I agree it’s really not a good question to ask in this kind of a forum. However, I personally wouldn’t have being embarrassed by such question.

We demonstrated Twegather because we want people to try the service. Frankly, we want to discover what people use our service for. We fully expect to identify a revenue model from what we learn.

As with many start-ups services often don’t get used in the way the creators intended. For example, Confinity (now PayPal) was originally designed to be a Palm Pilot-based e-wallet. The idea was that you would “beam” money from one Palm to another. Confinity designed a web page to demonstrate how the service worked. To their surprise, people preferred to use the web page for transferring money over the Palm handheld. Moreover, it turned out to be a great way to purchase items on eBay. The rest is history.(Viral Loop, Adam L. Penenberg)

In hindsight the idea of beaming money from one handheld device to another is stupid when you consider how limited the market would have been. But in the end it didn’t matter: they recognized the value the service brought to their users and used that knowledge to make a billion dollar company.

If someone had asked me what our monetization strategy is I would have simply answered “we don’t know yet – it’s simply too early to know”.

As the Gretzky quote goes, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” (brainquote.com)

i wonder if the analogy might play out in a couple of other ways too…for example, maybe mass could refer to the quality of a collaboration by a production team…in which case a small highly collaborative team would typically generate less friction and thus the most mass, and thus achieve a faster completion rate than larger & better-resourced but less nimble and more resistant teams, which is sort of counter-intuitive…though it lines up with some thoughts I’ve had lately too…not to mention the 37signals credo…

j

I am interested in the discussion about potential energy.