79 If you build it, they will come

There’s a rumor going around, saying that digg.com is for sale. The estimated price is $150m. This comes at only about a week or so after YouTube sold to Google. A lot of startup sites, many of them dealing with social networking in one form or another, are being gobbled up by the big corporations. I’m sure you can browse the recent news and come up with another couple of examples.

Note: This article focuses on the technical point of view. To put things into perspective you should also read another article, from Informit, which questions the enormous sums that these websites are going for and the system that evaluates them as such.

We have these websites with millions and millions of users (user meaning a visitor with more than casual interest in its services): Google, YouTube, Digg, Slashdot, Blogger, Flickr, MySpace and many more. They constantly make the news and huge piles of cash are mentioned. Everybody’s keen to know what gives, because everybody likes money and fame.

Some people mention the fabled “Web 2.0″. Some foresee a new dot com boom (perhaps complete with a dot com flop). Maybe they’re right, but I’d like to talk about what makes these websites so good, not their iffy price tags.

The crux of the matter can be expressed very simply. The tehnology has reached a state of spreading and acceptance that enables more and more people worldwide to get connected.

The consequences are immediate. Blogs are perhaps the most proeminent telltale sign of the bunch. What do they tell us? Give people a connection and easy to use tools and they’ll flood the net with content.

Which only goes to prove something that nobody should have ever forgotten about the Internet and the Web. It’s not about Web 2.0, that’s just the latest technology. Technology comes and goes when it becomes obsolete. Sure, it’s important, but the most important thing of all is still the one and only: Content, Lord of this World Wide Web.

Content was king on Archie, Gopher, WAIS, the Usenet, and the first baby steps of the Web. It was king when Gutenberg put together his printing machine, and arguably even before. Wherever large masses of people congregate, they’ll want juicy content. It’s even better if they can contribute to it.

It doesn’t have to be particularly intelligent or insightful stuff. Some of the famous websites of today have become notorious for their more retarded contributors. As more and more people get connected and the easier it is for them to spill their guts on the network, the easier it is to come across someone who’s been dropped on their head as a baby. And even the sane ones fall victim once in a while to the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

But it’s not all bad. Actually, I daresay that most content is in fact average, with a few brilliant pieces here and there. In noticing one retard because he makes the news, we overlook 1000 relatively normal people. That’s what the big websites use as fuel: millions upon millions of normal people.

Content does have to be abundent in order to keep them interested. Where to get abundent content if not from the same people who consume it? Let the beast turn in and devour itself. You just have to find the reel that will make it want to coil around it.

And this brings us to what’s been in all our minds from the beginning: How do I get in? Answer: build the right tool.

You no longer have to drag people kicking and screaming to the Internet. They’re already here. The net is teeming with people. We’ve reached critical mass, we’re already way past critical mass.

You just need to give them something to do. Something simple and interesting, that does one thing and does it well. All those big sites can be summarized in one or two words: photos; homemade videos; search; my page; my blog; geeks.

Find a word or two that nobody’s built a site for yet and you got it made.