OK. I’m starting to wonder if an ex-staffer or advisor from my Startup 1.0 has landed at Yahoo! First, they announce a product called Searchmonkey. Sounds a little like Greasemonkey, and intentionally so. Searchmonkey is supposed to give site owners more control over how their search listings appear on Yahoo!, the same way the Greasemonkey lets users control how different Websites look in (mostly) Firefox.

Now Greasemonkey isn’t exactly a product of my first startup, but it did originate from Aaron Boodman — a guy working for me as a full-time employee in the Web 1.0 days. Aaron’s job at the time? Implementing prototypes of my patent-pending product called Glue™.

Glue is a set of technologies around what later came to be known as “mashups” except that Glue started way back in 2000/2001. We filed trademark for the name “Glue” and successfully sold deployments of the technology at a wide range of A-list clients including Virgin Atlantic Airways, MasterCard, EarthLink, Sprint/Nextel and Audi. Our version of Glue powered tens of million of dollars in sales through the ShopAMD Web site for more than two years, and supported most of the joint e-commerce programs between Microsoft and AMD.

Aaron’s epiphany, apparently realized just after he left as an employee of my Startup 1.0, was that it might be easier to change things at the point of presentation (e.g. in the browser) than through proxy servers or on the back-end as our company was mostly doing at the time.

I’m ever hopeful that Aaron will publicly give a little shout-out to how/if my Glue™ product thinking shaped his early work on Greasemonkey. (He’s gone out on a limb for another of his ex-bosses.) If you’re out there, Boogs, remember that you still owe me one favor from a few years back — even though you’re doing fantastically well on your own these days.

So there you have it. Greasemonkey, Searchmonkey, Yahoo! Glue, and Glue™. All swirling just an arms’ reach away from this little blog. In the old days, I would have brooded over things I might have done differently to squeeze more personal gain out of trends that my old Startup 1.0 predicted way ahead of time.

But these days, I’m pretty darn excited about a potential Startup 3.0 that sees its first light of day in public later this month. It good. It’s timely. It’s got smart people helping me from the ground up. I haven’t felt this strongly about the likely success of an idea in years. Something tells me that Yahoo!, Microsoft or Aaron’s current employer might like this little project, too…