You could tell that the people who worked on the first generation of social networking services were not members of the IM generation.

We were thinking, if we could be topical to whatever is going on right now that's cool, and show people behind-the-scenes content, it would be a great way to illustrate the idea and get mindshare. It's been amazingly successful. The thing we've noticed is people are incredibly impressed with what you can do with imeem. They aren't jaded like everyone in Silicon Valley. When they see what you can do with it, they say "Wow, this is way better than MySpace." That is their frame of reference.

Our tools are very powerful. It's almost like they're too powerful. If you give people this huge beautiful blank canvas, where do they start?

In social networking, there are the Yahoos and the MySpaces, and then there is a huge pack of companies that no one has heard of. I think we're officially in the middle now. It's been fun being in tiny startup mode, but I think we're graduating to real-business mode.

Our tools are very powerful. It's almost like they're too powerful. If you give people this huge beautiful blank canvas, where do they start?

Conceptually, I kind of like their point of view, but it doesn't seem useful to me. Then, I don't have a MySpace profile either.

Imeem has replicated, it appears, the functionality of Blogger, Flickr, a few other web services and, of course, IM. They apparently use a custom IM application to connect with the various IM services, which is going to mean getting people to switch from iChat, AIM, Trillian, etc. That may be the most challenging thing for them.

I'm skeptical of convergence as a rule, but perhaps it will appeal to people who'd rather not have to manage multiple logins and so forth, I don't know. To me, it seems like trying to be everything is a good way to do a lot of things poorly.