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It’s always interesting to me, to look back at certain points in time in building a startup business, when some very strategic decisions get made very quickly. Once the decision is made, you try to adapt to the changing dynamics of the marketplace. However, excessive change of course without a rational basis for the change will only lead to thrashing and frustration! A better way might be to move along a path, measure, test and refine on a continuous basis.

We have had some very strategic decision points come upon us this past year. When we got started in the summer of 2006, we started developing Kwanzoo.com as a destination site for playing social trivia games. Earlier this year, Facebook opened up their platform. As we all know, that’s all the rage now. Every week we hear about yet another social application thats been launched on Facebook (and soon, the floodgates of announcements will be upon us of new social applications on MySpace, or Bebo, or Orkut or any other social network).

Betting one’s entire business on a social network “Gorilla” seems like a very risky proposition. In the past few days, we have all witnessed public backlash and advertiser skepticism of Facebook’s latest approach to monetizing their huge base of users (via Facebook Beacons). The core issue here is if Facebook sneezes, the entire ecosystem of Facebook applications could catch a cold (and some may even catch pneumonia!)

We are still a young business, trying to find our way through what could be either minefields or green fields of opportunity for us. It’s a whole new world of Facebook, Open Social, IM and mobile-based ecosystems. Who do we bet on? Who should be on our “watch” list? We would welcome your ideas and suggestions….

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