True, no one asked me. But here's my two cents anyway. Twitter should open up its platform to advertising. That's right, advertising. Forget all this hoo-ha over selling data or paid business accounts or dashboards . . . Twitter has everything it needs to build a wildly-successful ad driven business model. It should get on with it.

The two hallmarks of successful advertising-driven businesses are 1) massive scale and 2) abundant context. How has MySpace built such strong advertising revenue atop their social media platform? Huge scale and a ton of context. Same is true of Facebook and Yahoo and Six Apart. And, of course, the mother of all ad supported businesses -- Google -- is all about scale and context.

Twitter's scale has been well documented. Huge and growing. Does the fact that much of the Twitter traffic exists on third party clients make in-stream advertising less practicable? I don't think so. I think it actually solves the problem of how Twitter will be able to monetize its off-platform traffic. Third party apps can choose to present ads along with the rest of the stream or pay a fee to receive advertisement-free data.

As with each of the social media platforms listed above, Twitter's unique experience will require a unique ad format. In this instance, I think the format is pretty easy to envision. Twitter should constrain advertisements on its system to 140 characters or fewer. By doing so, Twitter ads will be pretty spartan. But if Google ads have taught us anything, it is clear that a relatively small number of characters and a link are more that sufficient to engage a consumer. Moreover, by matching the ad format to that of a tweet, the ads will not only fit well with the consumption behavior on Twitter.com, it will also work well with the many third party experiences enabled by Twitter's API. Twitter need only create some visual distinction between tweets and ads and it can very simply insert the ads in the tween stream, as can Tweet Deck and Siesmic and Tweety and StockTweets . . . .

What about context on Twitter? Huge and growing. The very data others have suggested Twitter should sell to third parties is invaluable to create the necessary context for a successful advertising model. Not only will Twitter know the things about which any given user is tweeting, it will also know who that user is following and the things about which they are tweeting. That's a huge amount of context for advertisers. I'm guessing Toyota would love to advertise to an individual who tweets about shopping for a new Honda Hybrid. And they are likely just as eager to advertise to an individual who follows numerous eco-tweeters. It is easy enough to envision a self-serve platform that allows a huge range of advertisers to bid for context and get great results.

The best thing about context-driven advertisements is that, when well-executed, they can be viewed by consumers as content, not just advertising. Look at Google's ads as case in point. It has been a long time since I've heard even a hint of objection to advertisements on Google. Why? Because the ads are often more compelling than the organic search results they appear beside. True, Twitter ads won't be a response to a query like in Google. But there should be more than enough signal for businesses to get great results advertising on the platform.

Finally, I think that users would embrace Twitter ads. We all recognize that Twitter needs a business model and we all want a long-term sustainable platform. If executed well (watch out for those lurking privacy trolls!), Twitter ads would become a natural part of the Twitter experience and add value, not take away from it. Better yet, we could all stop speculating about Twitter's business model and move on to more interesting discussions about things like the transformative impact of the real time web. So do us a favor Twitter and start serving ads already. I, for one, look forward to it.

Today TechCrunch posted a list of the "Top VC Blogs (According to Google Reader)." I was very pleased to find out that I came in at number three, sandwiched between Fred Wilson and Brad Feld. But I have to admit, the ranking makes me feel a little guilty. Not because I don't think there's good content on VentureBlog (after six years of blogging, there must be some good stuff in there somewhere). But because I really don't blog enough. Every couple of weeks or so, something jumps out at me that demands a blog post. In stark contrast, Fred and Brad post all the time. I have huge respect for them for that. And not just because of the quantity, but because they post great quality stuff day in and day out. So my hat is off Fred and Brad, who are the rightful owners of the top two VC blog spots without any questions.

The challenges posed by trying to maintain an active blog are only further exacerbated by the incredible proliferation of "media channels" these days. I don't mean professional media channels. I mean user-controlled media channels. Blogs. Podcasts. Twitter updates. Facebook and LinkedIn status messages. YouTube channels. Etc. The list is daunting. Yet anyone who takes seriously the idea of communicating directly with his or her "customers" really can't ignore the opportunities posed by each and every one of these channels.

