Sometimes I feel sorry for VCs. It's not easy to come up with ways to invest your fund that sound at least halfway coherent. These guys have clearly run out o

Sometimes I feel sorry for VCs. It's not easy to come up with ways to invest your fund that sound at least halfway coherent. These guys have clearly run out of ideas. The mistake people make is conflating the ideas of a social network and a social networking site. The former is simply an awareness of who and what you like, and it's hugely useful to almost any sort of application. The latter is a site that makes use of that information, with Facebook being the most prominent example. The option for a company building a social app is simple. Build it on your own site, with its own interface, and tie into social information from all of a user's sites; or build it on Facebook, with Facebook's interface, and only use the user information that lives on Facebook. Why on earth would someone choose the latter? Facebook is great, but the hype is a little bit silly. For instance, Digg and Delicious both made Facebook apps. They average less than 175 users a day.