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Anybody who’s ever managed a project, whether online or off, knows how invaluable a Gantt chart can be.

For project managers looking for a Web-based alternative to the industry standard Microsoft Project for creating Gantt charts, one option might be Gantto, a Y Combinator-funded startup that recently went into private beta.

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Gantto offers an intuitive UI for building out and editing Gantt charts, from the most basic to the rather complex. To make things easy for those who have historically used Microsoft Project, Gantto allows you to import project files in XML format.

For those who aren’t familiar with them, Gannt charts are bar-based charts that break down a project’s timeline. They’ve been around for about a century, but it was only with the invention of the personal computer that it became easy to rapidly produce complex Gantt charts. Today, they’re an indispensable part of any project.

Project managers looking to take Gantto for a spin can sign up here.

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In May, Google announced a new Internet TV product called Google TV. As we noted at the time, the most interesting aspect of the announcement was the developer ecosystem that Google is introducing to television. Google TV will not just allow you to view television programs and online video content, it’ll also give you access to Internet TV applications built using Google’s mobile operating system Android.

Google is positioning itself as an Internet TV platform, despite not offering a hardware component like Apple TV and Microsoft Mediaroom. Instead, Google has partnered with electronics giant Sony on the hardware side. Google TV launches in the fall inside a new line of Sony TVs, so let’s look at what we can expect to see.

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In May, Sony announced a special television that will have Google TV integrated. Called the Sony Internet TV, it will be sold in Best Buy stores in the U.S. this fall. In announcing its alliance with Google, Sony noted that the two companies will also look "to establish new forms of cloud-based user experiences."

The partnership is very much a win-win. Google gets to launch its software on probably the most well known TV brand. Meanwhile Sony clearly hopes to get a jump on its hardware rivals, attempting to create the next generation of television on the back of Google’s platform.

Android Developer Platform For TV

As noted above, Google TV is built on the Android OS. It will also rely heavily on Google’s Chrome browser, which will be very similar to the computer version of Chrome.

The developer platform is the crucial part of Google TV. It shows that Google is serious about wanting to innovate and change the way television is consumed (and perhaps in turn produced). This quote from the Google Blog in May is key to understanding what Google is aiming for: "your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more."

When Google TV launches inside the new Sony TVs, Google will release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV. This will enable developers to build applications, which will then be distributed through Android Market from "early 2011." Already Google is working with selected partners, so expect to see initial application offerings in fall of this year.

Google’s developer website for Google TV is currently focused on how content providers should optimize for TV. The site both states the obvious ("content is king") and offers solid practical advice for Internet TV developers ("sound is now a viable interface element").

Clicker: The Type of App We Will See

So what kind of applications can we expect from Google TV? Perhaps an indicator of what’s to come is an app that we’ve reviewed on ReadWriteWeb several times: Clicker. Billed as a "TV Guide for the Internet" when it launched in November, Clicker is essentially a browser-based portal for your TV. Clicker enables you to search for online TV programs, subscribe to them, watch them inside the site, and more. It also has an iPhone app, but Clicker will really come into its own when used on the likes of Google TV.

Clicker was one of the feature third party apps at Google’s May I/O, where Google TV was announced. At the event, Clicker launched Clicker.tv – an HTML5-based interface for Clicker, optimized for the “10-foot viewing experience” on a TV. While this is not an example of an Android-based app (it’s basically an enhanced web site), Clicker will likely be one of the first third party apps off the block when Google TV apps become available in the Android Store in early 2011.

What other types of apps do you expect to be built off the Google TV platform?

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The powers behind craigslist.org appear to have decided that withdrawal is the best strategy to deal with recent controversy around the “adult services” section of the site.

Last week, craigslist shut down “adult services,” which normally features paid advertisments for sex. “Adult services” was recently the subject of legal threats from 18 states, but it looks like it was media coverage that drove the people behind craigslist underground. Craigslist has not responded to any media inquiries since the shutdown.

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A CNN primetime investigation that aired last month featured human rights advocates who accused craigslist of facilitating human sex trafficking and even prostitution of minors (see “Craigslist Under Fire for Kids on ‘Adult Services’”).

