Dot-com address acquisition is a dubious vestige of the first internet boom, when branding reigned supreme over profits and functionality, before entrepreneurs realized people would just look for them on Google. It was also Foursquare's first use of a $1.35 million investment from Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech; the software company tells Business Insider it couldn't have switched to foursquare.com from playfoursquare.com without the seed capital.

Investors obviously weren't deterred by the Google theft rumors, either. Some people inside the Googleplex believed Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley launched the iPhone service with code from Dodgeball, which Google bought from him in 2005 and then shut down. Crowley apparently told people at this year's South by Southwest conference the same thing, reasoning that Google wouldn't mind since it wasn't using the code anyway. It seems a safe bet that either Crowley was right or the rumors were wrong, since it's hard to imagine O'Reilly and Union Square Ventures sinking in money if Google were poised to sue.

The incentive to dispose of — or ignore — the issue would have been strong; the iPhone bubble is fast inflating, and your typical venture capitalist hates to be left out of a good hype cycle.

(Pic: Crowley, by See-ming Lee)

Long before Web 2.0, long before MySpace, Twitter, Tumblr, and the like, entrepreneurs were trying to exploit the human urge to communicate. Amazon.com acquired PlanetAll, an online address book and calendar service, in 1998 for $87 million. That same year, AOL bough ICQ, a rival instant-messaging service, for $407 million. Long before Del.icio.us, there was HotLinks, a Web bookmarks service founded by Jonathan Abrams, who would go on to found, yes, Friendster; it was sold for a pittance. And before Ning, there was online community-builder eGroups, swallowed up by Yahoo. And whatever happened to the original SixDegrees.com? Bought for $125 million in 2000, then shuttered the next year amidst the bust.

Did any of those acquisitions benefit the acquirer? In some cases investors made out. But the brands and services are forgotten, neglected by their owners and abandoned by fickle Internet users.

The point is that the ideas of the Web 2.0 craze aren't new. They've merely been rehashed with slicker technology. The only thing that has really changed is the emergence of a new wave of investors with short memories, willing to take a gamble on companies with the appearance of fast growth and popularity.

Wilson is the exception: Someone who ought to know better, but hasn't learned his lesson. Or learned the wrong one. GeoCities was a fluke, driven by the crazed equity markets of the late 1990s, and the madness caused by six dueling portals all eager to establish themselves as the leading Internet destination, and willing to pay anything for pageviews. What does it mean that Yahoo was willing to pay $3.5 billion for GeoCities, but not $3 billion a few years later for Google?

Yahoo is now closing GeoCities, which prompted Wilson to reminisce about his old venture capital firm Flatiron Partners' hundredfold return:

I learned a lot from that deal. I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control. I learned that a business deal made over dinner and a handshake can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars, I learned that good partners are worth every penny of returns you give up to get them, and I learned that selling too soon is not too painful as long as you don't sell too much. And most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it's something special.

GeoCities, which offered people a crude kind of Web presence at a time when most people found building websites too technically intimidating, certainly offers lessons. But perhaps not the ones Wilson has in mind.

Websites which allow us to idle away time with our friends will always attract a large share of our online attention. The lesson of GeoCities is that they're only lucrative as long as there's a greater fool around.

After a lot of ruckus last week about Google or Microsoft buying Twitter (they're not — yet), Twitter investor Fred Wilson came forward to say that the company wants partnerships, not a payday. And he invents a new metric: "tweet views," or the number of times someone sees a message posted on Twitter, whether it's on the Twitter website, a cell phone, Facebook, or the countless number of Twitter apps people use to read and write tweets.

What does a tweet view profit Twitter? Nothing. In making up "tweet views," Wilson is returning to a practice of the late-1990s dotcom boom: imaginary measurements for fictitious businesses.

Why blame him? Anything which can be measured can be managed. And people's expectations for Twitter — A $500 million Facebook acquisition! No, make that $1 billion from Google! — are utterly unmanageable. Twitter has next to no revenues, and no plan for making money. Pressed on this issue, Williams and his cofounder Biz Stone say that they're watching how people use the service and will come up with something based on that. Translation: They're making it up as they go along.

It's far better for Twitter to be valued based on people's imagination of what it might become, rather than the reality of what it is — a "poor man's email system," according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, or instant messaging 2.0. (AOL hasn't figured out how to make real money off of AIM, either.)

So what's Williams's big news tomorrow? Here's a preview: The day after tomorrow is even bigger.

One almost certain possibility: accounts for businesses, with tools to track who's saying what about one's employer. But with companies like Comcast and JetBlue already using the service for free, it's hard to see where the value lies. And given Twitter's simplicity, it's hard to see how advanced analytics are needed versus, say, just using the site's search engine.

Online publishers and ad agencies like Glam Media, Mashable, and Federated Media are making money by repackaging "tweets," or Twitter messages, and slapping advertising around them. Federated is voluntarily paying Twitter a cut from its Microsoft-sponsored ExecTweets site, but Glam and Mashable are just taking advertisers' money.

So what's Twitter doing about it? Watching, according to the Journal:

Fred Wilson, a Twitter investor and board member who is a partner at Union Square Ventures, says Twitter will make money by "following the money," or building on the ways that others are developing businesses based on the service.

