Today marks the official death of WebTaggers. Docs have been filed in accordance with Deleware state law to make it so. 

One of these days I'll write a story about my experiences there.  Craig, my (fraternal) twin brother, Rudy Rouhana and I started this company in mid-1999 and convinced the newly-formed AVLabs to fund it.  The idea was simple: post-it notes for the web.  Make money by selling targeted ads. With $1M of seed funding we set out to make ourselves wealthy off of the Internet.  Almost exactly one year later it had to be shut down.  We couldn't get anyone to invest after the dot-com crash.   The process of shutting it down wasn't as clean as it could have been.  In fact, several people involved in both stages of the company's existence and demise have said pulling the plug was much more difficult than getting it funded in the first place. 

You could probably tell this exact same story a thousand times and all you'd have to do is change the names.

This gives me an idea.

You know how they have the Society for Creative Anachronism?  They're the geeks who get dressed up like knights and hit eachother with padded Claymore replicas, revitalizing traditions of yore.  Then there's also the Civil War Re-enactment nut-jobs, but unelss you live below the Mason-Dixon line you probably aren't familiar with them. 

What about starting a Society for Creative Capitalism?  Everyone pretends it's 1999. We could rent out Moscone Center in San Francisco, make up some imaginary (or real, but since mothballed) company to work for (as a Technology Evangelist!) and have a high old time.  Instead of jousting or shooting cannons at eachother, we could see who can draft the most powerful Non-Binding Letter of Intent.  Instead of selling antiquated hand-bound books at your booth, you could sell old copies of  ATG Dynamo or Oracle 8i.

Maybe not.

As Jeff Bone points out on O'reillynet, the PTO is having a hard time dealing with software patents. This is just so ironic to me because I used to work for Jeff at Activerse in the late 90's. We wrote software that did exactly what is described in the ActiveBuddy software patent claims. That was in 1998. We even showcased it at our JavaOne booth that year. The ActiveBuddy patent application was filed in 2000, two years after we released the Ding!Bot SDK.

Activerse itself is gone, so there isn't much hope of challenging the patent now that it's been granted. The PTO should either stop granting software patents, or get more (and more capable) people doing the research before they grant these things.

Gordon Mohr's comments on the ex-Activerse employee mailing list:

Read more: ActiveBuddy's Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers