Recently, after a couple of suggestions from blog commenters, I decided to try StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon installs a toolbar in your browser that allows you to give instant thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings for the websites you’re viewing. You can also tag them, comment on them, and recommend them to others. Click on a button while you’re browsing and you’ll find a page of user reviews for the site you’re on.
A year ago, I might have been really excited about this. StumbleUpon seems like a perfectly nice and well-implemented service. Instead, I’m suddenly feeling jaded. There’s just too much web 2.0 gimmickry around and I’m starting to get that bursting-bubble feeling.
I have a Reddit account. I regularly use Technorati. I run a WordPress blog with plenty of plug-ins to allow cross-posting, related posting, and comment previewing. I have a Firefox extension called coComment that allows me to track any blog conversation I want. I maintain a MySpace page, a LinkedIn profile, a LiveJournal, and an Amazon blog. My library is on LibraryThing. I sync my browser settings with Google BrowserSync, read e-mail on both GMail and Yahoo!, and read the news on customizable Google News pages. I read RSS feeds in Sage, Bloglines, and IE7. I have instant messaging accounts on Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Google Talk, along with a Trillian client to run them all.
Where does it all end? I could sign up for Digg and del.icio.us and Blogger and Friendster and…
Every single one of these services has a few things in common: they’re all meta information tools. They don’t actually, you know, do much of anything. They’re the Wonder bread that’s supposed to be sandwiching the meat of my online experience. They simply allow me to noodle around with my information in interesting and novel ways, to disseminate it far and wide, to share it and crunch it and squeeze it and caress it. Or they point me to other information that someone else has shared, crunched, etc.
But here’s something else that I’ve noticed: all of their revenue streams are somewhat suspect. Google, Yahoo, and MySpace might have big market capitalizations and lots of dough in the bank, but in the end they’re funded mostly by advertising. Many of these other services are even a step removed from that, and depend on Google’s advertising.
What’s wrong with advertising? Nothing. Except that me and hundreds of thousands of others run ad blocking software (I choose the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox along with Filterset.G) that wipes all of those ads off the screen without a trace. Except that there are morons who perpetrate click fraud on their competitors’ search engine ads with no remorse and (generally) no repercussions. Except that for all of this money that keyword-targeted advertising is supposedly making for so many people, I very rarely actually click on any of it.
Many of these companies have other services that they’re trying to charge money for, but I don’t know how much success they’re having. Google and Yahoo have a whole host of additional services ripe for premium, paying versions, but I don’t think any of them are actually setting the world on fire. StumbleUpon, quite amusingly, tries to convince me to buy “accelerated distribution” of my website whenever I click on a StumbleUpon referring link in my web stats package. But are people buying?
So we’ve got a) four zillion start-ups that b) don’t charge a penny for their services, and c) stay afloat through shaky advertising revenue. Sound familiar?
Now, don’t get me wrong — I like a lot of these services. I’ve blogged before about my adoration for LibraryThing, for instance. I’ve found many an interesting (or at least diverting) website through Digg and Reddit. And StumbleUpon seems like a perfectly good idea, executed in a perfectly good way, available from a perfectly good website. (Let’s also keep in mind that I’m being unfair by lumping an open source project like WordPress in with the rest of these for-profit companies.)
And of course, none of these companies (with the possible exception of Google) indulges in the kinds of gross financial negligence that the dot-coms of the ’90s did. I’m sure the guys who run Digg are doing very nicely for themselves, but I doubt that every lowly coder in the place is getting a six-figure signing bonus and company BMW. I’ve talked with Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, in the past, and while their membership is growing like crazy, Tim hasn’t exactly started shellacking bundles of money and using them as office furniture.
And yet…
I’m starting to get that same feeling all over again. You know, the feeling you got when that twenty-pound bag of dog food from Pets.com arrived on your doorstep in 1998 for some ridiculously low price with free shipping, and you looked at your spouse and said, “This is just too good to be true.”
It was. And maybe, just maybe, it still is.