Before he started Friendster in 2002, Abrams had a couple of earlier startups that were also early to their respective markets, including a social-bookmarking service called Hotlinks, which the Canadian-born entrepreneur started after working for Netscape in the late 1990s — but it launched five years before Delicious became the hot social-bookmarking tool, and it eventually perished in the dot-com crash. Abrams then launched an event-planning site similar to Evite called Socializr, but it too failed to get much traction and was eventually sold in 2010.

Trying to solve the social-information overload problem

At that point, Abrams had moved on to running a San Francisco nightclub called Slide and also an office-sharing and entertainment space called Founder’s Den — but he says he was always interested in trying to solve the emerging problem of information overload that comes with social networks like Twitter, which he had begun using as his main source of news:

“I started shifting my news consumption away from RSS and places like MyYahoo and started using Twitter more and more, but I found even if I checked it a couple of times a day I felt like I was missing so much stuff. I needed some tool that could help me manage everything.”

Instead of checking out one of the other services that were trying to provide filters and recommendation services, such as Zite or Summify, Abrams — a programmer who got his start working for Canada’s famous Bell Northern Research labs — decided to just put together his own, and what became Nuzzel was born. Users log in with their Twitter and/or Facebook profiles and the system’s algorithms go through a user’s activity streams and pull out the news articles that have been shared or recommended by the most number of followers. The service also uses these semantic signals to generate recommended content that hasn’t been explicitly shared by anyone in a user’s social graph.

In my initial use of the service, it came up with some good recommendations and some popular articles, and the site is well-designed and moves quickly — both of which are impressive, considering Abrams has no employees whatsoever, and put the entire site together himself. Users can filter the articles by time or by the number of friends who have shared them, and each post or article or piece of content comes with related tweets below it, any of which can be retweeted or interacted with. The most obvious use case for Nuzzel is the one that the tagline at the top of the service’s home page describes: “News You May Have Missed” — in other words, a catch-up tool for those who don’t have time to read everything.

The market for social-news filters is super-saturated

Abrams is right that this is a market that needs serving, but the challenge is that there are plenty of others already doing so: there are “personalized newspaper” services like Paper.li, apps like News360, Pulse or Zite, and even a service from the grandpa of social recommendations: namely, Digg, which was acquired by New York-based incubator Betaworks and merged with its News.me news-filtering app. Twitter has a stake in this particular game as well, after acquiring Summify, and there are newer dedicated filtering services like Nova Spivack’s Bottlenose and a startup called Prismatic.

The Friendster founder says that he doesn’t want to take the route that some others have taken by trying to make the system too complicated — he says that he isn’t interested in “having it become some kind of PhD thesis in machine learning,” but simply wants to solve a problem for users in as simple a way as possible. And he says he hasn’t tried many of his competitors, apart from News.me (which he says he liked in many ways). “I’m just really focused on my vision, which I think is a little different,” he said, adding that he is hoping to raise some seed financing so he can hire some staff.

The problem for Nuzzel, however, is that while Abrams may think his vision is a little different, the service itself looks very similar to about half a dozen other apps and services that do fundamentally the same thing, and in some cases have had months or even years to develop a following. That’s going to be a difficult thing to overcome, even for the founder of the world’s first social network.

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We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

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Diagram from a Friendster patent covering user compatibility scoring in a social network

The Friendster patents, which date back to the early days of social networking, are incredibly broad. They cover things like making connections on a social network, friend-of-a-friend connections through a social graph, and social media sharing. Friendster had received its first patent back in 2006, when it was already on the decline. At the time, Friendster President Kent Lindstrom told me the company had nearly forgotten it had ever applied for the patents, but added that “We’ll do what we can to protect our intellectual property.” From then on, Friendster frequently mentioned its patents as an asset, but to the best of our knowledge it never actually tried to enforce them.

At $40 million, the Friendster patents are one of Facebook’s largest acquisitions ever, on par with its FriendFeed deal. However, that money is trivial if there’s any chance MOL or someone else would have used the patents against Facebook. Especially with an IPO somewhere in its future, it was important that Facebook remove any shadow of a doubt that someone else had the rights to the intellectual property behind its core technology.

