Has the proliferation of bookmarking, sharing, and content aggregation sites in the last two years created the conditions for an industry poised for rapid consolidation? We think perhaps...
Take a look at the list of relatively similar (I know, I know, "each of these sites is unique, with its own special value proposition and appeal for its target users!", founders would claim...) sites which are now included in AddThis's list for its "Bookmarking" and "Sharing" site widgets. It's astounding.
We at Spring Creek Group take a pretty aggressive approach to utilizing as many of these sites as we can keep up with... we've got the public Digg profile keeping track of articles and posts we find relevant and interesting for our industry, we've got the Delicious bookmark roll growing, we've got the StumbleUpon account setup and tracking what we like, etc. But the list is becoming too long to keep up with, much less manage lately. Furl, Magnolia (not to be confused with ExxonMobil's Magnolia.com, mind you...), Reddit, Newsvine, and on and on and on and on. Admittedly, we're hedging our bets and experimenting for the sake of experimenting (on behalf of our own brand and website discoverability / SEO benefits, as well as to just have a sandbox in which to play on behalf of our collective opinion to share with our clients) by maintaining somewhat active accounts / profiles / public pages across as many of the content sharing sites as we can reasonably keep up with.
But the punter in me wants to place the bet: how long before the grand consolidation occurs? A year... two... three? Does "the internets" need ten different bookmarking sites? Does it need twenty? Perhaps... or perhaps not. Network effects are going to win out here eventually... the value of these sites is not only in helping all of us information-overloaded, easy-to-lose-vital-stuff-online types just keep track of "all the news that's fit to blog"... it's also in creating that body of shared feeds and links and thumbs-ups that allows any individual to subscribe to the "hive mind" of shared interest across many others inside the given site or network.
We'll see. Personally, I like the different downstream benefits that some of these sites offer (Digg's on-the-fly customizable, endlessly configurable Digg Widgets which allow for easy Javascript integration of a Digg roll into anyone's site or blog are particularly slick, and the Delicious app for Facebook profile integration is convenient indeed vs. the fairly limiting "Post" integrated functionality offered by King Zuckerberg and his supposedly-$15billion-company for profiles as well as Groups). But I wonder where it all will end. No doubt those hundreds of car companies in the early twentieth century all offered differentiated, unique products... but economies of scale on the R&D, production, marketing, and sales sides of operations all caught up with most of them eventually. Maybe the same economic principles aren't at work online, where "switching costs" are essentially nil from site to site or service to service.
But our grey matter just isn't wired to keep up with more than about 5 or 10 things at a time, be it concepts or phone numbers or preferred bookmarking sites. Pretty soon, we're going to need a bookmarking site just to keep track of our bookmarking and sharing sites, profiles, and accounts (how meta is that?). Maybe someone will come up with that and become another newly minted grillionaire-on-paper. Or maybe the big guys with the best business models and the largest UU shares will start gobbling up the little fish to expand their shares further. We'll see.
Until then, feel free to subscribe to any one of our "springcreekgroup" sharing site feeds. They're all special in their own, unique way (for now).
Happy linking.
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