Couple of comments: 1) I'm now recommending to my friends to log out of Facebook and visit it in a private/incognito browsing mode. Probably the same thing nee

Couple of comments: 1) I'm now recommending to my friends to log out of Facebook and visit it in a private/incognito browsing mode. Probably the same thing needs to be applied to Google sites. 2) More importantly, I think it's a bit simplistic to divide the web into "open web" and "Big Web". There are sites that fall in between the wild west of linking and social networking sites. Hacker News is one of these. So is Reddit and StumbleUpon. These sites generate a huge number of page views. In fact, I would guess that they generate more page views for people with only a few thousand followers on social networks. Even if you don't hit the front page of HN, every submission is automatically posted to Twitter (and probably Facebook, I wouldn't know), so the chances of it going viral are just as strong as if you had posted it yourself. These in-between sites allow you to gain the benefits of Big Web without directly participating in it.