I included this chart in my post yesterday.
I selected it because it made the point I wanted to make (that delicious was languishing under Yahoo!’s ownership)…
I got the following email from Joshua yesterday afternoon:
We continue to grow normally.
Unique users is not a good measure of our growth, though.
Much of our traffic is through the firefox and other browser extensions, which is not measured by these systems.
Additionally, we cut off search indexing several months ago, which also hurts the UU numbers.
It’s interesting to see Joshua Schachter correcting Fred’s post. I say this because I’m a die-hard del.icio.us user and also feel as if the service has been languishing. I’m an inclusionist pack-rat of my online experience and I like being able to tag pages and push them to a web-site (both del.icio.us/christmasgorilla and FriendFeed).
However, the reason I think the site has languished under Yahoo! has more to do with personal utility vs. publishing. When I first started using del.icio.us, it was useful to save things I liked to a web service rather than bring my browser to a crawl by favoriting things. But as I’ve continued to use the service, the utility of tagging has slowed. I find that I’m now just sharing more things from Google Reader (which gets pushed to FriendFeed).
I think I was originally very taken with tag clouds—they’re beautiful and offer an interesting snapshot of how someone categorizes information in their mind, but they’re navigationally almost useless. Even though I’m consistent with my own tagging practices, I can never seem to find the things that I want by browsing my tags. Search is a far better paradigm for finding information. And the search in del.icio.us is terrible and they’ve disabled Google search from being effective.
That’s interesting because I think del.icio.us was the original killer piece of social software—it had great personal utility that was amplified by a network effect (seeing who else was interested in what I was interested in). Now it’s only socially interesting, but has lost a lot of its personal utility as my list of tagged items has grown.
I think one of the interesting things about social software is that the value proposition changes as you become a power user. Often, you end up with too much noise in your Dashboard, FriendFeed, Twitter, etc. I’ve found my online habits changing a lot to deal with noise—I no longer spend much time on reddit, Facebook, twitter, or Google Reader. I do spend time on my Tumblr Dashboard (but don’t care about Radar) and on FriendFeed. But I’m counting on asymmetry in the applications to protect me from things I don’t care about seeing.
I think one of the things about acquired companies is that they get assimilated and go mainstream. If you’re a part of the fringe of early adopters, you may not like the mainstreaming of your favorite web services and perceive them to be languishing for your needs—yet the service could be thriving by other metrics—new users, broader appeal, etc. I think MySpace is a perfect example of this. This is also something that I’ve heard Evan Williams talk about at length—to really make a web service huge, you often have to pay less attention to your early fans. This is a tricky double-edged sword because those early adopters are the ones who help push the early success of a service, yet they’re also the first ones to jump ship for the cool, new thing.