While MOL’s Friendster buy might not be the hottest property ever — the social network’s strongholds in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are quickly being conquered by Facebook if they haven’t been already — the patent deal made MOL its cash back in the span of months.

It’s unlikely that Facebook would use the patents against other companies in the space rather than trying to out-compete them, though it now has the option to wield intellectual property as a weapon. There’s a historical reference for taking patents out of the market; the Six Degrees of Separation patent, obtained by the eponymous failed social networking startup, was bought at auction in 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus — in part to keep it away from Friendster, the market leader at the time.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Big plans for Friendster include crossover promotions with Mol principal shareholder Tan Sri Vincent Tan of Berjaya Corporation Berhad, which owns Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Borders, Krispy Kreme, Wendy’s and Papa John’s Pizza franchises in Southeast Asia. Friendster had raised $45 million, has obtained five U.S. social networking patents, and is expected to help bring Mol $110 million in annual revenue, according to remarks made at a press conference announcing the deal.

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Friendster, which says it has 115 million members, has been openly shopping itself around. A potential buyer, according to Reuters, is China’s Tencent. Facebook was also interested but reportedly “was turned down due to competition and intellectual property issues.” One of Friendster’s claims to fame in recent years has been receiving five patents for its early work on social networking. The company has made rumblings about enforcing the patents, but is not currently involved in any lawsuits related to them, according to public records.

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ComScore’s tracking methods are debated (see also Techcrunch: “The Widget Kings” and GigaOM: “ComScore Widget Metrix, more like a Jellybean Contest”), but clearly widgets offer an opportunity to create a positive brand experience. Take a moment to review comScore’s latest rankings of the most-viewed widgets (released in January):

Now, what can you do to make sure your widget has the best chance of success? I have some pointers…

10 Tips for Using Widgets (Well!) to Build your Brand
1) Make your widget engaging. Successful widgets let the user DO something. Beyond bling, they facilitate some social action on the part of the user – picture sharing, sharing of tastes in music, sharing a contest or poll – anything and everything social.

2) Use flexible formats. Offer your widget as a square, a rectangle, in various colors, sizes and shapes to appeal to the personalization desires and expectations of social media users.

3) Don’t Hesitate. Deploy your widgets fast and often. The best way to garner traffic and engage site visitors is to be one of the early developers and deployers of a widget. Being an early adopter lets you leverage the loudest phase of word-of-mouth.

4) Don’t be a one-trick pony. Have new widgets ready to follow. A single look/feel/function for a widget will wear out its welcome after a time. So plan follow-on widgets or upgraded functionality to expand upon the widget’s initial capabilities without forcing the user to change code. Make your widget part of a larger campaign, not a static event.

5) Maximize Adoption. Let visitors to your widget’s users pages also adopt the widget without registration barriers. A “best of” widget works well in this capacity (aggregating the most interesting from your widget user base for others to showcase on their pages).

6) Keep it Simple. Make the code for the widget so easy to copy and integrate that your baby brother could do it. Offer rewards or incentives for people to pass it on.

7) Promote, Promote Promote! Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. You have to actively promote widgets in order to increase findability and shareability. This involves a little marketing for the marketing.

8) Make sure it works! This sounds obvious, but all of us have had the experience of inserting code that doesn’t work. Few things bug Internet users more than taking the time to install something on their site only to have it show up as a blank box, cause problems they didn’t have before, or just plain not work as described. Test your code in various environments and within as many types of social media sites as possible before offering it to users.

9) Push the envelope. Go beyond the normal boundaries of what’s possible within the widget and also how it connects and enhances any given social graph. Connect your brand and value proposition to your customers’ areas of interest and enable something they couldn’t do before. Or improve something your customers are already doing enhance their online or offline experience.

10) Manage and cultivate the existing community. Killer widgets aren’t introduced and then forgotten about. There’s a sense of community building that needs to take place in order to keep people active — and also increase the buzz factor of word of mouth marketing.

