DeFaceBook and will LastHouse.com miss the boat?

Web 1.0 stars Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox are rejoining to put together a Dotcom 2.0 for that most Zeitgeisty of things, House Decoration.

As the Times report we linked to above notes:

The firm has begun to approach retailers and other suppliers that will provide the furniture and household wares sold through Mydeco. Hoberman said he was aiming for “the aspi-rational mass market . . . people who want to improve their home surroundings”.

Hoberman, 38, said Lane Fox, now 34, “was obviously a great partner at Lastminute. She will be very helpful in that we are targeting a large female demographic”.

Surely they mean largely....

An interesting concept....LastMinute was a genuine internet based disruptive play on the mainly f2f based travel market in existence at the time, but its less clear what an online interactive House Decoration service offers vs the existing "Good Enoughs". Will the capability and penetration of broadband allow such a service to work in Web 2.0 mode where similar ideas failed in Web 1.0? It has some impressive backers already (as well as the founders), so clearly some smart people believe it will. And maybe Henry Blodgett 2.0 will help promote it come AIM time

But will they perhaps have missed the (house)boat by launch time?

Evidence in Rest of World, and even the Rest of UK (outside of London) is that the Great Housing Boom is perhaps coming to an end as the extra low interest rates that fuelled it (caused of course by attempts to alleviate the impact of Crash 1.0) start to rise.

And when this happens, the House Decoration biz unwinds - fast! Anyone recall Coloroll, to name one of the casualties from the last time?

The need for house decoration doesn't go away in this phase of course, but a lot of the supporting hoopla - TV programs, colour supplements, advertising budgets - certainly do.

Of course, LastMinute's timing was impeccable, a few months after Lastminute.com's IPO, the whole Web 1.0 thing crashed, so maybe this is the best way of timing the Great British Housing Crash

So, how to hedge one's risk as an investor in such a venture?

Interestingly, Hoberman also invested recently in moveme.com, which is designed to make house moves easier - this (in our opinion anyway) is a more predictable business, as the % of moves per annum is a far more stable number, though there are already online move services businesses run by existing estate agencies etc.

But we believe the real answer lies elsewhere in other habits of the British....

We humbly submit that that organ of future trends, Lonely Planet, may offer some hints - the latest edition describes the British as fame and celebrity obsessed, binge drinking yobbos with the fastest growing Internet porn habit in the world. Add that to our avid consumption of broadband and Social Nets and the New New Service is staring one in the face......DeFaceBook

Remember what PT Barnum said re never underestimating taste.....

DeFaceBook is, we feel therefore, a better Zeitgeist based business plan, combining user generated sleb, porn and binge drinking content into a fully Open Source Social Network WebService - with Online Advertising and access via Twitter from the start, and it will of course have Open ID and be readable as keitai media on your mobile phone.

You read it here first...

...though we read the original Mydeco article over on Vecosys