London Dotcom Scene, Web 2.0 style

Following on from funders exiting the scene (see earlier post) I was saddened today to hear that Blogfriends has closed its doors for now.

For those who don't know it, it was a Facebook App that took your social network of friends, and their friends, and fed blogs to you from those people. From my point of view it was probably the most useful (eventually the only) Facebook App I used.

However, it ran into 2 common problems with "Web 2.0" apps on Facebook

(i) The Facebook API and Platform has high friction on system maintenance and scalability
(ii) The App therefore couldn't scale easily above the 27,000 users it go to without significant redesign

(See Luke Razzell's description of the issues in his notice of mothballing over here)

Issue they had was raising funding to restructure the service (i) to scale and (ii) to go outside of Facebook, was more than the resources they had.

Looking at all the hoopla and the money thrown at apps like FriendFeed though, it makes me scratch my head - if I compare what Blogfriends does vis a vis say Friendfeed, it does basically the same thing behind the scenes:

(i) Connects you to feeds via a social network
(ii) Aggregates data feeds from the nodes in that social network

One of them starts up in early 2007 in the UK and, despite proving its utility on Facebook, gets no funding. The other gets $5m to spend on Tech and PR from a standing start in late 2007 in the US.

Now I understand the issues from a funder's point of view - plateau in numbers due to scaling problems means lack of traction means less desirable for funding, and the "alpha" system design hit scale issues - but that is normal in small startups like this, and Friendfeed - as far as I understand - took its $5m before it even got to this stage. I don't blame the UK VC's, Blogfriends is still small stuff. What I want to know is where are the UK Angels and Seed Investors who can bridge that "equity gap" - who can put in the £100k or so that companies like these need to get to the next stage, never mind putting in the c £2.5m ($5k) that Friendfeed got?

There is a lesson there somewhere................