To commemorate, here are my five favorite Renkoo Blog posts so far:

• Why the name Renkoo?
• Fontlove
• Renkoo Adium
• Scotchy scotchy scotch and Star Wars
• Enormous social prowess

Onward and upward!

(P.S. -- Props to K.C. who will be starting with the Flickr team on May 1... w00t!)

5. "You can probably stitch together our plan from the moves we've made, the acquisitions we've made, the products we've put out to market." [That plan: to try and make social search the next stage in the evolution of search engines.]

4. "Day zero was when Jerry and David [Filo and Yang, the founders of Yahoo] went into a dorm room in 1994 and decided they'd organise the web. What came around next was the automated phase that led to companies like AltaVista and Inktomi. The third phase was really the innovation that Google came up with, looking at the topology of the web - link structures, back linking." That was in 1998.

3. "In topology search, what you're really doing is conferring to webmasters the privilege of deciding what's important for everybody. They cast their votes on what's important by building links - and they do it in a way that smears it out for everybody, so we all get the same results. [The concept of personal search and social search] democratises that process, and says 'why should webmasters be the only authority we trust and confer that privilege to?'. Why can't I pick other authorities of trust, like for instance my friends? What is their opinion?"

2. "If you're trying to find the population of London, you don't need social search. But if you're trying to find a restaurant to eat at, a blog to read, or a plumber who's reputable - the kind of things you depend on the expertise of others to know - that's where the social search phenomenon comes in."

1."We are agents of change within the organization. We're here to cause trouble. It's largely about innovation, it's about disruption, it's about change. It's about kind of the mortar between the products. Yahoo Calendar, Yahoo Local, Yahoo Maps, Flickr - how can we knit all of those together to create some uber-applications that are extremely compelling and aren't really in the purview of any of one group to deliver?"

Uber-applications are a great idea. Increasingly-useful services will integrate existing services in new and interesting ways. At Renkoo we started slowly but we'll keep building and integrating and improving with every rollout.

Time Warner is serious about selling a stake in AOL, though it would clearly like us all to think otherwise. The company insists it has no plans to share the long-suffering property, saying it's certain it will someday fuel future growth in online ad revenue. But sources close to the company say it's been shopping the property like a house built on an Indian graveyard. Last month, Time Warner was said to be in talks with Microsoft about combining AOL and MSN, a relationship that almost certainly would have ended AOL's longstanding partnership with Google (see "Microsoft+AOL: Where is your God now?"). Today, sources close to the company say it's talking to Google and Comcast about a partnership that would see the two take a minority stake in AOL. People familiar with the discussions said talks between the companies only began last week and were at an early stage. No telling yet what will happen moving forward, although certainly Google has the will and need to push a deal like this through. AOL, after all, accounted for 11 percent of Google's $2.6 billion in revenue during the first half of this year. Perhaps equally important here is AOL's instant messaging network, which could prove quite a bargaining chip for Time Warner in the aftermath of yesterday's IM interoperability agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo (see "Microsoft adds Yahoo to growing buddy list"). Elegant as it is, Google Talk, Google's IM client, isn't exactly zooming to ubiquity. Were it to granted access to the AIM network and its 41.6 million subscribers, the company would surely see a nice uptick in usage and would gain a base for the telephony-over-IM battle we'll undoubtedly be seeing in the months ahead.

1. Will Microsoft buy AOL?
2. What's the future of AIM and Skype?
3. Is AOL the flop?
4. What's a better acronym than GAMY? How about YAMAFEGI -- Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, AOL, Fox Interactive, eBay, Google, Interactive Corp?
   

And then I got to thinking, what's in a startup name?

My favorite startup name ever has got to be Ludicorp. They just don't make 'em like that anymore.

When I see a list I often try to decide my favorite name of the bunch. For example, check out this list of Social Media Innovators at BlogOn later this month: Attensa, BlogBridge, Blogtronix, Cymfony, Eurekster, Flock, KnowNow, NewsGator, Pluck, Umbria, and Zoto, among others. KnowNow is my favorite name of that bunch, though I am a tad biased about that one.

It was with much interest that I watched 24hourlaundry change its name to Ning. (Go, Gina!!)

And now I'm noticing lots of startups changing their names. For what it's worth, I like wink's previous name better. (eBagle was funny.) I don't like the name RawSugar at all; hopefully they'll change their name. I think Eventful is a better name than its previous one, evdb. And I like the name Yahoo! Local Events a lot better than names like zvents and upcoming.org...

Sometimes the company will keep the name but launch additional products. I like the name JotSpot, and their new products JotSpot Live and JotTracker are nifty. JotSpot Live allows real-time changing of a collaborative web page that can be saved as a Word document, and JotSpot Tracker allows import of an Excel spreadsheet table into a collaborative web page. With these two products, JotSpot gets closer to the holy grail of a Web-based Office suite like the one Kottke talked about 18 months ago in his paragraph about Google Office. I like it hot.

Another company keeping its name but launching a new product is KnowNow, who later this week will launch at Web 2.0 will launch eLerts, a consumer Internet service that provides users with immediate notifications of new information posted to the Web. It reminds me of "Pointcast 2.0" -- with content from places like PubSub, Syndic8, and Yahoo!. Initial reaction seems quite favorable... is it me, or is the RSS industry heating up?

To finish the thought I started this post with, of the Magnificent Seven in the title of this post, my favorite name is still Flickr. But the other names have their charms, too. And I like how obnoxious their Evite for that party at Swig is:

While the big guys are giving away stress balls and business card holders, Flock, del.icio.us, Flickr, Odeo, Technorati, wink, and WordPress will be tending bar all night (read: free drinks!), tossing out t-shirts that were not made in sweatshops (seriously). Come by and have a drink at our VCs expense with some of the folks who are really shaking things up.

Beautiful.

Oh, and though it goes without saying, I'll of course say it anyway. Of all the startups in all the lands in Silicon Valley right now, my favorite company name is Renkoo. Though, again, I am a tad biased about that one. With extreme prejudice. ;)

I like to launch (products) early and often. That has become my mantra... [recalling Apple Computer and Madonna:] Nobody remembers the Sex Book or the Newton. Consumers remember your average over time. That philosophy frees you from fear.