Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

It’s interesting to see how rapidly Web 2.0 companies and ideas can become a commodity nowadays. Take social news, the market which is best defined by the social news site Digg, where anyone can post a news item and users get to vote (thumbs up or thumbs down) on if a news item is worth reading. Just yesterday MySpace launched its version of a social news site, just the latest in a stream of firms who have added “digg” style news ranking to their pages. Among similar services are Netscape, Reddit, and Newsvine, along with literally dozens of clones of Digg.

Interested in putting up your own social news site? Just download Pligg, which allows you to instantly put up a Digg-style social news site today. Or download diggClone. Or maybe you just want a Spanish style Digg site–try Meneame. Think you’ve got an original idea for a “Digg” style site? You might want to check this list of 415+ “Digg-style” applications.

It’s gotten to the point where social voting on articles is just a feature people add to promote their web sites–for example, Language Weaver, a Marina Del Rey-based firm providing language translation software, just announced Kontrib.com, which uses their software to provide a multilingual Digg-style social news site. Clearly their business is selling translation software, a Digg clone is just a great way for them to get some attention and to demonstrate their capabilities.

Need another example? There’s been a lot of attention to social surfing from firms like StumbleUpon recently, which allows people to share the web sites they are visiting, due to rumors of an acquisition by eBay.  There are a number of competitors, like Me.dium and Trailfire, and Google just launched their own version of this as a feature of the Google Toolbar–probably a trivial weekend project for one of the firm’s many Ph.D. computer scientists.

With the commoditization of the software behind Web 2.0 occuring so rapidly, it seems to me that this market is becoming almost like the soft drink or bottled water market — a matter of branding and marketing. In that market, the entire back end of the operation is pretty much the same from company to company, but the driving force is how well a company can make their product attractive to consumers. The same goes for Web 2.0 companies now–this isn’t a technology game, it’s purely a matter of adoption, branding, and marketing your “brand” of a Web 2.0 company.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 8:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.