ReadWriteWeb

After the success of last week's ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit in Mountain View, California, we are back with this week's best startup advice in the ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup. This week we discuss VCs and NDAs, balancing features between power users and newbies, geeky startups and how one startup shrugged off a lack of funding and made the money themselves. We also have stories about Diaspora, the open source Facebook alternative, as well as an interview with Gary Vaynerchuk about the bright future of geolocation.

For many successful startups, there exists a point where their product is popular enough to grow beyond the minimum viable product, but is yet to be discovered by millions more that may be turned off if the service is too complicated. Internet startups need to find a balance between keeping the power users interested, while not overwhelming the newbies. According to Spark Capital's Bijan Sabet, Tumblr, a rapidly growing micro-blogging service, is one company doing a beautiful job of finding this balance by turning the "less is more" mantra into "less and more."

It's human nature - we are wired to be averse to change. When something new comes into our lives, we inherently approach it with caution, and at times, with negativity and hostility; but if that change is fundamentally good and right, it will gradually become widely accepted. For startups, especially those in the early stages of existence, changes come frequently and now and then in large chunks, which can be jarring for users who may have just become accustomed to the previous version of a product.

When I called Twitter out in my post of the top 10 failures of 2009 for "failing to innovate," what I probably should have said was this: Twitter has done a decent job of implementing features that we first saw being used by third-party apps.

The concept of user lists? Sawhorse Media introduced those. Retweet functions? That was a user idea that had already been implemented formally by many mobile and desktop applications. And the hot Contributor API is something that CoTweet has been doing for a while. The geotagging API is hardly new, either. But instead of saying that Twitter failed to innovate, let's instead name a few features we love from third-party apps that we think they should integrate themselves - maybe with a key acquisition or two.

According to a statement made today by Twitter's co-founder Biz Stone, the company is interested in acquiring more companies to expand upon their current core set of features. At a news conference held in Tel Aviv, Stone was quoted as saying that acquisitions are "something we are definitely interested in. We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision."

The acquisition he's referring to is Twitter's purchase of Summize, a real-time search engine that has now become search.twitter.com. Since that original purchase in summer of 2008, Twitter has made no other moves or indications that they were interested in buying other companies, seemingly more focused on quashing bugs, acquiring funding and partnering with major search engines like Bing and Google. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of Twitter applications exploded, and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter's service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?

Whether you're riffing on the latest celebrity gossip or ranting about local politics, Blogged lets you add your two cents to today's hottest news posts. As of this morning, the conversation tracking service is offering another level of news-related discussion through its live chat feature. In addition to aggregating topical blog posts and real-time blog comments, Blogged lets you find your online friends and create article-specific or topic-specific chat boxes. If you're like me and you have a knack for putting your foot in your mouth, this chat feature helps ensure that your buffoonery is kept amongst your inner circle.

While it used to be a bit of a media darling, it's not often that we write about MySpace anymore, but they continue to plug along - as one of the most popular sites on the Web. And, they continue to roll out new features for their user base. For many, these features may fall into the "too little too late" category. But it's still interesting to see which new MySpace features were a high priority to add or fix - especially for a site that seems to be rapidly losing touch with the audience that once embraced it.

Recently, Facebook added a new feature to its News Feeds: a "like" button. Now, rather than leaving a throw-away or otherwise unnecessary comment on a friend's status update, you can show your appreciation by just clicking "like" instead. Sound familiar? If not, then it's clear you haven't tried FriendFeed FriendFeed, the social web aggregation service popular among early adopters.

As avid users of FriendFeed will tell you, Facebook's implementation of FriendFeed's features are nothing but a pale imitation of the real thing. Still, there's a growing concern among the service's fans about its sustainability. Although FriendFeed's founders believe they can still innovate to profitability, we're no longer sure that's true.

One of the best features in Google's Chrome browser is the way it handles tabs. In Chrome, when you click a link, the tab that opens appears to the immediate right of the current tab. It may seem like a small thing, but when you have so many tabs open in Firefox that they spill off the sides of the screen, having to scroll to the end to see the new web page is annoying and inefficient.