius.
Zuckerberg, the master strategist.
Zuckerberg the MySpace 2.0, but also the founder of an unaffordable platform.
Zuckerberg, the creator of the post-Yahoo era?

And I don’t seem to be the only one who thinks this way, it seem that Tony shares shares the same view, but differently. :)