Monday, January 10, 2005

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part II

My morally bankrupt business plan of the day is that the interface for del.icio.us (as it now stands) is an ideal way to start viral advertising for web sites. This is prompted by the observation (no data yet, but that hasn't stopped me before) that people use del.icio.us as a way to find new web sites (I certainly do). And that the number of people who have bookmarked a site is an indicator of popularity.

All that you need to do is to get a group of about 50 people together, and have them over the course of a day all bookmark the same web site into del.icio.us. The web site always stays on the front page, and people click through on it. We take as an assumption that only the coolest of the cool (I'll fill in other names later) use del.icio.us, and therefore, we want trend leaders to see the web site we're (they?) are advertising.

Here's the interesting question / follow-on: How does a community like del.icio.us fix the problem? As it currently stands, I don't think there is a good fix for it. And I'm not sure if a community like Metafilter would be any better at fixing it either. I have some thoughts about how it may be possible to fix, but that's probably another post.

In the mean time, it shouldn't be too hard for someone to monetize this.

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