Stowe Boyd spends a lot of time thinking about Web 2.0, and web business in general. He was recently asked 5 questions for an article by a reporter at a small paper. His answer to the reporter's final question underscores how drab some recent startups have been.

When asked if "someone with nothing more than a good idea could start a Web 2.0 business", Boyd replied, "having an innovative idea is a good start, a necessary precondition for success. But there is a lot of luck involved, too. [...] The best advice I can give for would-be web app developers is to go where other companies aren't: move into the white space where there are no competitors. The world does not need yet another social bookmarketing app, another social event site, or another screen sharing tool."

I've got my own great idea for a new Web 2.0 start-up. It's this social-screen-sharing event site with bookmarking ability added on. Oh yah, and you can vote on things too! Wait! Where are you going? It's the next killer app, really!

Download Squad readers are tech-heavy web users. If you're like me, you probably generate quite a bit of RSS (maybe even without conscious awareness). Del.icio.us, your blog, your Flickr stream, etc, etc, ad nausea. We're at a total saturation point for the incoming data streams we deal with on a daily basis and, since there's no sign of the dataflow slowing down, we're forced to look for better ways to deal with it all. Necessity, after all, is the mother of all invention.

Emily Chang writes, "After a year and a half of using social applications heavily, I recently had to revisit the plan to aggregate all my activity into one data stream. As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about"

If you telecommute, you probably live in IM. Even if you don't live by the wire, it's easy to die by the wire, because IM's aren't saved as drafts (unlike those nasty emails you should never send). Stowe Boyd, CEO of Blue Whale Labs, has done what Letitia Baldrige failed to do: bring some civility to the land of OMFG's and WTF's. His Instant Messaging Etiquette just made it to the front page of digg (where maybe they could use a few tips as well), and it is worth every ACII character of a read.

AOL's much-talked-about social networking site AIM Pages launched today in beta form at AIMPages.com. Logging in with your AIM screen name takes you to the profile editor, which has a neat drag-and-drop Ajax interface. By default your AIM Pages profile has a few "modules" like the obligatory photo and "About Me" box, and you can add other modules like RSS feeds, photo tickers from Flickr or AOL, and even games, by dragging them to the column and position you would like them to appear. Each module has "Edit" and "Style" buttons for changing their settings and appearances. It also has more than 75 built-in themes which range from clean to cutesy to garish, and after choosing a theme you can further customize it. I've only used AIM Pages for about a half hour so far, but my earliest impressions are that it's a whole lot better than MySpace (though my MySpace experience is similarly limited), the integration with AIM is great but could be better, the Ajax is cool (and occasionally useful) but lacks the "snappiness" I've come to expect from Ajax apps. I'm not sure that AIM Pages is ready for the MySpace crowd yet (think Microsoft-grade beta, not Google beta), but there's one thing that, as a web geek, I'm very excited about: the open API. "Open" is not a word we tend to associate with AOL (and I write for them!), but for awhile now AOL has been running a site called I Am Alpha which is a testbed and resource for people who want to build modules for what turned out to be AIM Pages. I haven't attempted to create a module myself yet (and it's unclear what the protocol is for actually getting a module you made into AIM Pages), but the documentation is free and open, which opens up possibilities for AIM Pages that I'm sure even its developers haven't thought of.

The blogosphere is replete today with chatter about AIM Pages. For more discussion, take a look at Michael Arrington's less-than-glowing first impressions at TechCrunch, some optimistic views from Richard MacManus' Read/Write Web and J. Botter, and more commentary from Stowe Boyd and Vecosys.