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Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

Consider a tag cloud.

So 2006. What he needs is an iphone app with facebook plugin & twitter integration. Which is also a platform.

I was thinking what I needed was a sock puppet, or maybe a website with a name with too many vowels, like ooweblioo. I'm also considering a folksonomy of avatars, or maybe a paradigm-shifting web 3.0 application that virtualizes social dynamics in a new dimension.

Dang! That sounds great! I think I'll call the puppet Bob. Man, I'm almost there.

Wow, it IS like 1999 all over again, isn't it?

I remember shopping for capital in '99, and we had quite a few problems getting VCs interested because we weren't asking for enough money, had a CEO who actually had 20 years C-level experience and a name that didn't start with the letter e.

About 2 years after we shuttered and sold off most of the code to various people, EMC implemented something very similar and made a few hundred million dollars off of it :/

There's some similarity. Only this time, the big companies are buying up the little fish early in the game and absorbing them into operations -- which is probably a much saner thing to do than everybody betting they have the next Google.

We're seeing the beginning of "retail startups", where we can spit them out like six packs of Coke, fund them, get them bought up by Amazon or whomever. The industry really wanted to get to this point in '99. They've made a lot of progress since then.

"I like the way you think kid... here is 10 million dollars!"

"By the way, can we make it 4.0? 3.0 is so 1999"

-Anonymous VC

Tag cloud seconded. Then progress to vertical reflection of your graphics.

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