Del.icio.us Lesson

I was reading an blog post by Mike Butcher, and found a reference to Joshua Porter’s “Del.icio.us Lesson.”

From now on I’m going to call this idea the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first.

Porter nails what we think is a major key to the current round of Internet innovation: personal value precedes network value. That doesn’t mean shared use isn’t valuable, in fact what we do at Scouta is use the community to benefit each individual with highly relevant recommendations, but it’s those recommendations, or what each individual member gets out of it that’s most important.

It’s interesting what happens when you turn social software on its head.