MyBlogLog's Growth
I wrote in my Social Networking Interconnects post the other day: … Well maybe Eric read that. Or maybe not. But he wrote a post on the MyBlogLog blog yesterday outlining exactly how fast MyBlogLog is taking off. Here's my favorite chart.
Context & Ripple Effects
Fred Wilson has been arguing since August that the interesting action is between services, not inside them — first with Caterina Fake's 'BizDev 2.0' framing of lightweight deals, then in his own Social Networking Interconnects post sketching how blog-side social tools could knit independent sites together. The same month, Don Dodge was telling bloggers that if their site stood out, VCs would come calling, marking 2006 as the year the long tail became investable.
Against that backdrop, this post is Wilson spotting confirmation: Eric's chart on the MyBlogLog blog shows the service's user adoption accelerating, which Wilson reads as his interconnects thesis playing out in real time.
First-order effects
- MyBlogLog's widget-driven signup loop compounds: every blog that installs the widget exposes its entire readership to the service, so the growth curve Eric published feeds itself.
- Wilson now has hard adoption data behind his Social Networking Interconnects argument, strengthening his position as the voice predicting where blog-social value accrues.
Second-order effects
- Competing blog-widget makers face pressure to add community and identity features just to keep placement on the same sidebars MyBlogLog is winning.
- Bloggers gain leverage they didn't have under portal-era economics — small sites that aggregate an engaged audience become acquisition or partnership targets, exactly the dynamic Dodge flagged in August.
Third-order effects
- If widget distribution keeps beating destination-site distribution, the social graph fragments across millions of independent blogs instead of consolidating inside a few networks — reshaping who owns reader identity online.
The trend: Social features are migrating off closed networks and onto distributed blogs through embeddable widgets, with adoption curves like MyBlogLog's setting the pace.