Web 2.0 startups and internet startup companies in general always cause a lot of divided opinions. While some optimists claim that some product or service is the ‘next YouTube‘, there are always others who think it will go out of business within months.

So far, such arguments were mainly confined to the comments on sites such as this one, but now there’s a great new place to voice your opinion about Web 2.0 products and services - Killer Startups. It’s a RSVC (Read Submit Vote Comment) social content site based on Pligg, with an interesting idea behind it: users submit, vote and comment on internet startup companies.

Besides just plain voting, users can also try to predict whether a company will get bought out, receive VC funding, offer its stocks on the stock market through an IPO, or maybe just linger on or completely die out. The concept seems to be working well, because this month and a half old site is already experiencing a fair amount of activity. The fact that the design site is not just a plain vanilla Pligg template (which is in most cases a quick road to oblivion) helps too.

In a short interview, the founder of the site, Gonzalo Arzuaga told me that the site has been online since January 20th, and that it has experienced decent growth, which can also be seen in Alexa stats. He has gotten the idea for the site right about the time Google bought YouTube, thinking that a community like this could help investors decide on which idea is really worth their money, at the same time giving startups a chance to draw attention to themselves.

Gonzalo also pointed out to me two important features that are not immediately apparent. One of them is a link that says “contact them” below every company profile. It enables users to contact the companies directly through a contact form, without ever showing the actual contact email. Another interesting feature is the fact that after somebody reviews a startup, the system automatically sends an email to the startup company with a username and password to allow them to modify the information it was posted. This way the startups themselves can control that no wrong information is posted about their company.

Out of all the new social content sites I’ve seen lately, Killer Startups is one of the best. If the idea catches on and the community grows, it will offer a really great way to structure all those countless new internet startups not only by category or name, but also by popularity and hopefully (if the crowd wisdom works well) by quality, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Reviews, Web, Web 2.0, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.