From Haaretz, via Micropersuasions:
Raw Sugar, an Israeli Del.icio.us clone, shut down. The company was privately funded.
RIP.
This comes a few days after Conde Nast-owned Wired totally violated any speck of ethical disclosure policy and called for Digg to become the Friendster of 2007 without mentioning that the parent company had bought Digg competitor Reddit.
Then again, they also called for Google’s stock to hit $1,000, so who knows if they were being serious. Is Google on pace to be worth more than MSFT and on its way to becoming the world’s first trillion dollar market cap company. Not sure, but Google $1,000? Crazier things have happened… like Google $500, $400 etc.
Will Digg pull a Raw Sugar and shut down next year? No. Any time? Probably not. Will it crash to earth? Well, not crash. Will it become a Friendster? Maybe.
It does strike many resemblences to Friendster, and Steve Rubel does a good job showing how much the Web’s fickle audiences change tastes to merit the question. Of course, Digg has a lot more money raised than most companies in social bookmarking, but that adds to the pressure because they’ll have to expand their business quite a bit to satisfy the lofty VC money and what not.
Suddenly, Reddit and Delicious selling do not seem like bad ideas, of course, many people said the same thing about MySpace, and look at its post-acquisition growth.
In the end, it all boils down to people and personalities. To folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose, maybe it’s best not to sell. For others (and I’ve worked with and for the type), selling is the only real option cause they won’t be able to handle the ensuing growth and larger company.
People are human, business is secondary to that basic premise.
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