In the special, CNN’s Amber Lyon approached founder Craig Newmark after an event and asked him some accusatory questions about how the site polices its community. Newmark appeared very uncomfortable, at points was unable to answer. He ended up looking very bad.

<In the past, craigslist defended itself in public

In the days after the special, Newmark was friendly and very responsive to my emails. He cited “iPad Compulsive Disorder” when I thanked him for responding so quickly. The company also responded to the controversy fairly aggressively on its blog, responding directly to advocates quoted by CNN, outlining its manual screening policy, ripping apart the claim that eBay classifieds (proposed as an alternative to craigslist) are “family-friendly.” CEO Jim Buckmaster even posted a letter accusing Lyon of sensationalism and self-promotion.

The CNN story that put founder Newmark in an unfavorable spotlight.

Newmark also published an op-ed, “What I Should Have Said to CNN’s Amber Lyon,” defending himself. He cites his tendency toward Asperger’s Syndrome, a disorder on the autistic spectrum, and the fact that he has not been at the helm of craigslist for 10 years.

Now, silence from craigslist

But the media has not gotten a peep from craigslist since the “adult services” blackout. “Sorry, no statement,” spokeswoman Susan MacTavish Best said when the New York Times asked about the blackout. IPad-compulsive Newmark has not responded to me in three days. Asked via Twitter to do an interview and “talk about anything you like,” Newmark responded “not soon.”

Meanwhile, the media continue to cover the story, and not in the best light. “Some See a Ploy as Craigslist Blocks Sex Ads,” the New York Times wrote. Lyon accused Newmark of lying in a follow-up segment on CNN.

The law is on craigslist’s side – websites are not liable for content posted by users under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But craigslist has given up anyway. It’s not because its owners want to prevent sex trafficking – craigslist has maintained that it does more harm than good because law enforcement agencies can use it just as easily as pimps can.

Letting go of the narrative

From here, it looks like craigslist botched its defense from the beginning by attacking its accusers and presenting an unpolished explanation of how it polices its community of 50 million users.

The 30-person company doesn’t have the muscle or the savvy to fight a public relations battle. But it may be hurting itself more by clamming up.

Or maybe it’s smart for craigslist to sit back and let the media argue both sides of its case. The Huffington Post has a story, “How Censoring Craigslist Helps Pimps, Child Traffickers and Other Abusive Scumbags, written by a Microsoft researcher.”

What do you think – should craigslist speak up? Or hold its peace?

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It’s always a little funny to me when I see “Find us on Facebook!” written on church marquees and signs on coffee shop counters. But the University of Kentucky has taken this real world hyperlink concept to the next level.

The school has built huge wooden sculptures shaped like Facebook’s teardrop pointer and map logo to remind students to check in around campus using the new location feature, Facebook Places. The human-sized signs will inspire more buzz about the school on Facebook, recruiters hope.

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“We’re encouraging students to check in, so when they do, it’ll show up in their news feed and maybe their friends still in high school will see it over and over again,” the university’s marketing director told AdAge. (Click through to see a picture.)

It was the university’s ad agency, Lexington-based Cornett-IMS, that hatched the idea. The agency has pursued a high-tech strategy to help UK double its freshman class, including “a media-rich microsite with high-energy guided campus tours, and a truly immersive experience of campus life,” which it says has led to record applications. The school has more than 105,000 fans on Facebook.

Two of the wooden signs have popped up on campus, and the school is now considering whether to make more or place stickers on doors across campus to remind students to check in.

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The debate is often charged between MySQL proponents and those who are increasingly excited about NoSQL.

So, it’s good to see a bit of levity enter the discussion. Every once in a while we need to sit back and not take ourselves too seriously. That seems to be the intention of this video that we found on High Scalability.

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Just be forewarned – this is NSFW. The video may be a bit harsh for some. The language is a tad off color. If that is an issue, we’d suggest you pass on this one. Still, the creator did a decent job of framing the debate between a software engineer and a Web programmer. The engineer has just finished a site that uses MySQL. The programmer asks why he did not use MongoDB.

