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Comment by njl | Hacker News Reader

Good question.

I'll use this as an excuse to shamelessly plug the cofounder-finder I wrote in response to that spreadsheet, http://amb.itio.us.

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njl, if you scroll to the very bottom of the spreadsheet, there's a row where there's 3 other startups that inserted a small plug for themselves there; feel free to add yours to that row.

Thank you. I see somebody moved that row to the top. I added a short little plug, but I refrained from moving it back down to the bottom.

Thank you for going to all the trouble to curate this, by the way.

Why can't I browse the entries without creating an account?

Possibly because most people might not sign up if they knew there were only a handful of other people on there?

NB That isn't a dig at amb.itio.us - it's a nice wee site and I have signed up for it.

That's nonsense. I won't sign up for it then.

There you have it. There are good arguments both ways, but I decided against allowing anonymous browsing for two reasons. First was to encourage sign-ups, second was laziness -- the list of other users is sorted by their relevance to you, and over half of the width of the user list is taken up by how closely they match your needs. I didn't want to take the time to think through how browsing that list should look if a user wasn't logged in.

classic chicken and egg problem with any market place or social network idea for a startup

There's a real cool idea there, something about turning social networks inside out by focusing on meeting people instead of keeping track of people you already know. A dating site, without any real overtones of dating.

On the other hand, I have no idea how the hell to actually make money off of that. I was thinking it could be built on top of LinkedIn or Facebook, but that reduces the chances of ever making any money off of it even more.

Back to my "boring" ideas that involve people paying me money for providing actual value ;)

What do you mean exactly by turning it inside out?

Here's my m.o.:

Step 1. Meet new people Step 2. Keep in touch with people over time (and repeat)

The first is accomplished by any method that will yield you new contacts (real-life or online) e.g. attending a startup / technical conferences, YC SUS, Twitter, HN, ..

The second is the "I wonder what's new with that guy", and it can be passive (looking at Facebook or LinkedIn activity streams then hitting them up), or active (actually asking the guy what's up via email, @mention, etc.)

Step one is hard. Some way of meeting people with whom I share peculiar mutual interests, but not peculiar mutual friends, is hard.

Instead of a social networking app that tells me, "These are your friends, we'll help you keep in touch", I want an app that says, "These are people that might be your friends". The current social networking applications do a good job of telling me all about my current friends, and allowing me to keep in touch in a passive way. The issue is, most people have a hard time meeting new people after college.

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