Here’s a cool post from the founder of Blink.com, a failed but well-funded social bookmarking site from 1999. He talks about their past offering given the recent success of the del.icio.us social bookmarking service and their acquisition by Yahoo!.
He laments their mistakes, it’s rare to see someone be quite so open about their decisions:
“This post wasn’t meant as a defense of Blink or my own decisions while I was there. My intent was to show that product design matters. We had more money, more users, a five year head start, and some really, really smart people working on bookmarking in 1999. The bottom line is that we simply didn’t get it right.”
Following the entrepreneurship vein there’s an on-going series of light but good articles (first, second, third) over at 37signals on how to start a new web service by the UK blogger Ryan Carson of BD4D.