I think a full page introduction at the start would be overkill and probably turn people off – it’s not only that they don’t like to read I believe it actually causes some of them pain. I don’t mean to cause offence either but .. well, I’m good at it.

Maybe some sort of cookie-controlled “first story” that can be shown to new users and then closed if they don’t want to see it?

And yeah, you do need a community first. It’s been a problem with websites for a long time – forums, blogs, wikis, social sites etc just die because they never get enough users to build momentum.

If you haven’t written some sort of strategy for how you’re going to attract and retain visitors now would be a good time. Link building, awareness and an identity need to be approached with some sort of structure, otherwise everything boils down to chance, which isn’t usually on your side.

You make some great points here, and about all of these sites. I’ve purposely left a large part of that type of functionality out of my site so far in the hopes that the community would define what they wanted rather than impose something on them. Problem is, you need a community before you can take requests, so do you create features that people may hate or keep it simple until you understand their needs.

Sorry, didn’t at all mean to turn this into much of anything about my experience, but you’ve made some great points and they’ve caused me evaluate my own efforts — thanks for that. I hope you can get some more upvotes on reddit so that more people see this — it’s tough to get noticed nowadays and a lot of quality content goes unnoticed.

Fun is about all it comes down to now. There’s always a slim chance someone’ll be lucky and win with a better version of an existing concept, but it’s a really slim chance. A big feature of the superficial definition of Web 2.0 seems to be incredible quantities of (new) brand loyalty.

Digg is practically begging for someone to “do it properly”. Their search sucks, they have the most half-arsed comment threading and moderation in existance and they’ve transformed from a news aggregator to a funny links site.

Del.icio.us is just plain ugly, lacks support for Opera (although as an Opera user I can honestly say … big deal, there’s bugger all of us anyway), and it’s really quite limited – links are public or private, the end.

Flickr is completely devoid of customisation – not even CSS tweaking – so you’re totally locked into one look and feel.

So I still think there’s a little bit of room for ‘me too’ sites, but I don’t think the current blend of technologies is going to be enough to usurp leadership. They can be improved on, but not vastly.

Imagine an online office suite done using Apollo – this is the platform Adobe have produced, and are using to create an online version of Photoshop. The first office suite that’s done using Apollo has the potential to be on a level playing field with Microsoft Office feature wise. It’s going to leave the long running joke of online office suites for dead, no doubt about it.

The first flickr-style site that lets you manipulate your images locally pre/post publishing, directly on your desktop instead of fudged together remotely with upload delays, file size limits, and then manipulated via basic Flash and JavaScript, is going to rock people’s socks off.

There’s definitely room for improvement on all of the leading sites, the key now I think is to get onboard with emerging technologies and be the early adopter that gets in first and deepest.