what does your startup do?
Still under development, but drop me an e-mail if you (or anyone else reading this) is interested in beta-testing. I'm starting out e-mail first, so the initial UI is just that you get a daily digest of links & snippets to threads related to your interests.
Without trying to get too much off track, I gotta say that it would be so nice to be able to use the original theme data used in Wave (very obviously sans branding). Wave In A Box is... blech, in terms of design, I have to admit.
For example, my current video game obsession is Factorio, which has about 200,000 users and will likely never appear in a major news story, because it's un-economical for a news outlet to write a story that has an audience of at most 200,000. Despite this, there are 4 active forums dedicated to it, which generate a few hours worth of interesting reading each day. This content is a lot more interesting to me than anything that appears on Google News, but it's a lot less interesting to the millions of other readers of Google News. But the beauty of computers is that we can match content up to precisely the users that care about it.
In theory. I often wonder about pathologically impossible-to-query statistics like "who is snoring the loudest right now?" "show me a global map of everyone waking up right now (and a graph tracking how many people are waking up per second); and provide a second-to-second pinpoint of the person who feels the most refreshed." "what is the single most relevant set of webpages for this highly obscure, domain-specific query?" etc.
Heh, it sometimes takes me actual effort to calm myself down about the fact that, beyond a certain threshold, we literally cannot collect enough entropy (data) to direct a database to the most relevant results - and that we similarly won't connect users to the data they're most interested in, beyond that point.
I do totally get what you mean though.