Getting There From Here - Well Said

I've been blogging (here and here) about the difficulty of getting a service started when the value of the service depends on having lots of active users.  Sometimes you can't get from here (no users) to there (a very valuable service with lots of users).

del.icio.us is an example of a service which surmounted that obstacle.  Just saw a great relevant quote by blogger Joshua Porter:

"From now on I’m going to call this idea the 'Del.icio.us Lesson'. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first."

BTW, found this quote through Yaron Galai's excellent blog Web X.0 which is now on my blogroll.