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What happens when you build a company, show growth and clients, get investment, and then the market drops out? Sound like last year? Wendy Tan White was a Dot-Com entrepreneur who started and built MoonFruit in 1999, and her story is a good lesson for any entrepreneur to learn. I interviewed White at this years South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin, TX, at the Social Media Clubhouse .* I learned the necessity of having clear communications with investors and customers, even in the most dire of circumstances. White’s vision was to “allow users to build communities and share passions online, and to remove for them the barriers of technology and cost.” She and her partners wanted to create a system that allowed non-technical users to create these community websites by dragging and dropping shapes and boxes, designing their sites without knowing any code.

Springwise: Shortomatic is a California-based company that invites consumers to upload their own art for a truly customised swim. All they need do is indicate their waist size and then upload the graphics they have in mind. They then position and size the art, choose their colours and add text for use on the waistband. Next, voilà! A unique pair of California-made boardshorts that’s customised for them. Design your own swim shorts, earn up to $1,000 [Springwise]

Many start-up or small business owners look for partners to leverage their business. Whether the butcher recommends the baker or the programmer recommends a designer, businesses work on connections. The Small Business Web is a group of software companies whose programs are connected to each other via a set of communication channels. These APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)

A BookChat Experience on Readeo from Readeo on Vimeo . A BookChat is when two people share storytime through Readeo. In a BookChat, you’ll be able to see and hear each other as you read the book, and either party can turn pages and select books to read. Member Accounts have access to all of the books in the Readeo Library for reading solo or BookChatting with other Members or Guests. All Member Accounts come with a 14-day risk-free trial.

Buzz , Google’s controversial attempt to unseat Facebook as the most mainstream of social activity stream readers, just made some much-needed changes that Facebook could learn from as well. Buzz users now have more granular control over what social interactions with content trigger an email sent to their email inboxes and explicit explanations for why each piece of content was sent by email to them. These changes are a good start but ought to extended into the body of Buzz as well. Sponsor Just like most Facebook users can’t explain the difference between the new algorithmically filtered News Feed and the raw bulk flow of the Live Feed, Buzz too could benefit from explaining the mystery behind the magic. As social networking analyst danah boyd said at the opening talk of SXSW today, privacy online is grounded in user control . Buzz violated the basic understanding of email as private when it surprised users by layering the new social network on top of their private Gmail. By granting users more control over information, today’s changes are a small move in a better direction. Why Not Give Users The Tools to Drive Their Own Experience? Might social activity stream participation become more mainstream if users had clear and more complete control over what they see, what they expose and to whom? Many people believe that users are incapable of dealing with too many settings and need these decisions made for them. Perhaps it’s just a user experience challenge, though. Nobody said creating the ultimate interface for mainstream users to drive their online activity was going to be easy. Google’s move with Buzz today looks like a nice first start. Hopefully it will be extended beyond the Buzz and Gmail relationship. See also: How Google Buzz is Disruptive: Open Data Standards Discuss