Here, Gigaom discusses the lifecycle of a startup. But they forgot one crucial step:

Being featured on SuckyStartups!!!

One day an entrepreneur is chatting with his friends, gets an idea, writes about the idea on his or her blog, and then starts coding. A few weeks or possibly days, a beta — increasingly a euphemism for a not-fully-thought-out-product — emerges.

THE LAUNCH
Then the buzz builds and the company opens up the beta far and wide. Maybe TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, WebWorkerDaily or WebWare write about the product.

The missing sentence:
“Then SuckyStartups blogs about it, telling it like it is. No differentiation. Me too. No business model. No chance.”

THEN…

LAUNCH A SOCIAL NETWORK WIDGET
If the user adoption press releases, the widget and subsequent coverage can’t get your site growing again, it’s time for the big guns…the open API.

In between

They ain’t a startup, but it’s worth a mention anyway…CompUSA is closing all their stores. I wonder what took ‘em so long. I remember getting my 386 there and upgrading the RAM from 4 to 8MB. Good times. Even then, the employees didn’t know what they were talking about.

Kleiner Perkins ain’t investing in Web 2.0. Instead, they’re goin’ back to basics and investing in Web 0.2.

SiliconValleyWatcher has the details, but Randy Komisar said it himself: “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies.”

Not willing to take them at their word, I took a stroll through their portfolio. One company that stood out is called “Pinger,” which enables “people to communicate with their voice in new and remarkably convenient ways.” Notice the spelling of the company. If this were a web 2.0 company, it would be called Pingr and it would be in beta.

A different portfolio company, Aggregate Knowledge, doesn’t get off so easy. They’re described as definitively web 2.0: “Unlike enterprise software that takes months to deploy, Aggregate Knowledge is a real-time Web 2.0 service that deploys in days and offers customers a performance-based pricing model.”

If people stop investing in web 2.0, what the hell am I going to write about?!!?

Adobe just announced Photoshop Express. Well I guess they announced it a while back, but they just previewed it. What’s the point?

To me, traditional desktop software for desktop tasks works great. Desktop software for things like spreadsheets and photo editing is better.

Apparently, Multiply has been around for a long time, but the social network hasn’t really taken off. I hadn’t heard of it, but I guess that doesn’t mean too much. They just picked up $16.6MM from VantagePoint Venture Partners et al, presumably because they…well, I guess they believe they still have a chance.

Or maybe they just need some more cash to execute their strategy to target the Philippines and Indonesia. Apparently, they’re in the top 10 sites in both locations, says TechCrunch.

Rating:

Scribd is out there talking about how many “words” they have on their site from about 200K user-uploaded documents (much of which is copyrighted, I might add).

Here’s what I don’t get: of everything I saw on the Scribd, nothing required being in a document per se. In my exploration of the site, I found guides for this or that, top 10 lists, screenplays, etc. All of these things could (and I’m sure do) exist as web pages. And there’s this company called “Google” which helps people find web pages (and documents for that matter) over the web.

These guys are trying to be the of documents? I’m not sure there’s a need. Maybe they’ll be the Pets.com of documents.