Well, I am not completely sure just how much of this really jives with my line of thinking. Still, it does make for a good read.

I was skeptical when I heard how huge video-sharing hub YouTube and social-networking hotspot MySpace have become. YouTube claims 40 million plays a day, up from 35 million just a week ago. The Washington Post recently reported that MySpace pulls more monthly visitors than Amazon and is closing in on AOL and eBay. Both sites are vague about their traffic details, though, so I ran them through Alexa, the traffic report generator favored by techies who don’t trust press releases. I nearly fell out of my chair. On Alexa’s charts, MySpace is an order of magnitude bigger than Friendster. YouTube will pass CNN any day now.

Both YouTube and MySpace fit the textbook definition of Web 2.0, that hypothetical next-generation Internet where people contribute as easily as they consume. Even self-described late adopters like New York’s Kurt Andersen recognize that that by letting everyone contribute, these sites have reached a critical mass where “a real network effect has kicked in.” Source: Slate

[tags]youtube,web 2.0,next-generation,unified theory[/tags]