I run Techspace London (http://techspace.co). We have coworking spaces for tech startups near the Old Street roundabout. Contact me through the website - we can probably accommodate you for a couple of days.
I'm trying to keep the homepage as free of clutter as possible but I do think this would add a bit of personality to the site (as opposed to the sterile, crowdsourced feel that you mentioned before). I'll have a think about a creative way to put this in.
Thanks for the feedback - really helpful. I've been thinking about adding a poll feature (e.g. "Which of these dresses should I wear for a party tonight?"). Making that the main focus of the site is an interesting idea.
Thanks for the feedback. I will have a careful think about anonymous submissions (obviously spam is a big issue). Anonymous voting is definitely on the cards.
Most of the startups that are making money are the ones you've never heard of. This is a pointless exercise...however, here are some that I believe are making money that you may have heard of (happy to be corrected as I don't know for sure that they're all making money):
I prototyped a Rails-like framework in JavaScript using Rhino and Servlets and was suprised how feasible the whole thing seemed for a production website. JavaScript is perfectly capable for this IMO.
The benefits come when you start to re-use code on the front- and back-end. An obvious example is form validation business rules. Using the same models can be really handy in AJAX-heavy apps, too. It can be very DRY if done right.
I saw that someone recently wrote a V8 module for Apache - that could lead to some really interesting developments.
I bought mine new a while back (~$3000 AUD) from Apple. Just looking at eBay, they seem to go for a touch over $1000 USD at the moment. I figure they're a bit of a bargain at the moment since they're perfectly capable and have just been replaced by the shiny new model. I mainly develop Ruby Rails/Merb apps with TextMate.
How about redirecting the first URL to the second? Updating the fragment part via JavaScript shouldn't hit the server so that wouldn't be affected by the redirect. If you did get into a situation where it inadvertantly redirects then you could just check the referrer to prevent that.
I was more than happy to download the Silverlight plugin (I didn't have it installed). After an apparent successful install (latest OSX) and restarting Firefox, I'm told the plugin's not installed. I don't know how typical this is but perhaps Silverlight's not ready for the prime time yet?
Music? It's a reasonable indicator of lifestyle choice (so good chance of bringing compatible people together), not male dominated and it could be multiple niches (adding up to something on a much bigger scale).
My first impression is that this doesn't do much that Firefox doesn't already do (ok, maybe Opera/Chrome style thumbnail quick start but I don't care too much for that anyway). There's no compelling reason for me to come back.
Maybe if you can expand on the shortcut idea, something along the lines of what Ubiquity is doing, then you might have something that appeals to the hacker crowd. Honestly though, I think you'll have a tough time creating something that goes beyond what all the other start page sites out there are doing.