> Fair enough, but it seems like del is so simple really that you could
> replicate it fairly readily.
You can't replicate the user-base,
Well, for the record, the idea was: If you're going to have so many users - and (implicitly) if enough of them are *new* users (so that they don't know enough to miss del), and probably also, if the user base *grows* quickly enough (so the benefits of the social model kick in sooner rather than later) - what do you need del for?...
One of the questions built in to all of this is: Has del or has it not already achieved a scale that makes it impossible to eclipse?... It just occurred to me that it may not quite be there yet, and that something like Flock might be the way to eclipse del.
The best counter-arguments to this line of thinking seem to me to be: 1) the marketing point mentioned earlier; and 2) your point below that social software and browsers are different businesses.
and in addition, while the data model is
fairly simple, the data traversal is not.
Undirected graphs get complex much faster than they get large, for all the
usual Metcalfe/Reed's Law reasons. So the issue is not "Can we write
something that links users, links, and tags?" but "Can we write something
that handles all those entities in the millions, and performs real-time
queries that do complex things like calculate network neighborhoods?"
Del used to list the last 2 hours of queries on the homepage. Now it lists
less than 3 minutes or so -- that's a two order of magnitude increase in the
amount of incoming data, and the graph traversal problems grow faster than
linearly, so the server infrastructure and the query optimization are both
non-trivial.
Anyone putting up servers for downloading software has a brain-dead
interaction model, and isn't going to be forced to think hard about their
server or db setup. Things like del (and flickr and wikis and the other
things flock says they are going after) are a different kind of business
than Flock is in.
Ok, so this is very helpful, Clay. Thank you.
Actually, this helps me see that really, Flock is "just another browser." It'll integrate these social things better than others - at least theoretically, and at least for a while - but at the end of the day, when you look at their business, it's actually no different than the other browsers'. I wasn't as clear on this before reading your e-mail.
This seems to cast even more doubt on Flock. Why won't FF, e.g., be able to do whatever Flock does via extensions?... If you can take del and Flickr, etc. with you wherever you go, what's to keep you with Flock when it fails you in this way or that?... Its UI is going to have to be *awfully* good.
I guess I still wonder: If you were going to set out to do Flock, then why *wouldn't* you roll all your own social software? so that you could "trap" users just like we're all trapped in del. And I guess the answer is that you've probably then got to win *every* war, don't you? The Flickr war as well as the del war, etc. And this is just too much risk to bear. Something like that.....
I guess this is a third "counter-argument" to add to the list above.
Matthew
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