What's more, each of these media channels serves a different purpose. Podcasting can not replace blogging, which can not replace tweeting. A jogger isn't going to read my blog while taking a morning run, but may well listen to VentureCast. An entrepreneur trying to quickly get up to speed on the state of Venture Capital is not likely to listen through 30 hours of VentureCast, but could easily browse through VentureBlog for relevant content. And anyone foolish enough to care what I'm doing on a day to day basis will not likely find that out on VentureBlog or VentureCast, but could certainly subscribe to my Twitter feed and get the latest and "greatest."

The more I think about the relevance of each of these media channels, the more I realize that it is important for me to engage on each and every one of them. To that end, I have recently revived VentureCast -- now with my partner Howard Hartenbaum. We intend to record a new show about twice a month. The first two we've recorded are already available on iTunes, so check it out. It also means that I need to share more thoughts on entrepreneurship and Venture Capital on Twitter, which I will surely continue to do. And, of course, it means that I need to blog about the world of Venture Capital more frequently. If nothing else, this post is a good start.

Just yesterday I had breakfast with Rene Lacerte, the founder of PayCycle, and we discussed the power of great customer service. When Rene first pitched me on the idea of PayCycle, the service was not yet built. Nonetheless, he was already discussing how he would integrate the customer support experience into the overall service offering. He rightfully pointed out that every change you make to an online service will have implications for the customer support team -- whether it is training, navigation, speed to resolution, etc. So from its inception, PayCycle's product management and customer support went hand in hand. Rene is now building his second customer-focused service called Bill.com and it too has been built from the bottom up with customer support in mind.

As we ate breakfast yesterday, Rene and I had a long discussion about the fact that despite being called Software as a Service, very few SaaS organizations put any emphasis on the "service" piece. Sure, you could argue that the "service" in SaaS is all about delivery and not about customer support. But that would be a mistake. Service businesses live and die based upon the satisfaction of their customers. While it is conceivable that your software could be sufficiently foolproof that customer support is limited to receiving "thank you"s from your happy customers, so far no one has quite found that Holy Grail. Customer support remains a significant piece of all SaaS organizations and the more a company recognizes that going into building their service, the more likely they will succeed.

So what does that have to do with the Rosewood Hotel? I was reminded of the importance of customer service this morning as I experienced the Rosewood Hotel's stunning disregard for their customers. For those of you who have not yet been to the Rosewood Hotel (and I would not recommend that you go), it is the new "high-end" hotel that was just built on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. For those of us parked in VC-land here on Sand Hill Road, it was a welcomed new place for breakfasts and lunches and, in fact, I have eaten breakfast there 12 times in the little over a month that it has been open. But never again. (Warning: herein begins a rant -- a well-deserved rant, but a rant nonetheless.)

Three weeks ago, when parking for breakfast, I was surprised to see broken glass in one of the parking spaces. As I left breakfast, I pointed the glass out to a maintenance person driving his golf cart by. I assumed it would be cleaned up. Two weeks later, the glass had still not been picked up, so when the manager of the Madera restaurant came by to say hello to me (after all, I was there every other day), I pointed out to him that there was broken glass in the parking lot that had not been picked up despite the fact that I had pointed it out two weeks earlier. The restaurant manager apologized and assured me that it would be picked up. To my shock, it was not. Undaunted, I figured I'd give it a third try. Two days ago, on my way to an event in a conference room in the hotel, I asked to speak to the hotel manager. A nice young man named Daniel came to talk with me and I recounted my tale of woes. I explained to him that while the glass hadn't particularly inconvenience me, that I thought it didn't reflect well on his hotel and that he might want to take care of it. He assured me that it would be cleaned up by the next time I visited, which I told him would be two days later.

