Glad Tom, fixed his myYahoo feed problems, I had thought he took a little hiatus from blogging. If he didnt fix the issue I would have missed this exceedingly interesting post on a new service on Pong. (here is their blog)

By decentralizing the ping process to a user’s desktop, the messages are sent immediately to all tracking services that the user selects. Weblog authors no longer need to deal with delays in their posts as blog authoring software or hosting services attempt to forward pings. They no longer need to open a browser and navigate to multi-service ping relaying sites in order to send these notifications.

And most importantly, control over when and where these pings are sent is placed in the hands of weblog and feed authors, not a centralized service that makes this determination based upon business partnerships and financial incentives (this is happening, see these BusinessWeek and WSJ articles).

There are a couple reviews from Jeff Bar and Buzzword Compliant.

This is not much of an issue for Wordpress users who can add/delete their own ping tracking servers. I’m not sure how blogger or typepad works, but I suspect this product/service is targeted at their users. I dont really think Pong can solve the commercialization issue of ping servers as Matt (of wordpress) mentioned because it still relies on ping aggregators to relay to less well known RSS readers and search engines. Pinging directly to search engines and RSS readers is something I can configure myself in wordpress.

In the end though, I think its a usefull service for a segment of users who do not have access to a configurable blogging platform. As such here are couple suggestions. . .

1. Build a tool bar version would be cool as most peole write their blogs via their browser
2. Even better, build a greasemonkey script that add “Ping” button to blogger/typepad/livejournal etc on the blog writing page. And include an option to link the “publish” button to automatically enable the Pong “ping.”

This time, its different . . . but the outcome will be the same for entrepreneurs . . .

After 6 months of seeing my friends go off and start their own companies I wondered like everyone else if this time, its really different or is it just a bubble . . . knowing that its almost impossible to predict the future especially with regards to market adoption, I wont sit on my ass and pretend to know better than people who are more qualified than I am . . . (Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Tom, Alarm Clock, BubbleGeneration, Genuine VC, David Gibbons, Blodget?!)

I know that the weakness of “web 2.0” companies are the very “superiority” of their business models. In exchange for long-term scalabilities, these companies sacrificed short-term applicability. Put it another way, while “virtualness” is great once critical mass is achieved, the lack of value proposition until scale will cause many of these companies to fail . . . the value proposition of buying a book online is quite transparent . . . but the value proposition of writing a book, publishing a book, and reading a book .. all online is much harder to articulate and market to joe schmo.

On the other hand, to balance the increase in market risk, the execution risk for these ventures are significantly lower. As small as my sample size is, the people that are leaving to pursue their entrepreneurial are experienced builder of Internet applications. . . Back in 1998 no one really knew how to build web apps. . . we cobbled together software development paradigms and adjusted it as we went hoping to come up with the right recipe. 7 years later, companies like eBay, Yahoo, MSFT, who have went through countless iterations of the web product development cycle have produced a generation of developers and product managers that have no problem articulating a vision and execute to produce a user friendly product.

What this means is a potential gold mine for VC’s. Instead of funding execution and market risk, many VC’s have either invested minimal amount at the concept stage or waited until beta is produced to invest.

In the end, the ratio of successful companies to failed companies will be the same as another other boom . . .be it railroads, minicomputers, pc’s, the internet, web 1.0, 2.0 . . . (Hsu’s Law . . .not! ) But this time, VC’s would have put in less money and taken less risk to get the same amount of return. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs would have taken the same risk (quit their job, lived off savings) . . . to get the same success probability. Unless they bootstrapped the company (and thus acted as the financier themselves), someone else would have captured the shift in the value creation in web 2.0 world.