Because the server kept going off-line, the Walletproof blog was down as well, which meant that our users couldn’t see the information we posted there about the downtime.

If the server goes down again we’ll post about it here as well so people can stay informed.

One positive result of the downtime on our end was that we realised that our users are really nice people who care about the service. Thanks for all the nice email and your patience!

When Bill Gross founded his famous Idealab incubator in 1996, taking an idea and turning it into a functioning business was a venture that would require funds of at least $1 million a pop.

Today, developing an application like Walletproof costs significantly less than a million dollars. This changes the game.

In Return of the startup factory, Business 2.0’s Michael V. Copeland writes about the contrast between the good old days of the bubble and the new high turnover incubators, such as Paul Graham’s Y-Combinator.

The idea is not dissimilar to that of the VC model: No one has a clue as to what business ideas will become successful, just as the Hollywood studios don’t know what movies will become blockbusters. The incubator bets on a fairly large range of ideas and gives each company a small amount of seed capital for an equity stake.

With open source software, cheap bandwidth and distributed teams that don’t need office space, the cost of failure will be minuscule compared to the return if the incubator manages to bet on and support an idea that becomes a blockbuster.

Now, the high turnover incubator has come to London in the form of Seedcamp.

Seedcamp is run by two VCs, Saul Klein from Index ventures (who also runs the OpenCoffee) and Reshma Sohoni from 3i.

In a recent post titled Facebook is the new AOL, Jason Kottke makes an interesting point about Facebook’s development platform and how its “walled garden” approach might represent a negative trend: If every big player on the web offers their own closed proprietary platform for developers to launch their products on, it becomes inefficient and expensive.

It’s difficult enough to develop for OS X, Windows, and Linux simultaneously … imagine if you had 30 different platforms to develop for.

Erick Schonfeld, editor of the excellent Business 2.0, discusses this in The Race to Become the Next AOL and he links to a story in the Financial Times where one of MySpace’s founders says they’ll probably follow Facebook’s lead and introduce their own development platform.

An example of a more constructive approach is the platform Netvibes launched recently for developing widgets: Netvibes UWA. They emphasise openness and if you write a widget for Netvibes, it will work in iGoogle, the Apple Dashboard and “many more”.

Creating walled gardens like the Facebook development platform may well make sense as a business decision. One thing is certain though, it won’t benefit the consumer.