I must say I was surprised to see the glass still there two hours later when I got out of my meeting, but I figured I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that it would be picked up by my breakfast on Friday (today). I was wrong. To my horror, as I drove up to breakfast this morning, the glass was still there. Was I cut by the glass? No. Did I get a flat tire from the glass? No. So why do I care? Because I think that customer service matters. I think that if you care about your customers, you should do more than pretend to listen to them. So rather than park, I drove up to the front of the hotel and explained to them (amidst a fair amount of swearing) why it was that I would not be eating breakfast there any more. The same manager, Daniel, was there and fell on his sword, taking full responsibility for the incident. But as far as I am concerned, it is too little too late. Such blatant disregard for your customers maybe deserves a second chance. And, if you are feeing extremely generous, a third change (particularly when the restaurant is so convenient). But not a fourth chance. So I guess I'm heading back to Il Fornaio for breakfast.

Customer service matters. And it matters more than ever in this age of blogs, and Facebook and Twitter. If you search for PayCycle, you'll find a whole lot of happy customers. And if you search for Rosewood Hotel, I'm guessing you'll see a whole lot of dissatisfied customers. You'll certainly find me there.

Update: Shortly after I posted this rant about the Rosewood Hotel, I got a call from Managing Director of the hotel. Through the power of blogging, twitter and facebook, the Rosewood's MD had read my complaint moments after I had posted it and promptly called a staff meeting to address the situation. He then came over to my office to offer up his apologies for what had happened and his commitment to make customer service a priority of the hotel. While I wish it had not escalated to the point of needing such attention, I certainly appreciate that the hotel's MD took it seriously enough to come to my office and have the discussion.

A short time ago I wrote about my investment in Aardvark. As I said in that post, I believe that in many ways search is broken and getting worse. Not only are there voracious efforts at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) throughout the Web, but the scale of the Internet is monumental today and getting larger by leaps and bounds virtually every minute.

The massive scale of the Web not only creates huge challenges for search, it also cripples discovery. Gone are the good old days in which fortuity would lead to the unearthing of interesting new Websites. Remember when Web directors would lead you to great sites on the topic of your choice (you may not recall but, in the early days, "Yahoo" stood for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" and Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo's chief of ontology, was one of the most powerful people on the Web). Better yet, remember the good old days of browsing libraries -- the Dewey Decimal System created the propensity for discovering new and interesting books as a result of their being shelved next to related categories -- while looking at one book, other books in its general vicinity would likely pique your interest.

That sort of accidental discovery was driven out of the Web a long time ago. The only sorts of chance Internet encounters most of us have these days are a result of mistyped URLs -- not exactly a recipe for exciting new discoveries. Thankfully, one company has made it their mission to bring back discovery to the Web. StumbleUpon delivers nearly half a billion recommendations per month. Those recommendations can be across broad categories (e.g., photography, video, etc.) or in very focused niches (e.g., electric violins, VC blogs, Alice in Wonderland, etc.). The StumbleUpon experience brings the unforeseen and unexpected back to your browser. I like to think of StumbleUpon as a discovery engine bringing fortuity back to the Web.

Enthralled by what StumbleUpon was doing, a couple years ago I began chatting with the founders about their business. The more I learned, the more excited I got about the prospects for assisted discovery at StumbleUpon. But before I had an opportunity to propose financing the company, it was purchased by Ebay.

Nonetheless, I've stayed in touch with Garrett and Geoff and continued to talk with them about the power of StumbleUpon. So when they began discussing the possibility of spinning StumbleUpon out of Ebay, I was grateful to have the conversation. The need for discovery on the web has not gone away since Ebay bought StumbleUpon. To the contrary, the problem has continued to grow more acute. And StumbleUpon continues to be the best solution to the problem. Over 7.5 Million registered members discover, categorize and review Web pages, making StumbleUpon the Internet's most powerful recommendation engine.

I am thrilled to join the original StumbleUpon team in spinning the company out of Ebay. Along with Garrett and Geoff, Ram Shriram is reinvesting in the company and going back on the board. The primary financial backers of the spinout will be August Capital and Accel Partners and Sameer Gandhi and I will go on the board as well. I look forward to working with Garrett, Geoff, Ram and Sameer to continuing to build StumbleUpon into a large and important piece of the Web's infrastructure.

