Steve Rubel just declared that the social bookmarking game is over and that Yahoo! (with del.icio.us) has won. I beg to differ!

Yes, businesses with network effects are very powerful and it is very hard to catch up with the first mover. However, businesses have only won after they have hit the "knee of the curve" and have truly experienced lift off.

Well, today del.icio.us might have huge adoption within the geek community but they are a small niche application with perhaps a few hundred thousand active users. So, we are just at the VERY early stages of a rapidly growing market. Is del.icio.us in a good position? Yes, however, they are not even close to winning yet. In fact, if you check the alexa stats, then you see anything but lift off. You see a site that is just flat, hardly the exponential curve that you would see in a network effects driven business that is really taking off. Ok, Alexa is anything but perfect but the trendline is generally correct.

We are very confident that our site, www.blinklist.com, has a very good chance of emerging as one of the leading players in this space as we continue to rapidly improve our service based on the feedback from our thriving community.

I do have to agree with Steve on one point, there are way too many social bookmarking clones out on the market and over the next year the dust will settle but BlinkList is most certainly going to be one of the players that will be around for a long time to come.

social+bookmarking del.icio.us delicious bookmarking yahoo!

Anyone that knows me knows that I am a VERY hard working person. However, I have never liked to work on the weekends and on the occasions that I have to, I have always let people know that this is a problem. However, reading through Google's and Yahoo!'s blog just makes me realize how warped the sense of work / life balance is at those companies. Do people at Google and Yahoo! not care about having a life?

Here is a quote from Google's blog

When we launched Google Talk, some people told us what a great idea it'd be to add chat to Gmail. True that. So a couple of us Google Talk engineers approached the Gmail team. They were excited about the idea, and we got to work immediately -- spending a lot of not-so-lazy Sundays huddled in a conference room.

Here is a quote from Yahoo! blog

In addition, we’ve been working hard to make My Web faster and lay the foundation for future functionality. It took us a little longer than we expected over the weekend, but the good news is that all went well and we’re in good shape for what comes next.

It seems like they are all bragging about working weekends and not having 'lazy Sundays.' What is wrong with a lazy Sunday? Is this where we are headed? If yes, I don't want any part in it. I don't mind working super hard but when companies and their employees are bragging about working weekends it just makes me sick.

Ok, now its time to get back to work! Perhaps I should start to write and brag about my 10, no make that 12 hour days. Just kidding, it is a 16 hour day. Ok, I will stop my rant. Things over here are great and we are having a good life balance, working hard and having lots of fun!

As promised, we just rolled out an improved tag cloud for your blogs. The new tag cloud that you can add to your blog can be easily customized. Now you can decide whether you want to show and share the most recently tags and sites that you have been blinking (a thought cloud) or whether you want to show your most popular tags (a traditional tag cloud).

In addition, you can now customize the colors, font size, and the number of tags that you want to show in your blog.

We hope you enjoy this and will start to add this to your blogs!

Mike