Problem
People use people they know to filter information all the time ("word of mouth") but using them manually seems very inefficient
Hunch
You could should be able to systematically make use of your social network to do a range of activities online (seems obvious now but the term “social networking” was not even used when we started this)
Crunch
Social networking platform that allowed third parties to develop applications on top of one social network. Dating website FriendlyConnections.net and Jobs site RealContacts.com were the first applications
Munch
The aim was to create a stand alone company selling services and ad to consumers but ending up licensing the technology instead
the story so far
The hunches for this came from reflecting on what worked and what didn't about the GlobalBrain opportunity. A remarkable amount of things happened through networks of contacts and it got us thinking about how we use social networks for a wide range of activities (the term social networking was not actually used back then). It also got us thinking about how you could use the Internet to create a series of applications built on top of your social network. We failed on the execution of this for a number of reasons; including our assumption that people care about privacy when it turns out they really don't. Company still had a successful exit when it was acquired by Intel.