Fred Wilson wrote two posts in 2010 that were very influential with the startup community.

The titles were:
Mobile First, Web Second
Mobile First, Web Second (continued)

If you’re in the minority that never read these posts – you should.

I know that they really impacted an entire cohort of startups because every company that was coming to pitch me businesses was (is) saying, “I’m a ‘mobile first’ company.”

Behind every successful Internet and mobile technology startup is a handful of power players guiding the founders. Smart and savvy investors like Eric Hippeau or the celebrated Bob Pittman may give you a kick start, super attorney Victor Boyajian might draw up and help you ink your Series A financing, or Union Square's Fred Wilson might chip in some expansion capital and join your board. In celebration of these key insiders, AlwaysOn is seeking nominations for your favorite New York City Power Players.

Last night Facebook announced a bunch of new partners that are using ‘Actions’, a Facebook feature which lets developers make just about any action a verb. We can now expect Facebook buttons to pop up everywhere inviting us to declare our relationships to all sorts of things by clicking buttons with verbs such as  ‘Want’, ‘’Listen’, ‘Own’, ‘Watch’, ‘Read, or ‘Pin’. As I’ve said numerous times now I think the next big wave for social is when it spreads into everything that we do to make it just a little better. I’m not talking about new sites or apps, or even necessarily spending more time on Facebook, but rather the apps we currently use incorporate social data to get better.

Back in my broadcast.com days we had a saying that “bits are bits”. That once content becomes digital, it is naturally going to become available on any and all digital devices. Based on this, we always made the point to be platform and device agnostic. We didn’t care where or how people saw our content, as long as they saw it and we had the chance to monetize it.

We also knew that our core value proposition to consumers was that on broadcast.com they were able to get content that they couldn’t get on TV. We had Yoga channels, we had cricket live and on demand, we had sports , music, movies, tv, comedy and anything else you could think of available.

Yesterday I wrote that the market for social interest sites has matured to the point where it is difficult for new entrants, and this morning I saw the slide below which says something similar.  It is one of ten predictions for 2012 from Roger McNamee and Mike Maples, two leading US VCs.  You will see that they make this prediction with only 50% confidence, which I think was lower confidence than all bar one of their other predictions.  You can find the full set of predictions here.

2011 was an amazing year for social interest sites. Twitter started growing fast again after an extended flat period, Tumblr finally made it up into the stratosphere and new kid on the block Pinterest had an amazing second half to the year. The Comscore chart below shows traffic growth for all three, as well as the epic decline of Myspace.

Facebook isn’t on this chart, but they had a pretty good year as well.

With the season starting tomorrow, I wanted to update a blog post I did in 2010. In just the past 18 months the number of proposals for in-game entertainment have skyrocketed. It seems like every day I get a new proposal to invest in a company that is going to revolutionize the experience of going to a sporting event. Without fail the proposal starts out with some form of “with the explosion in sales of smartphones…” Then I get the meat of the pitch which is some derivative of stats, pictures, fantasy games, social sharing via FB/Twitter or some new network to replace FB/Twitter.

Regular readers will know that I’m a strong believer in open standards.  I think they provide the best platform for innovation and are the best protection against monopolists.  Hence I would love it if the open web prevailed, and the rising power of gatekeepers like Apple, Amazon, Facebook and even Google annoys me as a consumer and worries me as an investor.