Who are you kidding? - Using Kids to test new media plays

Interesting post about kids being used by VC's to test social media plays over there at Naked Conversations (picking up from a New York Times article)

Apparently VC's have recently discovered that kids will quickly show you (i) what works and (ii) how it will be used. Well goodness me, how extraordinary!! How long ago was Got Game published? - we've known kids drive many new adoptions at least since Web 1.0 (or are all those lessons part of a Dark Age best left forgotten and mouldering)

(harrumph....been testing stuff on my kids and watching them interact for 3 years now - in fact they found YouTube in the early days of this year).

But this is still interesting for 2 reasons:

Reason 1 - The reported reason - a bellweather, or canary (as in coal mining) as the article puts it.

By the way, here's what watching my kids' activities implies now:

- MySpace is old hat, they are onto the next one (Bebo in our case)
- Habbo - too simple / boring - went back to Sword and Sorcery games fairly soon (I have boys) - its not that they don't like social games - they play Sims with gusto - just Habbo doesn't do it for them. (Like lego men according to one)
- YouTube - loved Smosh brothers, but the buzz of YouTube has faded now - they are off doing other stuff.
- Pandora beats Last.fm hands down

Now, my swallows do not a summer make, but it is interesting none the less.....Krispy Kreme doughnuts are much, much stickier than social media sites.

But, what interested me more was the quoted VC person, a Ms Heidi Roizen, apparently based her decisions (as far as I can discern from article anyway) on the basis of a few days usage obervation. . I can see this is maybe more relevant for products (once the punter's bought it you've taken the money), but I'd be far more scared with services. For example, if you had invested in YouTube based on my kids' early takeup you would have paid a fortune...over a 4 month period you would be much more sanguine I think.

Reason 2 - Why are VC's doing this?

Apart from realising what most everyone else has known for ages I mean.....

No, what interests me is that a lot (most?) of the sage advice from VC's that I read on websites or even on various VC blogs says that they want traction and lots of customers before funding, in which case why bother doing this? Surely this would all be worked through if that were the case?

Methinks more are actually starting to fund earlier stage businesses, despite protesting so much?.

Now that is interesting.

PS...were there any kids at LeWeb3 to comment on use of French politicians