In other words, as soon as someone figures out a good way to make money on Twitter, Twitter will kneecap them and steal their idea. Finally, a glimmer of business sense at the whimsical startup!

"This has nothing to do with the economy," Fred Wilson, a partner at Twitter investor Union Square Ventures, told The Deal. True enough — but it does have to do with Dorsey's incompetence. One industry insider says he botched several acquisition offers — one by nattering on about his original idea for Twitter as a messaging service for ambulance drivers and bicycle couriers, an idea he still wanted to pursue after a Twitter acquisition.

Wilson gave a speech last week in Manhattan. In other words, there was no reason to run the story. What's really going on? Wilson himself explains: The Times had this piece in the works for weeks. My theory: Editors there felt it needed to run soon, before the sector Wilson favors — hipsterish Web startups like Twitter and Etsy — suffered some embarrassing disaster.

(Photo by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)

It'll be catnip to the bloggers featured on Techmeme, an automated news aggregator which has attracted an obsessive following among tech bloggers, if not actual traffic worth speaking of. Instead of seeking actual pageviews, Techmeme gamers try to collect some ineffable sense of self-importance. And so they'll inevitably start linking to Zemanta-suggested stories out of laziness. Even reporter Anthony Ha admits, "Linking and adding other media can feel like time-consuming distractions when I’m writing VentureBeat posts."

With all the TechMeme pile-on posts drawing from the same pool of Zemanta-planted background links, the feedback loop in tech blogosphere groupthink will be turned up to 11. Honestly, with an algorithm finding your story leads, an algorithm doing your research, and an alogrithm choosing the relevant ads, why do we need human tech bloggers at all?

Twitter is no different from other user-generated content, like Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad. Those businesses are good businesses. People who can't wrap their heads around trying to monetize these businesses aren't trying that hard. It would be naive to assume that the management teams of Twitter or FriendFeed or Disqus don't have four or five strategies for monetization in their business plans that they are evaluating.

That youth and inexperience is an asset to many of these startups. We’ve been through why that is before. The founders have low personal burn rates so $25,000 can take them six months. They are largely developers/hackers who know how to build stuff quickly and inexpensively. They create lean, mean, capital efficient companies. They grew up with the web so they have a “native” feel for how web apps and services should work. And of course, they don’t know why they are going to fail so they “just do it”.

Or: "No, honey, that minimal investment doesn't make me look cheap; it's just your exceptionally high burn rate showing." (Photo by Xerostomia)

Victim: NextNewNetworks cofounder Timothy Shea

Victim: Yahoo ad exec Mike Walrath

Victim: Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson

It's not that amazing. As CenterNetwork's Allen Stern first pointed out, each time a new user signs up for FriendFeed, the site suggests the new user becomes friends with "Popular FriendFeeders." On the list: Bret Taylor, Fred Wilson, Scott Beale, Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte — despite, as Stern notes, the fact that many of these "popular" users don't actually use FriendFeed very often. Why? We haven't asked anybody at FriendFeed because the answer is obvious: So that the whole bunch of easily ego-fluffed blog blowhards will blog about how amazing FriendFeed is, without bothering to figure out why, exactly, it seems to be growing so much faster for them than everybody else.

She was recently spotted in New York's startup-laden Flatiron and Chelsea neighborhoods, making the rounds. New York VC Fred Wilsion is an unabashed fan, and the two have already invested alongside his Union Square Ventures in Etsy. Might the pair break hearts in both San Francisco and Vancouver by moving to Manhattan instead? As for New York, all I can say is been there, done that. Head back to Canada for Sonnet's sake, guys. American citizenship ain't what it used to be.

Then Wilson and Jerry Colonna founded Flatiron Partners and turned $150 million into $750 million. Says Wilson:

I don't recommend anyone reading this to try it the way I did it. If you choose to get an MBA, get a real job out of business school. Help to build a few businesses in an industry sector you really like. Become an expert in that industry. Then try your hand at venture capital. You'll be much better at it than I was my first ten years in the business.

The scaling shit only bugs nerds. Most people aren't doing enough messaging volume to notice. The people bitching are the ones who would never leave. Actually, whoever invests in Twitter is getting IP rights to something that solves a whole *class* of scaling problems, i.e. not just what's wrong with Twitter. I mean, I assume Twitter is a feature of everything going forward. Either Twitter proper, or that capability. That means everyone who succeeds will encounter this issue. If there's five non-Google companies in the world who've figured this out, I'd be shocked.

• Customer data stored by different service providers will be combined to create more intelligent services.
• Oil will have increasing difficulty competing with biofuels made from cheap nonfood crops for transportation.
• Water technology will replace abating global warming as a global priority.
• The mobile device industry's migration to smart phones will produce great disruption for big industry players.
• Booming market for healthy aging technologies.
• Four-fifths of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within five to 10 years.
• Algorithms will be constructed to develop new industrial chemicals, new biofuels and eventually artificial intelligence.
• The mobile phone is your most important device.
• There is going to be a venture capital shakeout.
• Within five years everything that matters to you will be available on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse