52 Bicycles

reddit is a cool service that doesn’t know what it has. It’s a game show right now, getting people to put in their “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” for various sites, and rewarding active users with fame in the form of a leaderboard.

But the cool part is that they are building a database of the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”. That’s the asset. I spoke about this earlier. They should be focused on getting everyone in the world to be adding their thumbs up and thumbs down.

It should be easy as pie to add one’s favorites from Firefox or IE to the “thumbs up”. There should be an interface to pull them off delicious, and maybe other social bookmarking sites.

And then with a single click, such as with a bookmarklet, one can add to the database of “stuff I like” vs “stuff I don’t like”.

This database of plusses and minuses, instantly populated with the user’s prior data entry, and added to with the bookmarklets, can create a lot of value for targeted advertising, for pointing to useful data, for enhanced search - imagine crossing this reader-centric database with google, which is kind of what wink is doing, but that’s one of many applications for these guys. And if they don’ t do it, someone else will.

And through creating the database, they create sustainable competitive advantage for their business that their software will never achieve, and make themselves an indispensable component for any number of high-value applications, which makes them an acquisition target.

But per my previous observation, this is speculation beyond what I know about these guys. But useful reader-formed data is the key to “web 2.0″, so those that can accumulate it and use in a way that can anticipate consumer needs is going to make an impression.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 12:51 am and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Reddit This