Over the course of the many weeks of on-again, off-again MicroHoo madness, I did a fair bit of pontificating and speculating of my own about the would-be deal. After all, it was THE Bay Area topic of conversation (for one brief moment we all put our Facebook speculation on hold -- I am so pleased that we can get back to speculating about Facebook now and, better yet, speculating about MicroBook, or is it FaceSoft?).

Many of the MicroHoo conversations I had centered around the combined assets of Microsoft and Yahoo. What could the two companies, in combination, bring to bear upon the Internet landscape? And while the press largely liked to discuss the impact a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would have on the search market, to my mind that was not the biggest advantage of the combination. From where I sit, the greatest combined asset of Microsoft and Yahoo would be their vast social graph data. Farmed properly, MicroHoo could have enabled a stunningly powerful social network using nothing more than the fumes of their existing services.

To see the power of Microsoft's and Yahoo's social data, one need look no further than the first visit to virtually every social service. The first thing you are asked to do in the registration process is to give your login data for Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc. Why? Because each new social experience on the Web needs to recreate your social graph and the best way to jump start that process is to use the social graph data you already have stored in your existing communications services.

What if MicroHoo were to simply farm the social data contained in all of its current social services? Step one, implement a unified login across all MicroHoo services. I must say that this is one thing that Yahoo has gotten right from the very beginning (and Google has been a fast follower). Since its inception, Yahoo has viewed the customer experience as a unified one across all of its properties. And with each of its acquisitions, job number one has been to unify the login experience. Thus, Yahoo knows that "davidhornik" on Yahoo Mail is the same as "davidhornik" on Flickr is the same as "davidhornik" on MyYahoo. What if MicroHoo also knew that it was the same as "davidhornik" on Microsoft Messenger and as "davidhornik" on Hotmail? In fact, MicroHoo could know that I am the same "davidhornik" on:

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Messenger

Flickr

Delicious

Upcoming

Hotmail

Windows Live Messenger

Xbox Live

etc.

Every one of these services contains data from which MicroHoo could have created a social graph an order of magnitude larger than MySpace or Facebook. Add on top of that social data compelling personalized experiences drawn from the likes of MyYahoo, Yahoo Finance, Zune.net, etc. and you've got the makings of a pretty powerful social experience.

So why haven't Yahoo and Microsoft done this on their own, let alone in combination? That's a great question. If I were in charge, it is where I would start. As all experiences on the Web increasingly are informed by social relationships, the long term winners will be the players who can bring the most social data to bear on their services. What's more, as can be seen in the recent announcements by MySpace, Facebook and Google, the ability to own that social graph and make it available for use by third-party services will prove invaluable. While Google has relatively little to offer in terms of existing social data, both Yahoo and Microsoft sit on treasure troves of data (as does AOL for that matter) that would allow them to legitimately compete with MySpace and Facebook as the Social Graph of Record for the rest of the Web.

Not that it would be easy for Microsoft or Yahoo to create a social network from whole cloth. I know it wouldn't. (Just look at Yahoo 360.) But the prize is well worth the effort. Consider the millions of people who have yet to join any social network. While Yahoo and Microsoft may not be the likely starting point for Millennials, it strikes me as a very natural place for the rest of the Web to discover and embrace social networking. Similarly, Microsoft and/or Yahoo seem the natural repositories of the social graph of record for the rest of the Web. If MicroHoo is ever reborn, the big opportunity for the combined companies is to create the social network for everyone else (and the social graph for everything else). In the mean time, Jerry and Steve, if you are listening, you probably should get working on it independently. My guess is that your future in the Web depends upon it.

It appears that Shameless Self-Promotion Week has become Shameless Self-Promotion Month. Not that I am promoting any more companies than I had originally planned. I am still only talking about those businesses in which I have invested on behalf of August Capital. But, it turns out, it takes more time than I had anticipated to sing the praises of such a fantastic group of companies.

