Claude Montpetit -- Montpetit.net -- en

In 1997, 2 friends and I started a high tech company. One of our goals was to develop a web-based application ("web service" or even "peer-to-peer" may have been more appropriate terms but they were not in our vocabulary back then) that would allow individuals to share information; in particular, information found on the Web. We started this development in early 1998.

And then came the B2B trap. The generic framework we had built was turned into something that fit better with the "Enterprise" market. Indivuals that were the primary targets of our ideas became non-interesting for the trend of the moment, and thus, from the potential investor's perpective.

But this is not the point of this post. The focus of this post is rojo.com. This is a startup in the SF area that appears to be fully ventured, and lead by people that have been around for a while (Marc Andreessen is an advisor). Here is a 2 liner from a post on their site:

Our mission is to make online content more accessible and useful for information consumers, and our free Internet service, Rojo, aims to do just that.

And later on, they add:

Rojo has therefore developed community features in which friends and colleagues can connect to each other within Rojo and flag stories for each other and share what feeds they are reading.

This is 2004. Back in 1997, these ideas were there but without words to back them up. Now, there are concept such as emergence, feeds (RSS, Atom), aggregation, reputations, social networks, semantics.

These word can now bring money to good projects.

Reading content online is the third biggest Internet application — following email and search.

My personal conclusion here is that the emergency that has fueled most projects in the 90's was not as necessary as we may have thought it was. Ideas can emerge in different places at different times. The fact that an idea is born in your mind does not mean you need to deliver an app in six months otherwise someone else will do it. I look at some individuals at Rojo. One in particular, Kevin Burton, has been around RSS feeds for many years now: Apache's JetSpeed, some defunct web-based project I forgot the name of, NewsMonster — a Mozilla plugin. These are all RSS-related application. One would think that this technology's hype time is up, but surprise, it does not seem to be. I know, this is just another startup that may not make it, but still, it received money (at least it appears that way.)