Digg + Del.icio.us are the norm… what’s next?
It’s interesting when the big boys start seeking parody with the startups. A lot of sites have embraced Digg’s style of community selected news. Cnet being one of the largest who have included “digg this” buttons on all of their stories. This is true of del.icio.us’ social bookmarking as well.
Now Netscape is trying to get in on the action allowing their users to populate their top news stories. What does this all mean? I like to relate it to the big grid – small grid dilemma. The big grid (accessible, mainstream whatever you want to call it) likes to mine the small grid for gems that they can take to recreate and make accessible. We’re seeing this a lot now in Movie and Music. Where a few years ago nobody cared about Broken Social Scene or the Decemberists and now they have a strong mainstream following. The same can be said about films like Rushmore and Magnolia vs Napoleon Dynamite and Crash.
I’d like to be optimistic and think that this generally elevates the level of the medium. There is level of authenticity which needs to be apparent for those in the small grid to accept big grid items who have adapted their craft. So what does this all mean for Web 2.0? I would hope all this IS elevating the web. Social software seems to be a very prevalent and reoccurring theme, allowing users to link to each other in various passive and active ways. These web toys are slowly moving out of the alpha geek circles and absorbing other demographics. This allows for new and interesting opportunities in other movements such as continuous computing. When the proficency for tools like Digg and Del.icio.us goes up so do the opportunities for creating another generation of tools.
The only question is if we are actually laying the correct foundation for innovation on the Web. Although the beautiful part is that the web is very much an accelerated society. Memes live and die in a matter of days. Experimenting and the web go hand and hand and as we begin to have other pieces of hardware singing the same tune a whole new world of opportunities will emerge.