Great post. - Iain Baker

amen - Mark Dykeman

Great post Steve... some great points in there. Thanks. - Adrian Nadeau

Awesome. - Raoul Pop

Thanks a lot guys. I''m really interested in seeing who manages to clear this hump, and what that product will look like. - Steve Spalding

I hear ya Steve, we have been banging our heads off the wall with these issues for years now :) My head is starting to hurt! lol - Adrian Nadeau

"Writing about technology on the web is like building a Starbucks in Manhattan — it seems like a great idea until you look across the street." Nice. :) - Nathaniel Payne

Fabulous post, Steve. It's a message we've brought up ad nauseum on The Guidewire but the irony is, of course, that the mainstream isn't reading either one of our blogs. In an interview on 60 Minutes this weekend, Bruce Springsteen said something I can't get out of my head. "You have to make an audience care about your obsessions." I personally haven't figured out how to do that yet, but am somewhat comforted that none of us in the technosphere have. - Carla Thompson

I think a large part of it is making our obsessions more palatable. We are all saturated in information day in and day out, so we develop solutions to the problems that arise from that, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." The result is that the best ideas I ever hear using social tech come from people who have just been introduced to it. - Steve Spalding

@Nate who knows, so many of them are shutting down it might not be such a bad plan afterall. ;) - Steve Spalding

Seth needs to reread his book Meatball Sunday! Is he pushing a pyramid skim? "Buy my book to join my tribe!" John Chow! - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Wrong thread, Igor. ;) - Nathaniel Payne

Sorry! ;-) - Igor The Troll יִצְחָק

Word. - Eric Rice

Great post. Mainstream is much bigger. Popular articles on FriendFeed can't usually get anywhere on Digg. - Mitchell Tsai

Even Digg is only a larger subset of "not mainstream." It has a lot of traffic, but I think sites like Drudge Report, DailyKos and Perez Hilton have orders of magnitude more -awareness-. We are very good at rallying numbers, but very bad at getting people to care. - Steve Spalding

Leverage: Do you need to reach everyone though? What about concentrating on movers & shakers (or whichever group interests you)? - Mitchell Tsai

You definitely don't need to reach everyone. The problem we suffer from is that movers and shakers are generally unwilling to -buy- the services that are being offered to them. I am less concerned with saturating mainstream markets than I am in creating services that meet the -needs- of mainstream markets (an enterprise software company is way more likely to be profitable than even the most popular social app) - Steve Spalding

Well done.. - Dave Peck

I don't view the "law of large numbers" as a "dirty little secret". I agree with you across the board though which is why I've never wasted any time chasing Digg or Stumble traffic. We just got a stable link from Drudge to TVbytheNumbers -- no branding, just "TV Ratings" (which makes a lot of sense for a few reasons). We didn't ask (never have communicated w/Drudge). It's not as much traffic as a Digg or stumble spike, but it's sizeable -- bigger than Yahoo search, so far pretty stable and way better traffic in terms of bounce, engagement, etc. - Robert Seidman

Great post. congrats - jonathan

Steve: How about concentrating just on "influencers" (not big movers & shakers, but people who are heavy networkers)? There was a marketing book (forget name) which said that "Old money" tends to hide info - my favorite hairdresser, vacation spot, etc..., but some types of "New money" are the guys who share their favorite tips around the golf club - cool car I got, great vacation spot, neat electronic toy, good business connection spot. - Mitchell Tsai

Targeted marketing. My favorite recent books are "Buzzmarketing" - Mark Hughes, 2008 http://amazon.com/Buzzmar... "Meatball Sundae" - Seth Godin, 2007 http://amazon.com/Meatbal... I think the quote comes from one of these, but not sure. - Mitchell Tsai

brilliant - yvons

Excellent post Steve, for a minute there I thought it had to do with fraud. - Mike Fruchter

Great points. In the past few years of writing my blog, I figured out that nobody cares about what I think is cool. But when I solve problems that plague others, ones which I personally might brush off or consider trivial, such as how to recover a lost password or use a spreadsheet to budget your money, the traffic pours in. - Tom Harrison

Mitchell, that's another good point. Especially when growing a product, but many times you are going to have to move past initial influencers to scale your income. - Steve Spalding

Steve: I think the cool web 2.0 idea is to have the *influencers* be part of your marketing team. It's a more-refined and friendly version of MLM. I'd rather have 100 other people do my selling, than try to sell everyone myself. - Mitchell Tsai

Good post Steve. I wrote something about this phenomenon this morning. The problem is both a lack of creativity on the entrepreneur side (lets use the free model everyone else uses in web 2.0) and on the demand side. The mainstream user doesn't need services the early adopter crowd over here gets all crazy about (including Friendfeed). It doesn't solve a problem, address a need, so people won't pay for it. It's dead simple really. Create something that produces user value, and the user will be happy to pay - Alexander van Elsas

fantastic article. So many good points and analogies. - Chieze Okoye

@Alexander Right on, and there are a bunch of problems out there just like that. While there were a lot of problems with the pre-bubble days, the one thing they did well was recognize how the web could help with real, brick and mortar problems. - Steve Spalding

http://www.patientslikeme.com/ is a good example of a company doing something useful, I think. - Meryn Stol

Very cool Meryn, thanks for passing this along. This is exactly the sort of application that made the web so interesting for me. - Steve Spalding

I loved this article. I was discussing Knol and data portability with a friend of mine last week and he informed me that he barely even uses facebook. This is both a challenge an an opportunity. The future lies with applications that are both ubiquitous and dead simple while adding real value to the lives of it's users. Facebook came close but the abundance of applications was both a blessing and a curse in terms of unpassionate engagement. We need a graph of effort to value for differential usage patterns before we will come any closer to adding value to those unwilling to adopt early. - Derick Valadao

Interesting concept, comparing effort to usage. How easy is it for someone to just "pick up" something like Friendfeed. I'd dare say it's harder than we might think. - Steve Spalding

I loved the final sentence "What should we do while we’re waiting? I don’t know, we could probably use another Google-killer." I'm starting to write a undergrad thesis about Data Portability and this article made me think a lot about the target of all these rumblings: will the Crowd (tm) ever care about Data Portability, will it ever realize its value or will the service providers implement it in such a subtle way that ordinary users won't even notice? - Francesco Levorato