Long Live the Walled Garden!
Josh K. has an interesting post that contrasts the acquisition & retention model of social networks (and community sites) in general.
The winners have a “catch and keep” model where the site is “sticky” while the less succesful players have a “catch and release” model where repeat visits are low and value is garnered linearly.
Another way to put it ... we should try to build a site with a set of functionalities which gives users incrementally more value on the second visit than the first visit . . . third visit more than the second vist . . . and so forth. In many ways, this is a practical intent of metcalfs law and perhaps much more actionable than simplying trying to build a large userbase and claiming to have reach critical mass and network effects. The goal for any website would be creating accretive value per incremental visit.
Another interesting interpretation of Josh’s post is that social networks that are augmenting/turbo charging offline & parallelsocial interactions seems to have higher value and relevancy to the user than ones which tries to be completely virtual. If a site has relevancy to the daily (and thus offline) lifes of its user (campus life for facebook users, professional & personal networking for meetup users etc) it will remain more sticky than a site which is simply trying to act as a bridge or replacement for physical interactions. (Yes, I believe the future lies in “singularity”)
Lastly, to the snarky title of this post. It wasnt long ago (12 month?) that the web is buzzing about “attention aggregators” which mostly became just “catch and release” websites. It is very possible to create a “edge” based site which has the “catch and keep” value proposition (google for one) . . . but in truth, the functionality and features required to provide accretive value per incremental visit can rarely be achieved by an aggregator unless aggregation can provide such a value (which only occurs very very rarely . .. such as in google’s case). In most cases, aggregation is not enough and product/feature based value can only be built and captured through a “walled garden” like website which nurtures and builds value within a tighly controlled environment. A potentially winning model (I have to think more about this) is a hybird site like digg which combines edge aggregation with wall-garden like product and features . . .