Over the holidays I spent some time reflecting on the applications I use and why I use them. Part of this excercise involved revisting when and how I discovered the applications I now use as part of my everyday life. One use that fell out of this analysis provided an interesting story for me as it relates to that age old VC question- is something a feature or a company (the former being considered, by many, unfundable as its unable to reach any kind of scale for venture level returns).

Back at Foo Camp 2006 my friend, Mitch Kapor, was giving me grief for not being on Facebook. He shared how much enjoyment he got out of his stream of status updates and wanted to be getting them from me. Several months later I joined Facebook and began, infrequently, to post status updates. Shortly after, I found that my friends in San Francisco were wildly familiar with my travel schedule, my kids and the goings on in my life. This proved to be a great way for me to stay connected to my bay area friends business partners when I was back home in Salt Lake City.

After months of playing with the status update feature of Facebook I realized that it was all I used the service for. I didn’t post photos, I didn’t play games and didn’t send messages to friends- just updated my status. Based on that realization, I fired back up an old Twitter account I hadn’t used since signing up for the service and started updating my status there. No constraints, not starting my update in the 3rd person (remember is…) and many of my bay area friends already on the service.

The lesson I took away from this: there are times a very large company or service can expose their users to a feature, even condition them to use it, which then opens the door for someone to build a company focused exclusively on offering that feature in a better way.

I would have never reengaged with Twitter if it weren’t for Facebook. So when I hear Facebook is prepping a new feature, I think of the hundreds of millions of people who will be conditioned to a new behavior and whether there is an opportunity to build a business singularly focused on providing it in a better, more interesting, way.