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their only competitive advantage is the network effect. and even then, when you're pitching to M&As, what would you even say? oh hi, i have tons of users playin
by alaskamiller 19y ago
their only competitive advantage is the network effect. and even then, when you're pitching to M&As, what would you even say? oh hi, i have tons of users playing on somebody else's backyard?
their positioning is as precarious as facebook app developers.
- mattmaroon 19y agoThey're in a far less precarious position than a Facebook app. An app developer is dependent entirely on the whims of one company for their success. Take, for example, Scrabulous. If MB sends a cease and desist to Facebook, they might be done for. Disqus, on the other hand, resides on thousands of independent blogs. Each one individually may decide to uninstall it or switch over to a competitor, but then Disqus loses only a tiny fraction of their userbase. It's much better for Disqus to have that power spread thinly over a lot of individuals than to have it all in one place the way an FB app dev does, especially given the capriciousness Facebook has exhibited since day 1. Disqus has tons of users playing in thousands of back yards, much like MyBlogLog or Feedburner.
- alaskamiller 19y agotheir positioning is precarious in that they're at the mercy of the platform providers. sixapart or automattic (they did buy a similar company) can come up with official comment systems with better support. livejournal doesn't even let them add on third party software. the flipside of course being that they're platform agnostic and third party they're capable of bridging the community at large and there's certainly value in being able to be a telephone instead of the telephone service provider but how do you monetize this whole thin? the only provider that has the power to monetize would be the blog software providers and even they have trouble doing that.