(Video not displaying? Here’s a link.)

The debate lives on in the blogopshere. We found a more reasoned look at the discussion on Rick Ho’s blog. He gives a more balanced view:

“Most of the debate is centered around the transaction processing model itself. Basically RDBMS proponents thinks NOSQL camp hasn’t spent enough time to understand the theoretical foundation of the transaction processing model. The new “eventual consistency” model is not well-defined and different implementations may differs significantly with each other. This means figuring out all these inconsistent behavior lands on the application developer’s responsibilities and make their life much harder. Hard to reason about the DB’s behavior can be very dangerous if the application made wrong assumption about the underlying data integrity guarantees.”

Are you a MySQL diehard or a NoSQL fanboi? What’s your take on the debate?

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Open data is all the rage these days, but is simply opening up aggregate public information for outside analysis enough to change the world for the better? A new article by Mike Gurstein, Editor of the influential Journal of Community Informatics, argues that open data may merely make the rich richer and the poor poorer, unless the “open access” paradigm is extended with what he calls “effective use.”

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we often write about the potential for innovation created by aggregate online and public data. Leading technology publisher Tim O’Reilly is a big, open data proponent as well (his newest conference is all about big data), but he called Gurstein’s article a “sobering account of how open data is used against the poor…” “We need to think deeply about the future,” O’Reilly said this afternoon.

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Here’s a long excerpt from Gurstein’s post, Open Data: Empowering the Empowered or Effective Data Use for Everyone?

A very interesting and well-documented example of this empowering of the empowered can be found in the work of Solly Benjamin and his colleagues looking at the impact of the digitization of land records in Bangalore. Their findings were that newly available access to land ownership and title information in Bangalore was primarily being put to use by middle and upper income people and by corporations to gain ownership of land from the marginalized and the poor. The newly digitized and openly accessible data allowed the well-to-do to take the information provided and use that as the basis for instructions to land surveyors and lawyers and others to challenge titles, exploit gaps in title, take advantage of mistakes in documentation, identify opportunities and targets for bribery, among others. They were able to directly translate their enhanced access to the information along with their already available access to capital and professional skills into unequal contests around land titles, court actions, offers of purchase and so on for self-benefit and to further marginalize those already marginalized.

Certainly the newly digitized information was ‘accessible’ to all on an equal basis but the availability of resources to translate that ‘access’ into a beneficial ‘effective use’ was directly proportional to the already existing resources available to those to whom the access was being provided. The old story about the pauper and the millionaire having equal opportunity to purchase a printing press as a means to promote their interests can be seen as holding equally here as in the 19th century.

“…digitization and related digital access to land title records in Bangalore had the direct effect of shifting power and wealth to those with the financial resources and skills to use this information in self-interested ways.

Benjamin’s meticulously documented paper shows how the digitization and related digital access to land title records in Bangalore had the direct effect of shifting power and wealth to those with the financial resources and skills to use this information in self-interested ways. This is not to suggest that processes of computerization inevitably lead to such outcomes but rather to say that in the absence of efforts to equalize the playing field with respect to enabling opportunities for the use of newly available data, the end result may be increased social divides rather than reduced ones particularly with respect to the already poor and marginalized.

As well, this is not to argue against ‘open data’ which in fact is a very significant advance and support to broad-based democratic action and empowerment but rather to argue that in the absence of specific efforts to ensure the widest possible availability of the pre-requisites for ‘effective use’ the outcome of ‘open data’ may be quite the opposite to that which is anticipated (and presumably desired) by its strongest proponents.

An ‘effective use’ approach to open data would thus be one that ensured that opportunities and resources for translating this open data into useful outcomes would be available (and adapted) for the widest possible range of users.

Thus, to ensure the effective use of open data a range of considerations needs to be included in the open data process and as elements in the open data movement including such factors as the cost and availability of Internet access, the language in which the data is presented, the technical or professional requirements for interpreting and making use of the data, the availability of training in data use and visualization, among others.

