A VC: This Time will be Different
avc.blogs.com
avc.blogs.com
Since when has this not been true. The only people who benefit from little gadgets that get widely used for fun are the people that get bought out early on. The only time people (as in customers) will really pay you (monthly, yearly, and so on) is when you are making them money. How do you make the customer money? Increasing the customers ability to sell or by radically streamlining there business processes.
Salesforce is a good example of this, myself I can't reach Salesforce type heights but am working on targeting a few very specific verticals with officezilla.com in a similar way to salesforce but at a much lower price point.
So "right now" judging solely by users, Slide seems to be a "winner" but time will tell if it remains one.
Very few companies can easily abandon the data they put into Salesforce, but I can easily imagine Slide's users taking down their party pictures once they start worrying about their more permanent online persona.
Popularity and number of users are great certainly money can be made from ads.
Not sure if they can make $55 million worth of dollars from ads, probably not though. Those investors will be looking for there money (x10) and when they don't get it will force the company to close.
That's one theory for what happened to FilmLoop (one of Slide's early competitors).
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/12/filmloop-betrayed-by-in...
Actually it looks like FilmLoop is still around here: http://filmloop.myfabrik.com
Going to the twiistup event not too long ago, I realized that there is some benefit to having a lot of "hands" in a company in that the more people who have a stake in it, the more they want it to survive. Which is probably how Slide even raised 55 million. There has to be a way to do that without taking so much money that it just hangs you.