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"Mike Arrington picks up on the fact that Squidoo isn't performing all that well.  Some might say \"failing\".  I had a nagging suspicion this might happen, but I probably didn't express my view as clearly as I could have.  My concern (as expressed on my original post) is that Squidoo began as a walled garden.  As we all know, getting users to post content on your site is tough if they have no motivation to do so.  The best social software has a selfish motivation at its core - the del.icio.us lesson, for instance (hat tip to Joshua Porter), shows that users must be using your site for selfish reasons before you have any chance of building a community.  Squidoo tried to get around the motivation problem with revenue sharing - that's great, so long as you can actually deliver on the promise of paying people.  But since Squidoo has a walled garden of static, unlinked content, the revenues haven't been great and the amount of work required is far higher than the reward.  I've always felt that a combined approach may be the most effective motivator - an addictive platform, plus the ability to monetize your content if you want (see my thoughts on adding your Yahoo Publisher ID to del.icio.us).\nSo can Squidoo be saved from the f-word?  Possibly.  Based on my experiences over the last few months, I'd say that Squidoo lenses will end up becoming more like an aggregator, allowing you to pull together lots of outside information (in fact, Squidoo is already encouraging users to place widgets on their pages).  But while aggregation solves the static content problem, it raises whole a new issue: there are hundreds of sites gunning for this space (including the ajax start pages) and we're nearing saturation point.  How can you create a signal in all that noise?\n\n\nMike also raises the idea of startup success reflecting badly on the founder.  I'll put in the disclaimer that I'm not exactly a follower of Seth Godin, Squidoo's creator, but I do think Mike is making a good point.  We can also point to Mike's own project, Edgeio , which is gaining plenty of mindshare, but not much traffic.  While leveraging \"the edge\" is a cool idea, it's also one that's way ahead of its time.  I feel that Edgeio's angle should be the aggregation of niche classifieds sites, and that making people change their behaviour (by posting classifieds on blogs) is a really tough gig.  Plenty of people have pointed out genuine concerns with Edgeio's gameplan, but most of them have the advantage of being outside of the echo-chamber, making it easier to separate the ideas from the personalities.  It's also important to remember that when someone (especially Mike) says that they \"like\" a new company, it isn't a prediction of success.  Rather, they're expressing an interest in a particular idea - in Edgeio's case, I believe the edge aggregation model will take off, even if Edgeio doesn't.  \nBased on my assumption that 80% of businesses fail, I've tried to be skeptical of the thousands of Web 2.0 startups with no business model.  I personally believe that many of these companies won't be around in two years - that's the nature of business, unfortunately.  Nonetheless, I still find myself softening the blow, since it's pretty hard for a founder to hear that his company is headed for trouble.  But if there's one thing I'm learning, it's that honesty trumps sensitivity every time.  Looking back at the early (and overzealous) posts on Mashable makes me cringe.  I've toned it down since then, but I think there's still room to become more skeptical, more pragmatic, and more upfront when it comes to predicting (and hopefully avoiding) failure.  \nIn that vein, I'm going to conclude by saying that Share Your OPML won't change the game in any significant way.  It's a neat tool, but ultimately Squash is right - even geeks will find it geeky."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/05/09/squidoo-edgeio-and-the-f-word/>