In the past ten years or so, I have worked on, or been presented with, dozens of online business ideas. From real estate to horses, hot sauce to social networking, they all share one thing in common: they started with an idea. What differs, however, is where the inspiration came from. One common formula I tend to see is the “me too – but different” syndrome. I’ll make facebook but for: fish, cats, seniors, small people, big people, beautiful people.

I have a confession to make. I I <3 twitter. For those of you who don’t know what twitter is, it’s basically a micro blogging platform. You get 140 characters to say whatever you want. You add friends – creating your own social network and let them know what you are doing through your status updates. If you want to read more about twitter, you can find more info here.

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.

The facebook Kiva application lets a user grow their funds by using the facebook platform as a means of soliciting friends for monetary contributions.

Invoke Media has just launched a new Facebook application for memelabs- memelabs is a user generated video contest platform. They wanted a facebook application that would allow them to integrate their contest platform with Facebook. The application that was developed allows users to watch and vote for videos that have been submitted to one of the memelabs contests. You are also able to share it with friends, see the videos that you’ve voted for, see the videos that your Facebook friends have submitted to the contests, update your memelabs profile, and see what friends you have on Facebook that are also registered with memelabs…

The CBC has just published and article by Jesse Hirsh that looks into Facebook�s new advertising platform, Beacon. Beacon allows advertisers to install a small piece of code on their website that allows Facebook to track their users on these third party sites. This information is then imported into Facebook through recommendations in your friend�s newsfeeds and on your profile page. For instance, if I go to Ebay and buy The Life of Pi, this information will be imported to Facebook and disseminated amongst my friends by letting them know I just made this purchase. This advertising mechanism leverages the powerful force of word-of-mouth advertising…