As a start-up, Micromobs has been successful in growing as a community and company; perhaps your start-up can learn from them.

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the in Mountain View, California, a community center and gathering place for hackers, thinkers, and future Silicon Valley mavens. While there, I met with Ajay Kamat, Himani Amoli, and Gordon McCreight, the creators of Micromobs, a company whose goal is to develop a social network that's easy to use and respects your privacy. They taught me a thing or two about running a start-up, and of course, they gave me some juicy nerd-details about their site.

Micromobs is specially designed with social groups--like companies, work groups, clubs, friends, and families--in mind. The service lets you create a group (called a "mob") in one click, and log in using your existing Facebook or Twitter account. Micromobs's big draw is the privacy it offers: When you create a mob, you'll be able to control who is in the mob, and who'll be able to see what's posted to it. Compare this to Facebook, where, unless you're vigilant about locking down your profile, you never know who on the other side of the world is reading what you post. Also, joining a mob is 100% your choice; there's no forced opt-in as there is with Facebook's latest change to .

When you do chose to join a mob, you'll be presented with a stream of messages--all relevant to that mob--from other mob members. Micromobs's creators made it very clear when I spoke to them that Micromobs is not just about privacy and simplicity, but also about context. Whenever you log on to Facebook or Twitter, you'll see a stream of posts that might not have anything to do with your interests.