Friday, April 18, 2008
Wordpress Vs. Facebook
Wow, take a look at this graph showing unique visitors to both Facebook and Wordpress sites:
This graph is important: the traffic to decentralized Wordpress oriented sites are almost as numerous as the traffic to centralized Facebook!
I had thought that the trend the last two years was away from decentralized blogging and communication tools like Wordpress and towards centralized systems like Facebook, but it looks like both are happening at the same time. The deeper trend is towards personal communication platforms, whether these are centralized or decentralized.
This is important, because it means that decentralized platforms stand a chance in the marketplace today, which is important both to me and the open web. Now here's the deeper question: can we make decentralized systems like Wordpress even easier, so that the traffic to those can go beyond centralized systems like Facebook? Maybe it will be a strange fusion of the two: maybe we can create a one-click system that will install Wordpress on Google App Engine, for example, so you can get started very quickly without having to provision storage. What do you think? How can we make decentralized systems as easy to use as more centralized ones so that we get the usability benefit of centralization with the freedom of decentralization (a theme you can see in the work I've been involved in over and over with things like coworking, Paper Airplane, and more.)
[Thanks to A VC for highlighting this graph and the fact that Wordpress Vs. Facebook is doing pretty well]
This graph is important: the traffic to decentralized Wordpress oriented sites are almost as numerous as the traffic to centralized Facebook!
I had thought that the trend the last two years was away from decentralized blogging and communication tools like Wordpress and towards centralized systems like Facebook, but it looks like both are happening at the same time. The deeper trend is towards personal communication platforms, whether these are centralized or decentralized.
This is important, because it means that decentralized platforms stand a chance in the marketplace today, which is important both to me and the open web. Now here's the deeper question: can we make decentralized systems like Wordpress even easier, so that the traffic to those can go beyond centralized systems like Facebook? Maybe it will be a strange fusion of the two: maybe we can create a one-click system that will install Wordpress on Google App Engine, for example, so you can get started very quickly without having to provision storage. What do you think? How can we make decentralized systems as easy to use as more centralized ones so that we get the usability benefit of centralization with the freedom of decentralization (a theme you can see in the work I've been involved in over and over with things like coworking, Paper Airplane, and more.)
[Thanks to A VC for highlighting this graph and the fact that Wordpress Vs. Facebook is doing pretty well]
Labels: open web
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Unfortunately, I think that's actually visitors to the wordpress.com domain (ie, the centralized, hosted Wordpress service)
isn't wordpress.com (the hosted wordpress platform, from whom the wp-figures probably originate) the perfect merger of the centralized and decentralized system? or am i missing the point here?
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