Fernando Gabrieli wrote:
its probably a new topic, why a site is successful where others dont
event get 1 comment posted...why craiglist was successful?
That's a big question.
Many successful sites have bodies buried somewhere. Up until 2002
or so, it was possible to launch new community sites with e-mail spam
campaigns. If you tried to do that today you'd have servers, ip
addresses, really anything associated with the operation burned pretty
quick. (Not like I'd know or anything...)
Community sites tend to be two-sided makets: for instance, people
posting personal ads and people reading personal ads. It's very hard to
dislodge an established competitor in this kind of market. Amazon,
Yahoo and other sites with big user lists tried adding auctions after
Ebay was successful, but it was always a flop -- why try to buy
something in a place where nobody is selling? why try to sell something
in a place where nobody is buying?
In early phases, 2-sided markets grow according to a differential
equation where dx/dt is proportional to x^2. This equation gives you
slower-than-exponential growth in the early phases (site that never
gets established) and crosses over to super-exponential growth before
hitting a singularity and going infinite at a finite time. Of course,
limiting terms make the singularity go away in real life.
It helps, therefore, to be the first person in a market with a
"good enough" product... There are some cases where products that
aren't "good enough" fail until something successful comes along: for
instance, a number of del.icio.us-type sites were created in the
1990's, and they just didn't go anywhere. del.icio.us got the user
interface right for putting content in, and nobody ever seemed to
notice that the interface for getting content out is entirely deficient.
Some sites connect with a community and some don't. There are some
subjects that people are interested in talking about and others that
they aren't -- sometimes the people that talk don't know and the people
that know don't talk.
_______________________________________________
New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List
http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
