Facebook Instant Messaging Coming Soon

TechCrunch is reporting tonight that an IM application is coming to Facebook and launching to the public soon - perhaps in the coming week. TechCrunch's report.

A Facebook IM will almost certainly kill off third party Facebook applications that deliver IM services, showing one of the perils of startups that "build for Facebook" or any other major player in the online space who might decide to deploy a similar application and pull the rug out from under the unlucky startup at any moment.

More importantly will be the impact of Facebook IM on other major messenger services such as those provided by Microsoft and AOL, and perhaps even microblogging tech favorite Twitter.

Heavy users are clearly tiring of using dozens of applications to communicate with friends and associates. The surging popularity of new social media aggregator Friendfeed is a testament to how hungry early adopters are for applications that can simplify the process of publishing and communicating to the broader web, though Facebook's new IM entry is unlikely to shake things up all that much given the increasing demand for more robust forms of communication than that offered by IM.

17 Startup Tips Start A Blog Fight

A recent post by internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis suggested 17 tips for startups to use to save money and maximize productivity. These included everything from a fridge full of coke and an expensive espresso machine to outsourcing IT and firing people "who are not workaholics".

The firing workaholics tip generated so much controversy that it has been softened to "fire people who don't love their work..." , which appeared to be partly a response to a TechCrunch post titled: Calacanis Fires People Who Have A Life.

What I found very interesting though was how positively many successful startup folks received the piece. Mark Cuban for example, praised it and added his own startup nuggets including "NEVER EVER EVER buy schwag" and "NEVER EVER EVER hire a PR firm".

Are startups taking us back to the sensibilities of the early industrial revolution when workers were expected to give their life to the company or die trying? Those companies provided free lunches too. Yet free espresso was hardly a perk back then, or stock options. To my mind equity distribution is an excellent measure of how a company feels about employees and vice versa. Companies should honor their employees with a stake tied to hard work, and employees should honor the company with the hard work needed to make that stake have value.