In a sector of the economy as dominated by political Libertarianism as web technology is, the idea that opening up platforms of data for innovation needs to include consideration of the unequal circumstances of potential consumers of that data is unlikely to be a popular argument. We tend to believe that the web and data are meritocracies, where anyone with enough motivation can create value and the tide will rise, raising all ships.

Maybe that’s not the case, though. Maybe data as a platform needs to be presented to society with the same care that technical providers of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) take in serving up their connection to a would-be community of independent developers. You want people to use your data? Then pay attention to what they need. Similarly, if you want all parts of society to benefit from the opening of public data, then simply opening it up and allowing the most ferociously competitive people in society to grab a hold of it may not be a good way to impact the world positively.

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In a post last week about how to measure the effectiveness of startup employees, we mentioned that perhaps the number of hours worked isn’t the best metric. With that said, this weekend was Labor Day weekend in the U.S., one of the more popular get-out-of-town weekends of the entire calendar, but does that apply for entrepreneurs and startups? Certainly there were some die-hards out there that refused to leave their desks this weekend, but we still wanted to know – do startups labor on labor day? I polled Twitter over the weekend and got some interesting responses. Here’s what you had to say.

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One of the most succinct responses I was sent came from Pasadena-based IT pro Brian Jeremy, who said simply, “entrepreneurs never take days off.” Never? Not even on Labor Day, a holiday meant to be a celebration and respite from work? I suppose, for an entrepreneur, the right mindset means never feeling satisfied with one’s work, and always wanting to work harder and longer (and enjoying every second of it). Perhaps the hardest working entrepreneurs don’t feel they deserve a day like Labor Day?

Jeremy isn’t alone in his sentiments. In fact, many of the responses leaned in favor of working on Labor Day. Chris Grayson, a New York-based digital media consultant and marketing strategist, said, “What @brianjeremy said.” Others jokingly hinted at the fact that they were unaware any holiday even existed today.

When I asked if it was even a question that startups and entrepreneurs would work this weekend, the entrepreneur behind the Twitter account techofnow replied, “No question. It is something I enjoy too much, had to put at least a couple hours in.” Another response said, “I love to use holidays as a chance to get ahead of the competition,” which is certainly a good move, if your competition gets lazy.

It would seem that time off and holidays are few and far between for young companies looking to get off the ground. For those with some experience (and a team of employees) under their belts, holidays are avoided less often. Jeff Powers, co-founder at Occipital, says that even though his team officially had the day off, he’s “been working all day as usual.” Sometimes even the most seasoned entrepreneurs-turned-managers can’t break old work habits.

But perhaps polling Twitter was a bit of a biased method for this question. After all, those out enjoying the holiday weekend are less likely to be paying attention to Twitter well enough to chime in.

So here is your opportunity – let us know: did your startup get work done this Labor Day weekend? Or did you take the time to decompress before getting back to business Tuesday? Or was it a mix of both with laptops on the beach? Leave us a comment with your opinion on working holidays!

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This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He started his first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London, leaving in 2005 and selling to a publicly traded French services company. He founded his second company in Palo Alto in 2005 and sold this company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies.

I’ve had a post in my head for months – maybe longer – about the role of a CEO. My primary role was “chief psychologist” and as I’ve learned over the past few years the same has been true as a VC. Both are basically people businesses.

I finally got around to writing it having read Fred Wilson’s post about what a CEO does. He says it basically comes down to three key functions:

• Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders
• Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company.
• Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.

Matt Blumberg, who runs one of Fred’s portfolio companies, Return Path, follows up with an additional three:

• Don’t be a bottleneck (make sure you aren’t holding up people’s work)
• Run great meetings (don’t be a productivity drain on the company)
• Stay fresh (be mentally and physically fit & attuned to what is going on in the world)

And I’d add to the world of “lists of three” the old adage that many VCs quote about boards having only three roles:

• Raising money
• Selling the company
• Hiring & Firing the CEO

These are good starting points and one day I’d like to elaborate more on the topic of running a company and as only I can do I will take these short lists and make them much longer

But today I’m going to do the opposite. I’d like to boil down the role to just one critical function: chief psychologist.

1. Psychologist as the CEO of Employees – Everybody wants to work somewhere “that is not political” but that place only exists in a mythical utopian island. Even three person organizations are political. Not when you first start but if you’ve been at it for 2 years or more you’ll know what I mean.

Almost by definition to be a great leader you need to be an effective psychologist. If you want to grow you, as Fred’s post points out, need to be able to attract & retain the very best talent. Some entrepreneurs make the mistake of never devolving power. They are control freaks and have to own all of the decisions. This breaks Matt’s rule about not being a bottleneck. This is the failure of many early-stage companies when they try to scale.

And the opposite is also true. Leaders who trust people too easily and get divorced from the details are almost always failures. It’s a paradox: control too much and you constrain growth, control too little and your quality lapses.

Anybody who has worked with me knows that I have these “control freak” tendencies as I think many leaders do. We want quality, we trust our own instincts & judgments and we think that many people don’t live up to our standards. But we know that ultimately being effective is about finding those people that do. It often takes a while of experimentation and watching their results to start to trust them. But when they start to meet and exceed your expectations it’s magic. You’re suddenly free to focus your energies elsewhere.

Once you’ve been around for a few years, attracted some great people, landed real, paying customers and raised venture capital you’ve likely got a talented team around you. Almost definitionally very talented people will butt heads. It’s your job to give people enough space to flourish without conflict, resolve conflicts when they do occur, encourage your team members to perform at their best and set the culture by which they ultimately treat their colleagues and staff.

My first company was founded in Ireland, headquartered in England and had country operations in the UK, France & Germany. Due to the language and culture issues in Europe we opted for a country structure with an MD in each country and local sales, marketing & customers support staff. We obviously had the debate about whether these functions could be centralized but either strategy has its trade-offs.

This is akin in the US to having sales staff in NY, SF & LA with your HQ in one of these locations.

As each country grew it obviously vied for centralized resources: finances (to fund people development & marketing), technology development (they wanted to show their largest customers that they were willing to build in critical features or integrations required to win big deals) and also they wanted my time – out in the field and with their biggest customers.

As things got bigger we hired a head of European sales and a head of European marketing. In your case this might simply be a VP of Sales or Customer Support for multiple locations. Naturally the countries reacted negatively to reporting to a centralized figure in the UK (and of course to no longer reporting to the CEO).

I found that a lot of my time went into spending time with the country MD’s to show them that they were still important to me and that I was still willing to help with sales campaigns. Equally I had to spend time with the heads of sales & marketing to keep them confident I wasn’t going to undermine their authority in the country operations.

But it wasn’t just about company structures. If one sales guy had a banner year he wanted to know why the other sales guy wasn’t pulling his weight. He wanted more resources allocated to him and he would begin wondering whether he might rise in the organization. If any of you have built larger organizations I’m sure these types of issues will resonate.

Lots of requests for “just 20 minutes of my time.”

To try and overcome many of these issues we held all company meetings twice / year where we paid for EVERY employee (executive assistants, customer support staff, interns) in the company to come to a central location for a day-and-a-half of team building & fun. Keeping things together was a function of re-energizing everybody: reminding them that they were important, reacquainting them with their colleagues and making sure that they felt part of something bigger / more important.

As virtually anybody in our company will tell you I was the last person to leave almost all of these events. Not because I had to prove I was a party animal (although there was that) but mostly because I wanted everybody to have their private 20 minutes to tell me what was going on in their jobs, lives, careers.

I’m sure this mostly played the role of catharsis but I did remember almost every individual story and in my own way would try to make things just a little bit better in some small way over time. It would surprise anybody who has never been a CEO the specificity and sometimes simplicity of the grievances:

• We haven’t gotten a new office printer in 3 years, I really can’t take it any more
• Their office pays for their coffee and ours doesn’t. It doesn’t seem fair
• I don’t understand why she gets all of the best accounts. How can I hit my quota selling to Deutsche Bahn – their sales cycles are so slow!

But this isn’t restricted to distributed teams, multi-country environments or even large companies. We faced it when we were small.

I had developers who thought that the chief architect was a bottleneck – having to be involved in every decision. Our most talented developer wanted to move to the US for personal reasons. We kept him on a remote role – by far the best decision we could make.

