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.

“The economy is tanking and people are arguing about whether they should go to Demo or TechCrunch,” Abrams told the Times. “Few companies sound like they are breaking new ground. It’s like, ‘Here is Twitter for dogs.’ And people still think they are going to get rich by being a blogger.” Hm. Twitter for dogs does sound pretty lame. But then, so did "Friendster for college students."

There was no pressure to pass out business cards or pretend to listen to a pitch out of politeness. But the Uncov guys are sly. They have an angle, like everyone else in the Valley. They're running Uncov, advertising-free, just to get attention — and then, when they launch their stealth startup, they're going to milk that attention for everything it's worth. Add to that this guarantee: Their company is the one startup that will never get savaged in Uncov. It's just so cynical it might work.

But besides that hidden scheme, it was just a night out at the bar with your sarcastic know-it-all coworkers. "We're less than 30 years old! Nothing we do now is going to have repercussions in the future!" Uncov writer Ted Dziuba cheerfully slurred towards the end of the night, after the shots of Patron but before he started flashing the shocker in almost every picture he posed for.

Other guests were just as charming. AdBrite salesman Joel Sacks, after trying to steal videographer Sarah Meyers's camera, spilled an entire pint on himself and spent the rest of the night smelling of stale beer. When Meyers pointed her camera towards Friendster and Socializr founder Jonathan Abrams, he pretended he couldn't speak English, mumbling gibberish instead. The chaos was capped off by Forbin Group biz-devver Cindy Phung shouting "Geeks gone wild!" If only.

And of course, there were the haters. "I liked these guys before the started getting on the scene," said one guy by the bar, as if he were complaining that his favorite indie band was picked up by MTV.

Not like the Uncov guys are all that cool, really, when you get right down to it. Dziuba drinks whiskey sours, the same cocktail my 93-year-old grandmother orders on a night on the town. And his wife Julia is adorable and way too hot for him. Watch out, guys: I'm going to be exploring this Silicon Valley phenomenon of the too-hot wife soon.

Speaking of too hot, Pownce engineer Leah Culver was upset that her new relationship with LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who plans to celebrate the conclusion of his still-pending divorce next month, didn't merit a Valleywag post. Oh, Leah. If we posted all the things we heard about you, what fun would that be? A lot of fun, actually. "Hot swap," indeed.

–Video by Sarah Meyers

Back in May or June of 2002, I was at a party in Adrian Scott's loft (Adrian is the founder of www.ryze.com) and Jonathan Abrams (Friendster founder) mentioned, "Hey Sean, next week, I'm gonna do the same thing that Adrian is doing, except it'll be for dating. Check it out." Sure enough, Friendster was launched the following week.

Who knows what this will do to Friendster's recently awarded patent on social networking sites. But kudos to Sean — a real-world schmoozer whose Stirr mixers are the new place to network — for remembering this 2002 incident.

Friendster patents social networking [Boing Boing]