Finally, The Internet As Intended.

For the past year, like most of you, I’ve been droning on about the long tail to anyone who will listen. I’m now almost through Chris Anderson’s just released book. It’s a great read, and it has been fun rediscovering his core concepts, and why I found them so compelling the first time I read the original Wired article. However, while I am a believer that virtually infinite inventory paired with the user’s ability to discover content/products does indeed change the dynamics of business today, one thing still strikes me as ironic: in order to matter in a marketplace that is serving a long tail - your service needs to be a hit.

Consumers have proven they have the attention capacity to purchase songs, movies, books, gourmet pizzas, or whatever in the long tail. In fact, Anderson offers compelling evidence that they prefer it. But do they have the attention to leverage multiple long tail services? There is a long tail curve of companies for every marketplace. The game has changed, and the companies that offer up a long tail of products/services to their customers will end up at the head in their market, they will, ironically, be tomorrow’s hits.

A great deal of Web 2.0’s hype, or the justification of its promise, is rooted in the fact that social application’s are engineered specifically to unleash the network effect. There’s a new social application being launched ever day now it seems. But You Mon Tsang, founder of Boxxet, makes a fantastic point in this post about bionic systems: with attention increasingly scarce, the web community simply will not support a large number of social applications - there isn’t enough participation to go around. His words:

…the web community will have a tough time supporting the large entries of social applications. There is simply not enough participants/participation (or attention) to go around. New services that are essentially empty applications that require participants to add content and value will have a harder and harder time. We should expect to see a handful of such services dominate eBay style (where the network effect works its awesome magic). But unless these services can create lock-in the way eBay did with its feedback score, we have seen the fickleness of the crowds also abandon services just as quickly.

So how do you get large-scale participation network-effect results when the reality is you’re social application will be competing for increasingly scarce attention? You seed it and feed it with automation - you make sure your application amplifies the small participation it does get. This is great thinking on the topic. I’d love to get an invite to Boxxet :-).