Just this past Friday, Craig Syverson and I recorded the latest installment of VentureCast at University Cafe in downtown Palo Alto. I had recently been discussing with a friend the fact that University Cafe has very much become a part of the startup economy again. Folks like Rajeev Motwani and Ron Conway spend a fair bit of time meeting with companies at University Cafe. Practically any time you're there you can look around a see deals getting done. In fact, shortly before Craig and I started recording VentureCast, the guys at the table next to ours were banging out the details of some sort of financing. Unfortunately, they had finished their negotiations before we started recording, or we might have captured the blow by blow on tape.

A couple years ago I was meeting with an executive from one of my portfolio companies at University Cafe. While we were talking, Rajeev wandered by and told me to come say "hi" before I headed out. Rajeev was talking with a smart group of guys about their new company in the local advertising space. Those folks were the founding team from DoneRight (at the time called Perform Local). I was intrigued by their business, impressed with the team, and a short time later I ended up funding their company.

The CEO of DoneRight was -- and is -- Paul Ryan. Paul is a phenomenal technologist. He had most recently been the CTO at Overture and, thus, had been part of the team that had pioneered the very concept of pay for performance. The idea at DoneRight was to create a pay for performance local advertising network that would allow local service providers to purchase valuable leads through DoneRight. By aggregating demand through on and off-line lead generation techniques, service providers could use DoneRight as their marketing arm, paying only for the leads they received. On behalf of the consumer, DoneRight would screen service providers for professional licenses, BBB complaints and the like, and only accept professionals onto the service that DoneRight was comfortable guarantying. Given this data-intensive, data-driven service, there was no one better to build DoneRight than Paul.

Because local services are . . . well . . . local, DoneRight has been rolling out their network on a city by city basis. With each new city, DoneRight gains more insight into how best to provide consumers with the information they need to make informed buying decisions, while providing service professionals with the channel they need to scale their businesses. The service launched in San Diego, and has rolled out to Denver, Chicago, Houston and Dallas over the course of this year. In 2008, DoneRight will expand considerably, using what they've learned in their first five metropolitan areas to optimize the DoneRight experience on a nationwide basis. To date, over 1,000 home improvement professionals have entered into prepaid performance agreements with DoneRight. While other online services have failed to gain meaningful sales traction with local businesses, DoneRight has been able to sign up its first thousand paying customers in record time, because it is providing real, measurable results for its business customers -- In the short time that it has been doing business in these few metropolitan areas, DoneRight has processed nearly 500,000 consumer requests for referral to a DoneRight certified service professional. And that number will scale dramatically as DoneRight expands nationwide.

DoneRight is another business in which I invested because of my love of data. Ultimately, the lead generation business is a numbers game. How much does it cost to acquire a lead? What will a service provider pay for it? Does it scale? Those were the questions that needed answering. And given Paul Ryan's background, I invested, confident that Paul would be able to produce the necessary infrastructure to answer those questions and create a scalable business. And he has. Better yet, as Paul and the company learn more about lead generation on a local level, they are able to apply that knowledge to each of their metropolitan areas, making each city more efficient and the overall business decidedly more profitable. If you live in San Diego, Denver, Chicago, Houston or Dallas and are looking for a guaranteed service professional, DoneRight.com is the place to go. And if you are living elsewhere, stay tuned. DoneRight will be coming to your neighborhood soon.

While I'm talking about user statistics, I might as well talk about VideoEgg. When I first started meeting with the team from VideoEgg, they had all but no traffic. They had a fantastic video upload tool. Their solution was really elegant. But they were serving thousands of videos at best. The discussion within my partnership was about the degree to which they could compete in a market that was dominated by YouTube and a group of fast followers. Nonetheless, I was really impressed with the team and was excited to see how we might be able to put the VideoEgg software and service to good use.

Having determined that creating another video destination site was tantamount to suicide, the VidoeEgg team decided to partner with various services across the web to provide them with the necessary infrastructure to ingest, manage and serve video onto their respective sites. Because the VideoEgg technology and business proposition were so compelling, they quickly signed up a large number of partners, including: Bebo, hi5, Piczo, Consumating, Current TV, Flixster, AOL, Glam.com, Military.com, BlackPlanet, MyYearbook, ringo, Tagged, AsianAve, theU.com, Dogster, MiGente and many more. The results have been staggering.

