I am working on something similar. The project management tool is based on Bugzilla, and I have built real time chat software for Android, iOS, and Web app. I organize everything around a "project" and each group has strong focus to get the product to market. If you are looking for general socializing place, HN works well in that regard.

I am involved with a couple of active projects. They are games targeting Asia Pacific market. You can take a look, http://121.199.0.53/bz/about.cgi

It is not much a way to escape 9-5, more of a place where like-minded people get together and build something interesting. If it pays off financially, it is even better.

I am bringing artists and game deveoplers in a collaboration effort to develop games and apps. There are a couple of games under development. One of them is a sandbox game. We are hoping for investors once we have a demo ready. We are also looking at Kickstarter and a local incubator. But we are determined to ship the games to market.

If this is something you may be interested, please contact us.

The real cost is customer acquisition. If you can get that figured out, you have a winner. I am open to collaboration deal, and you can contact on IRC

http://www.digi-go.com/creativearmy

That is what great minds of business say about pivoting, especially in the early stage of business. Google didn't get into the ad selling business until they aquired AdSense. Now if I only can pivot some of my own ventures...

You actually have spoken to 1700+ artists? See if you could learn a few things about the market, and do a "pivot" as so many start ups have done. AirBNB started out selling air mattress...

I like the idea. What happened? Social graph was not as pervasive as now.. I think this idea has a chance... Act quick before FB makes it a feature into their website... Linkedin has similar feature with their endorsement from coworkers..

Or company won't spend as much as they used to get those "likes". Do pizza companies still give out free pizza to get users to become a fan of them?

The owner of a website can set whatever policies they please. But the users can vote with their feet. They can always move to other places with a set of more agreeable rules. Give it a couple of more years, you will see average joe will be able to manage their own websites, and they can host their pictures and writings on their own website, and grant access and set all sorts of privacy levels with their lists of friends of different levels. They will not need to join any social network. And they will have their full control of their "40 acres". Until then, they have to subject themselves to the restrictions of the site owner.

Someone will make a tool to make managing user's own digital asset and content so easy as to disrupt the current social network business model. We already see the trend with all the "cloud computing" thing...

I started a free classifieds website ( http://www.houseofnothing.com ) out of similar frustration, and with similar goal that I will place as little as possible restrictions on the content a user can post. I encourage my users to be tolerant and open-minded, and respect the freedom of expression of others. I even had the thought of placing it under public control. But I am not sure how that will work.

To the credit of the management, they did not fire him. He resigned. But the coworkers felt he was responsible personally. That makes a uneasy work environment.

That's not much to give credit for. They could certainly have done more to help him recover from this.

Interesting thought. I heard that Nordic countries like Fin, Swede.. make their government information public, not sure if they include salary information.. Transparency inspires trust. But in practice there is more to that.