Photo: Kenneth Moyle
Web products have followed a steady evolutionary path from the compound to the atomic. Today’s popular social sites are spin outs of behaviors that emerged from blogs and forums, the primordial soup of the early social web. Before there was Twitter, people were doing something similar to tweeting on so- called link blogs or micro blogs. Tumblr was a direct descendent of a particular strain of blogs known as tumble blogs.
The successful products took big meals and converted them to snacks. The Internet likes snacks– simple, focused products that capture an atomic behavior and become compound only by linking in and out to other services. This has become even more so with the shift to mobile. People check their phones frequently, in short bursts, looking for nuggets of information. MORE