In the month of June, VideoEgg will serve in the vicinity of 25 million videos per day or nearly three quarters of a billion videos per month. Those videos will be watched by approximately 23 million unique visitors, a number which is growing by 15% month over month. If that trend continues, VideoEgg will serve about 53 million unique visitors by years end. What's more, VideoEgg is able to leverage the distribution across its network to promote original content. For example, in partnership with Motorola, VideoEgg will stream more than 14 million views of The Burg throughout the VideoEgg network. As the network continues to grow, the opportunity to act as a meaningful channel for original content will grow as well. Which is precisely why I view VideoEgg as a next generation television network.

I was just asked today on a panel if I thought that the market for online video was approaching saturation and my answer was an emphatic "no." I am not predicting the demise of television in the near term by any means. But I am predicting exponential growth in online video as the next generation of media consumers spends an increasingly large percentage of their time online. And I anticipate that VideoEgg will play an important role in that media evolution.

A lot has been said about Six Apart in the past, including by me. I have never been shy about making clear my love of MovableType (VentureBlog), TypePad (SaysMe) and Vox (Hornik, Hornik and More Hornik). I use each of Six Apart's platforms, which makes me an investor, a customer and an evangelist.

But what hasn't been said about Six Apart to date? Perhaps what hasn't been said is that when it comes to web traffic Six Apart is HUGE. According to Comscore, Six Apart's hosted properties (TypePad, Blogs, LiveJournal, Vox, etc.) put Six Apart in the 50 most trafficked sites on the Web. Six Apart has approximately 39 Million unique visitors a month and growing. Six Apart served just over 600 Million world-wide page views in April, of which over a quarter of a billion page views came from the United States alone. And those page views do not even include the massive traffic of the innumerable branded sites that live on Six Apart's hosted platforms, including TheSuperficial, SocialiteLife, Gothamist, BoingBoing, HuffingtonPost, AskDaveTaylor, TreeHugger, ZDNet Blogs, Celebrity-Babies, CuteOverload, Kottke, CoolHunting, and thousands more.

Where are all those page views coming from? There are nearly 20 Million Six Apart bloggers across the various platforms. In the US, they are posting on LiveJournal, TypePad, Vox.... Internationally, they are posting on Friendster, Nifty, NTT.... On nearly any topic on the planet that one might search, there will be results hosted by Six Apart. The number of bloggers is constantly growing, the number of pages is constantly growing, the number of page views is constantly growing. The power of blogging!

On top of that, there are hundreds of thousands of users of MovableType, which represent innumerable millions of page views which Six Apart does not host and does not track. MovableType is the predominant platform for enterprise blogging. Many corporations use MovableType for external blogs, many more are using MovableType internally. While in no way comprehensive, check out this list of companies using MT for their own blogs: ABC, CMP Media Conde Nast, Gannett, Hearst, NBC Universal, NPR, Playboy, USA Today, Time, Walt Disney, Washington Post, Warner Brothers, FedEx, Interpublic, Ogilvy, Organic, UPS, Adobe, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, SAP, Symantec, Verizon, GE Heathcare, GE Medical Systems, Genetech, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, American Express, Deutsche Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank, Intuit, Standard & Poors, Wells Fargo, American Eagle Outfitters, American Girl, General Mills, L'Oreal, Mattel, Miller Brewing, Mike, P&G, Patagoinia, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, General Motors, Boeing, Lockheed, Brown, Columbia, MIT, NYU, Princeton, Yale.... And, of course, VentureBlog!

When I invested in Six Apart, I was excited about the incredibly broad applicability of Six Apart's technology. If anything, I've been surprised by just how broadly Six Apart's platforms have been applied. From Standard & Poors to Playboy to CuteOverload to BoingBoing to NPR to my mom's Vox blog, Six Apart has enabled a distributed media "empire" that is truly vast, and growing. It will be exciting to see how Six Apart continues to flourish in the coming years. I am thrilled to be a part of it.