DISQUS

There isn't any rules based algos to make this type of thing work today. Keywords are not sufficient.

All the low hanging fruit easy stuff on Facebook has mostly been done. The potential to build a big audience still hasn't changed. The thing that people are realizing is they need to build all the real company stuff such as a sustainable competitive advantage, monetization strategy, etc.

@Dave MacClure: The pony may be the ability for social apps to attract and aggregate targeted audiences via the social graph. Attract the wrong audience and you have crappy CPMs ($0.10-0.30). Attract the right audience plus build the right context and you have the potential to command higher CPMs ($2-10 CPM).

This is nothing new and is very much like the early days of the web where the companies that stuck to the fundamentals and focused on building real business rather than a massive land grab made the most money.

Love this great post.

The logistic curve you refer to is actually also known as a Sigmoid function (aka S-Curve).

On Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function

There is also an Excel spreadsheet floating around for the S-Curve here:

http://jcandkimmita.info/jc/2007/04/business/modeling-market-adoption-in-excel-with-a-simplified-s-curve/

I've used this to model pretty closely Facebook application growth of some pretty popular apps.

Best,

Stanley

When looking at who is best I think one must look at two things.

* Quality of Results (i.e. SPAM is huge problem)
* Quantity of Results (i.e. Up to date, coverage)

To me the quantity of results don't mean a whole lot especially if I have thousands of results returned and a good majority of it are SPAM. So quality is more important, than quantity in my book.

For example, I frequently (once per week) like to do blog searches to find out what is happening in real estate for a particular area (search: "real estate austin").

http://technorati.com/search/real+estate+austin

For this search, on the first page the 3rd, 5th - 10th are all SPAM. There are 10 search results on the first page, so 70% of the results are SPAM. I the 1st, 2nd, and 4th result contain the words "real" , "estate", and "austin" but have nothing to do with what I am looking for.

The same search on Google Blogs don't contain any Spam on the first page.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&a...

The first result is a blog post about Hyde Park real estate in Austin. Highly relevant to what I am looking for.

Some more competitive areas are ripe with SPAM. Check out the following:
http://technorati.com/search/phentermine
http://technorati.com/search/ringtones

Given that a recent Microsoft research study mentioned that Blogspot contained more than 70% Spam Blogs I am not surprised by the results that I am seeing. Google seems to be doing a much better job at filtering SPAM than Technorati.