Take A Deep Breath

Josh Kopelman has a much commented on post about how many – or rather, how few – people are aware of the Web 2.0 darlings such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, or even MySpace. Josh points out that many of these companies, and especially the newer ones, can quickly obtain a user base of between 5,000 and 25,000, primarily driven from the 53,651 readers of the TechCrunch blog. He also guesses that the 10,000 most active users of the top ten Web 2.0 sites are probably all the same people – and there’s always some truth in jest.

Personally, I don’t think there’s any problem with sites having a user base of a few thousand – the trick is how much money you can earn from those users, from whatever method you’ve chosen to do so, and still be a viable site. However, I do agree with the underlying implication that the industry needs to take deep breaths into a giant paper bag.

Flickr is the only site where I’ve personally witnessed take-up and usage by “regular” people – it’s just a really great way to share photos, and it works tremendously well.