Finances: you put out for it out, and hope for the best. Only thing you can do until you have a view rate that justifies some nice yet unobtrusive ads that drive in cash. Performance: well, you put out for it too. These things will pay for themselves when they are not concerns if you become successful, or you bite the bullet if you fail. Of course, odds of failure are 100% when you never try- and it seems like you have a clever sense of direction. No day like today, huh?

The thing about social networking these days, of course, is there are established communities. People have their myspace account, their blog, there *whatever* account. I consider this challenge to be split, and your 2 biggest issues. Getting the people, making the come back.

Sometimes it’s better to integrate, at first, than compete. For example, let the beta grow with ‘temporary’ hooks to the hotspots: myspace widgets, digg feeds, twitter plug ins. Maybe a one stop shop for those who want to tie together their LiveJournal, Myspace and Facebook account all in one place. Let the person know, not only do you have something new, better, cooler- you also are down with that they already think is cool and works with or without you. Simple clean interface is nice, interactive content is better. Customizing, driving the community- people want to level up in this type of community like it was their WoW character.

That’s all easier said than done, and perhaps not even possible. Another point of view is to consider where other popular areas fail. Myspace is a mess. Digg begs for video and pic categories that people actually like. RSS is under appreciated, del.icio.us is still a sheltered community of appreciation. How do you exploit things like this? Sexy smooth Firefox plugins is a thought- doing something cooler people can bring into the sites they already use is even better. RSS never caught on the way it should have, so how do you bring it to everyone where IE7 failed? Food for thought.

I went from replying to thinking out loud- it’s one interesting venture. Looking forward to hearing more about it.