Yesterday, I had a brief Twitter discussion with Rober Scoble. It started when Scoble and a few of the Web 2.0 bloggers re-twitted an article that suggest Google is gonna buy Twitter. I added the following to the conversation.
Twitter is a lot like del.icio.us, Digg and MyBlogLog. Where are they now? They were geek fads. Twitter will fade.
I'm willing to bet $1,000 you are wrong. Wanna put up?
if Digg is a "fad" then I want a "fad" too: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/Digg.com/?metric=uv
I wasn't willing to bet $1,000, but I did respond that I'd take the bet for $100. I never heard back on the bet. Hopefully he takes me up on it.
Further, you look at the stats Scoble provided reguarding Digg. I wouldn't put any stock in web stats, but if you look at Alexa web stats for Digg, then you get another story. Brandon Wirtz suggested that Digg traffic has been dropping 7% monthly for 6 months. I'm not gonna argue the stats, but what I see is that uber-geeks like Scoble have moved on from Digg after evangelizing it for a year or two. All that you have to do is look at Scoble's Digg profile and note that it hasn't been active for several months now. The same is true of Steve Rubel and most all of the other Web 2.0 evangelists.
If you look at the other Web 2.0 fads, like del.icio.us. You can see that some geeks continue to use it (Steve Rubel), while others have long stopped (Scoble). If you look at the web stats for these Web 2.0 fad websites, then you can see that most are fading (delicious).
Basically, the Web 2.0 websites of the last decade begin with a small group of uber-geeks. The site is picked up by Steve and Scoble from the uber-geeks and blasted to their mostly geeky audience. The geeks in turn blog about it and tell their friends. The audience jumps on the bandwagon and the websites receive tremendous growth for a year or two. This is classic WOM (Word of Mouth) viral growth seeded thru the top geek bloggers.
Unfortunately, Steve and Scoble get bored and move onto newer things. They neglect to blog about Digg and even stop using it entirely. The WOM funnel breaks down and the website's traffic begins to fade.
I'm gonna call this the Scoble factor.
This doesn't apply to non-geek websites like MySpace or Facebook, but even MySpace has experienced a decline as users move over to Facebook.
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