"Talk to people like David Hornik, venture capitalist with August Capital, and they see huge potential as big companies catch on. The Four Seasons hotel chain, for example, could notify people with Internet feeds when it has a $300 special on a night in New York City.

``While I've been publicly skeptical about social networking as a space, I'm pretty enthusiastic about social software broadly speaking,'' says Hornik.

Hornik's firm invested angel money into Technorati, which has subsequently raised about $6.5 million from local firms Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital. And Hornik's colleague at August, Andrew Anker, recently left the firm to help lead Six Apart, another start-up in the sector. Six Apart provides tools to make blogs."