OK - today is the day. I’m going to wrap up StartupCamp Australia by posting stories on all the startups (don’t worry someone else will be writing the ut.ag one)

First cab off the rank is LinkViz

The LinkViz team is

• Ian Naylor
• Lee Goodman
• Ozan Onay
• David Soul
• Linda Gehard
• Richard Hayes

I love cool visualisations - so I love the LinkViz concept. The goal of the site is to monitor your social networks, check out what people are linking to, then represent that in a way that is visually navigable using variables such as size and proximity to denote popularity and relevance.

Think of it as kind of a visual tag cloud for what your friends are linking to with a whole bunch of sexier features.

So - that’s the cool stuff. Now let’s look at a couple of issues.

First of all it doesn’t quite do all that stuff…yet. You can navigate through and popularity is represented by size - but it’s not grabbing my social network data cause I haven’t put it in.

That having been said, it’s close and the concept is only 5 days old so we won’t hate on them too much.

Secondly, there’s no love for Internet Explorer. I’m sure that’s a technical issue as opposed to a philosophical position - but IE still owns the market so if they want real traction they’re going to have to sort that one out.

I spoke to LinkViz co–founder Ian Naylor about what the next steps are and this is what he had to say:

From a LinkViz perspective we have a few on-going developments:

• Full browser compatibility
• Improved pop-up information when hovering on the thumbnails (originating twitter conv, number of social references, better title desc summary)
• Filtering the Social Thumbnail Clouds to trending topics and themes (ie Barrack Obama , Tech etc) this will enable you to really drill down to websites your within your interests.
• Filling out the site with the usual about us, contact us, what we are actually providing etc

In addition to this we would like to add further revenue opportunities, ie per layer one of the thumbnails will be set aside for advertising, with the size/weighting being dictated by relevancy to other website thumbnails (or if successful long term the bid amount if we choose to go with direct advertisers).

That is our current dev list, I’m sure as we get further into it we will do more, certainly the team is (currently) still pumped to progress it.

It’s early days yet - but this could easily turn into a much-loved recommendation/research tool. And with Twitter’s appetite for buying complimentary services, if they get this right there could be a big pot of gold at the end of the LinkViz rainbow.