You could tell that the people who worked on the first generation of social networking services were not members of the IM generation.
We were thinking, if we could be topical to whatever is going on right now that's cool, and show people behind-the-scenes content, it would be a great way to illustrate the idea and get mindshare. It's been amazingly successful. The thing we've noticed is people are incredibly impressed with what you can do with imeem. They aren't jaded like everyone in Silicon Valley. When they see what you can do with it, they say "Wow, this is way better than MySpace." That is their frame of reference.
Our tools are very powerful. It's almost like they're too powerful. If you give people this huge beautiful blank canvas, where do they start?
In social networking, there are the Yahoos and the MySpaces, and then there is a huge pack of companies that no one has heard of. I think we're officially in the middle now. It's been fun being in tiny startup mode, but I think we're graduating to real-business mode.