The funny thing about a startup is that if you keep it together for several years life happens along the way. We went through marriages, divorces, babies, deaths of close family members and even deeper issues like alcoholism. Along the way it was my job to play the role of sympathetic counsel, mediator or bad guy depending on the situation.

It is such an under-discussed issue as we spend our time in startups mostly talking about products, marketing and fund raising. And business schools seem to also over emphasize the quantitative skills over the human ones. I guess the latter is harder to teach but I believe a bigger driver of success.

If you want to attract world class talent you have to be inspirational, persuasive and persistent (they best people always have other offers). If you want to retain the best talent you have to be able to devolve power, coach people for performance, resolve conflicts, find ways to create growth opportunities, balance carrot / stick motivational techniques, etc.

And if you want to really be an effectively leader you need to know when & how to get rid of under-performers or bad seeds. One of the most common “chief psychologist” asks of me as the CEO was to resolve an inter-personal conflict with another employee. You can’t fudge these types of situations – you are often forced over time to pick sides. And I’ll tell anybody who asks (or doesn’t) that I’d rather hire somebody with 90% of the skills and a great attitude than a bad seed with more talent.

2. Chief Psychologist As a VC – I am surprised by the extent to which my role as a VC has continued this “chief psychologist” trajectory. I’ve often said that being a CEO is one of the loneliest jobs that there is because you always feel the need to be self-confident and make sure others don’t sense any self doubt. You’d love to tell your employees that you’re going through tough times / decisions but you don’t want it to affect them.

You want to be able to tell your VCs that you’re nervous your market will be limited but you’re worried that might affect your next funding round (or your job!).

So you internalize much as a CEO, which is why groups like YPO are so important for super successful entrepreneurs.

As a VC you see the insides of companies rather than the companies positive spin on TechCrunch. I spoke to a VC recently who said, “if only my company was going as well as the Wall Street Journal says they are.” That is not uncommon.

I have been involved as an investor in many CEO / founder disputes including many that are not in my portfolio. I’ve had to sit with founders and talk to them about how we need to hire more senior staff as the company is growing and that person is not necessarily able to fill the new role we as a company need. I’ve been involved in helping CEOs who are having disputes with investors and want to figure out how to resolve them.

I had one of these “chief psychologist” moments last week with one of my favorite young entrepreneurs. His firm hasn’t yet performed up to the level at which he expected. I opened up with a very blunt conversation about self confidence, self doubt, family pressure, peer pressure and the demands on a CEO. I *think* he found the conversation relieving and confirming.

I’m no savant for being able to know his issues of the mind – I’ve been there. Lived it. And as a VC, mentor, angel investor and founder of Launchpad LA I live it as a routine of my life. I had the CEO of a prominent site in 2006 come to me near tears about how she couldn’t take the stress of running her company any more. I helped keep her calm and we focused on other possible outcomes (we eventually got the company sold for more than $7 million and she owned half of it).

Another prominent CEO was on the verge of both company & personal bankruptcy when we had lunch. He and his family had guaranteed a personal loan on the company.

I think one of my most important roles a VC is that of chief psychologist. I know it doesn’t sound glamourous but since the development of a company is such a roller coaster ride I believe that the best VCs understand the need to help counsel people – to be their best motivators. Sometimes this is heat. Sometimes this is light. But not paying attention to the human element in company performance is being oblivious.

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We’re not going to lie to you—this video may feature the world’s worst Skype connection. And that was after 45 minutes of trouble-shooting. While we have no problems connecting to entrepreneurs in Russia or Kenya, apparently London is the land that Skype forgot, which is pretty ironic given it was funded there.

But such old-world telecom connections are the new reality for Monty Munford who moved from uber-telecom connected India back to the UK last month. Munford has worked in two if the industries where India has outdone many other countries: Mobile and Bollywood. (See him above getting pampered.)

As we discussed a few weeks ago with mobile in Kenya – and as Munford wrote in his guest post on Somaliland yesterday – India is one of many countries trying to export what it has done well to Africa. Is Bollywood the model?

