A Rising Tide Floats All Web 2.0 Boats

If you're reading this you probably live in the online techy world.  You subscribe to blogs via feedburner at netvibes or bloglines, you check digg for news, you're linked in, techcrunch is a staple, you put photos on flickr and then upload them to typepad, wordpress, or blogger.  You're wired.  You can loosely define web 2.0.

Now leave the computer and go outside.  Not one of the above links is a household name, particularly in the college generation.  Flickr is the closest, and Yahoo already grabbed them anyways.  These sites are huge in the web 2.0 world, but they're nothing in the 'people world.' 

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, says there's a gap...or a chasm that must be crossed...between the innovators and early adopters of your product....and the world.  That's never been more true than in the social web.   Web 2.0 sites worry about each other, about their competition....but why?  Most sites that are getting acquired are not  billion dollar acquisitions.  Del.icio.us and Flickr were not gigantic deals.  Myspace and YouTube were...but why?  BECAUSE THEY'D REACHED THE MAINSTREAM...THEY'D CROSSED THE CHASM FROM TECH GUYS TO THE GENERAL POPULATION.

TechCrunch has recently talked about Digg competing with Reddit, and Wired Magazine's (whose parent company also owns Reddit)  unethical reporting of the 'downfall of digg.'  Even more interesting to me, TechCrunch announced a site called Spotplex, which I believe will be a site much more likely to cross Moore's chasm to the college population and beyond.  These three sites are all in competition.  That's true.  But is that bad?

These sites sell the 'democratization of the news.'  Digg's Kevin Rose started it, and great for him, but Reddit's founders cashed out on it first.  Digg is undoubtedly worth more.  Should Spotplex gain a following it could be worth the most.  If they want to be huge, if they want to have even half of Facebook's traction, they have to be more mainstream.

These sites can do one of two things.  They can try and kill each other off so one reigns supreme (maybe what Conde Naste is doing?), and has the small following of technically oriented people reading news.  Or....OR...they can realize that the goal isn't to be the one site to have the tech following...the goal is to show EVERYONE who reads online news that site democracy is the best method to find good stories.  If they can do that, it will be EASY for 3 sites to all cash out huge...as the tides of the masses flood their sites.  MySpace did this...YouTube did this...Facebook did this (and Facebook has the opportunity to trump the other two in my opinion)...and...well...30 bucks says that Digg and the others wouldn't mind being in the same breath as those three.