* Widget Definitions (from comScore):The current universe of widgets is defined as embedded Shockwave Flash objects, certain JavaScript objects, and Facebook applications. The comScore Widget Metrix service will evolve in its tracking of widget file types as the market dynamics and content delivery systems change. The report currently focuses on the individual widgets, and not the platforms that deliver them. Desktop widgets are not included in the reporting.

Mike Jones is the CEO and cofounder of Userplane, a premier provider of communication software for online communities such as MySpace, Friendster and eHarmony.

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1) Territorialize but don’t Monopolize the limited resource at the
event — the fairer sex. Tease, but do not “hotbox.”

2) Be a Vacation. (I’ve used this one before, but it’s worth repeating.) Humor and a snipett of self deprecating humor go a long way in building charm. Don’t just be a pleasure to work with, be their vacation. I attended a comedy showcase Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman, did and it helps him be a vacation for people when he uses humor.

3) Rebrand Yourself. I’d get nowhere in life if I were Lawrence. But goofy friendly ‘Larry’ is approachable. Larry-licous is over the top but Fergilicious is, cha-chiang!, cash money.

4) Never ask point-blank Yes/No pre-qual questions. It shows a lack of profiling ability. Don’ts: “So are you a member?” or “Did you study at HBS?”
Dos: “Have I seen you @ similar industry events” or “Did you go to school in the boston area?”

5) DDSS. The “DD” stands for “dumb it down.” “SS” is “sandbagging for success.” Sandbag your elevator pitch and sell. Again, incorporate humor. My rule of thumb is that I want to make the message on what I do easy enough for a multi-tasking, C-level ‘hitter’ to recite it back to me, even after he’s had 6 vodka tonics. If you can’t do this, your message stinks.

6) No broken branch friends. Some people you know won’t or can’t introduce you. A broken branch is a person who doesn’t introduce you (ever). I stole this from my side project, theDatingReport.com where some relationships get in a year and you still don’t know who their friends are.

7) Be a Weed. Weeds grow and foster entire impromptu communities. Friendship with you is like a gateway drug. Be the one that gets added via Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, MySpace, Ryze. (I say MySpace twice cuz its the biggest.)

8) Work the Room’s Fringes. a) Wallflowers can be broken branches but could be an “amiable ambush”- another dude looking to charm you.

9) Anoint an Alpha Male. Better than being one, pick out a gamma male, a rising star, and make him alpha. Defer to him when the pack is trying to choose, listen when he’s on a soapbox, let him have first pick and make positive fun of his sandbagging whenever possible.

10) Run the Point. Point guards don’t score (plus who wants to score
in a room full of dudes). Good point guards pass, meaning they set aside
their own agenda (shy, sausage-ing, turtling) and make intros.

11) Invite People to a Post Party. Do the math. The event goes from 7pm to 9pm and they had passed apps. Translation: People are still hungry. Get your host, the VIPs and or your crew to a nearby eatery. Key tip: hosts and organizer won’t eat until 30-40 min after event ends. Or be a Larry Chiang and order Chicago Deep Dish from Patxi’s and just hand it out to keep the night going.

12) Encourage fake thinking. Get a person to think they’re thinking and they love you. Get them to really think and they’ll hate you.
* BONUS MAN CHARM TIP
13) Pin-The-Tail-on-the-Donkey. Nothing rallies a crew of men better than an alpha of the night who IDs a donkey. A donkey is party dufus that is borderline malicious. For example, at last fall’s TechCrunch 40, a VC said to me after I ddss duck9, “How dumb, that will never work”. I pointed three fingers up in the air (entrepreneur gang symbol/ signal) and emoted daggers toward ‘donkey’. Fast forward 20 minutes and there’s a full business card stomp, circle
dance. It was native. Next week I post a Yelp review of said donkey’s VC firm and buy $3,000 of inbound links. Sha-zam! Google search result #3 for firm name is my yelp poke in the eye. Donkey-ify for fun and community building.

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