The Wall Street Journal recently posted a pretty thorough article on the “next wave in the social-networking craze.” Now, mind you, as usual this story is way behind the curve (Digg is almost 3 years old), but still not a bad look at social bookmarking. And yes, calling a story behind the curve while posting it on your blog 3 days after everyone else is lame. Point taken. Touché.

So, a couple of things here. First, this is just crazy talk:

“These sites are the next wave in the social-networking craze — popularized by MySpace and Facebook.”

Is the WSJ serious that their memory only allows them to remember back to MySpace and Facebook as the pioneers of social networking? I hope that was just an overgeneralization and they aren’t actually attributing those bastards as the founders of socializing online. Eww. What do the critics say, oh WSJ?

“But critics say it’s simply an aggregate of borrowed content and links to a relatively small pool of blogs. And while they sometimes drive traffic to Web sites that are spotlighted, the spike can be temporary.”

See, now this is smart, and absolutely accurate. Next time you see an uber popular site, make note of it and be sure to come back after the craze. They will probably have a week of spiked traffic and sales, but just as quickly as it came it will disappear. This isn’t a long term method to build a business, on the contrary I think it teaches people to love you for 15 minutes and then right back out the door.

My fear about these things is that they truly do teach people to pay attention in tiny doses. I am a good example: I find a link on a service like these, think it is very cool/smart/entertaining and then I’m off to some other distant corner. A few weeks later I might have a passing recollection of having seen it, but there is no way in hell I’d find it again. I suppose that isn’t much different than book learnin’, but I think it is at a much more frightening pace.

It is interesting that even something “cutting edge” will repeat itself, though. The second most popular post on Digg right now is In case of a terrorist attack… follow these hilarious signs. Yeah, um… that was funny a year or two ago.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 at 7:07 am and is filed under Rant, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.