The Mike Abundo Effect

Fresh from earning another place in Internet legend for defying the MPAA, Digg founder Kevin Rose is set to launch an IM startup.

Business Week poster boy Kevin Rose is rumored to have teamed up with Daniel Burka also of Digg, and first time entrepreneur Leah Culver and has started a new company. Rose and Burka have worked closely on tools like Digg Spy. Burka is one of the main designers of Digg.com. Rose and Burka have worked closely for nearly two years.

We have learned from sources familiar with the company, that the trio are currently working on a new kind of a communications tool, that can be dubbed as an IM competitor. The company which is currently operating in stealth mode is going launch sometime later this month.

A 2005 blog post from Kevin (via Tech Manifesto) reveals some of his old ideas about IM, ideas this new startup might implement:

- Social pools: Want to meet someone new? Set your IM account to ’swim’ and you will be placed into a ‘pool group’ of other users within x_degrees of separation. Join a chat room, or chat one-on-one.

- Group/Individual offline: The ability to right click on a group or individual and choose ‘appear offline’ – great for “sick days” from the office.

- Tagging: Highlight any text within a conversation and tag it for later retrieval.
/tag keyword1, keyword2 from the IM window.

Yahoo! Messenger supports offline groups and Wablet supports tagging, but I don’t know of any IM service that supports social pools. Kevin’s pretty much a geek god right now, so expect a sizable chunk of Digg’s 1,000,000 users to instantly adopt this just because he’s Kevin.

In a bold move that will go down in the annals of Internet legend, Digg founder Kevin Rose joins the Digg Revolt of 2007 by defying the MPAA’s order to make the HD-DVD decryption code an “unspeakable” number.

You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Yes, Kevin, you have balls the size of Google. You richly deserve your $60 million. And your hot girlfriend.

(Via Jon-Paul Oliva.)