The Global Venture

This may be proposed business model for the three previously mentioned ideas:

• mobile post-it
• location based RSS
• location based Internet

I am thinking of the classic idea that the basic service is free but more advanced services are not. Obviously the free msut be reasonably useful.

Posting a message on an area with an certain radio (more than X and less than Y) and with a certain duration is free.

If you want different geographical range (wider or more specific) or a different duration, you have to pay.  This approach can also be used to dissuade spammers (as they usually want the maximum range and the longest duration).

An extra tuning to this business model may be adapting the free radio range and the free duration range to different kinds of content. But this may be difficult

Is it too naive? Anyway, if this business model does not work, you will always have Adsense.

I've found a couple of interesting things today:


- Interesting article about new Facebook API and how too much love may kill you (love from users, that is).
Basically it says that the great insight of Facebook is to become an 'open' platform for apps, and that if your app is there and gets virally extended, the growth might be so brutal that your servers won't be able to cope with it unless you have good resources.

- I got to that article through James Hong's blog . James Hong is one of the co-founders of hotornot , that website where you can rate people's pictures and say whether you find them hot or not. Simple and effective. James Hong says the killer app in hotornot is the people. User generated content to the rescue.

I heard from hotornot several months back, and saw James Hong recently in that churchill club panel video on Guy Kawasaki's blog. Everything falls into place like a giant cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

Ok, but what has all this have to do with the post's title?
I was thinking of meneame, pretty successful spanish website which some people despise as being a copy of digg.
Not me. I find beauty in there. It's not simply a copy, you have to do it well to succeed. It is a story of a local solution well implemented. English language is not everything.

Ideas
Why not localize sites through 'creative plagiarism'. Why not 'copy' and adapt sites to local needs, sites with simple ideas behind, like hotornot, plentyoffish -another dating site- or others popular ones into spanish or maybe chinese (huge market?). Think of baidu in china, very very similar to google but much more popular there. Oh, that misterious and intriguing chinese connection!

Am I evil for suggesting all this? Please don't judge me, just love me.
Be like a chameleon. Or like Bruce Lee put it, 'Be water, my friend'.