In this clip we talk about what India did well with Bollywood. It’s an interesting lesson for any emerging market looking to build more than a copy cat industry, but something that can be a true global sensation.

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I’ve ignored more press releases in my time than I care to remember, but I still scan, and sometimes even read, a bunch of them every single day. Comes with the territory, and I’ve long accepted that – I’m sure a lot of PR folks think of those as necessary evil almost as much as we do. Almost.

But as boring as it is to read the same frickin words over and over and over and over again, there are certain times – albeit very, very few – where we manage to distill some actual useful information from the writings (but please, again, stop using words like “leading” and “award-winning” in the first paragraph all the time. Pretty please?).

And then there the rare ones that put a smile on our face. Press releases we actually enjoy reading. Not because they’re ballsy (it’s easy to provoke and get attention by running your virtual mouth) but because they’re whimsy and just the right degree of ballsy, rather.

Take for example this one announcing the launch of MeetYourFriends, some social network (posted in full below for your reading pleasure). It has everything: a headline that draws just the right amount of attention, the basic information and mostly lots of self- and industry mocking humor. Bonus points for distributing the press release on Labor Day.

Will MeetYourFriends ever stand out of the social networking crop? Almost certainly, they don’t even stand a chance. But they’ve already gotten my attention by penning a better, more memorable and attention-grabbing press release than most other companies throughout their entire existence, so that’s gotta count for something. Or something.

Update: actually, maybe you should think twice before signing up. I can’t in any way guarantee this isn’t a clever ploy (yet another?) to get gullible users to provide the makers with their personal data. Update 2: just don’t sign up, it’s better for everyone.

Either way, enjoy the read.

Latest Social Network MeetYourFriends.com Threatens to Bury Rivals ‘Within Days’

NEW YORK, Sept. 6 /PRNewswire/ — After resolving not to come up with a pretentious name and an avalanche of gimmicks, social network MeetYourFriends.com goes live to a celebration of simplicity and retro fanfare. Having not just received first round equity funding of $50 million from leading venture capitalists, the site is well set to tap into the growing market of 30- and 40-somethings who just want to talk to each other.

Developed by Neil Bryant, one of the founders of Badoo.com, MeetYourFriends will not be launched in a private beta for only a select 500 users. When visitors come to the site they will immediately find they are not immersed in a stunning 3D multi-verse, where they can interact with each other via fully customizable avatars. “It’s going to be beautiful,” says Neil, who is not going to give an overhyped, media-crazed keynote speech.

MeetYourFriends claim to have identified an emerging demographic of users who, according to Neil, are “keen to engage each other in casual chat” and are aggressively aligning their service portfolio to meet this demand. “We wanted to bring some fresh new ideas into the social networking sphere, and with a unique combination of email and live chat we think we may have just achieved that.”

For those who wish to bring up goats and cows on a virtual farm, MeetYourFriends will not satisfy. The site is a back-to-basics social network that will appeal to fans of The Beatles and sliced bread.

There’s no open API so game developers around the globe are not frantically hacking code together, right this minute, in order to launch the latest virtual pets and aquariums across the network. “We are extremely excited at the thought of all the products that will soon not be appearing on the site, contributing to the users’ rich enjoyment of the service,” says Neil.

Following the predicted growth in mobile Location Based Services such as FourSquare and Gowalla, MeetYourFriends gets in the mix through a revolutionary static PC interface, pinpointing the exact location of the user to their computer. “We think it’s important that our users can access the site whenever they are at a PC. We’re looking at a version for Notebooks right now, but it’s some way off,” says Neil.

To calm fears before they arrive, MeetYourFriends will not change its privacy policy or allow advertising once it’s settled on its laurels. “We think Facebook is nervous,” adds Neil. Global domination awaits.

ABOUT MEETYOURFRIENDS

MeetYourFriends.com is a back-to-basics social network that brings together new friends from across the globe. With simple sign-up and fast search, the website offers instant friendship using Direct Messages and Live Chat. Based on secure and powerful web technology, the social community brings the world to your front door for chat, fun, and friendship. Find out more at www.MeetYourFriends.com.

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