I spend as much time as I can hanging out with other entrepreneurs. The opportunity to do so is a huge advantage that I have living in San Francisco, and it's one that I don't take for granted. It energizes me to hear what other folks are working on, and to trade stories about the ups and downs of startup life.
And one thing that is increasingly dawning on me is that we are all working on the same damn thing: distribution.
Just about every startup that I come across is working on optimizing their sites / service / content for distribution on Facebook and Twitter. Sure, old fashioned email sharing is still getting a nod, as are some of the bursty drivers of traffic like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, and you'll see the occasional MySpace distribution project - but for the most part, it's all about Facebook and Twitter.
Everyone wants to guide their little streams of content into the larger rivers of Facebook and Twitter with the hopes of gaining more distribution. Everyone wants to hitch their wagons to Facebook and Twitter's meteoric growth, because as we know, a rising tide lifts all boats.
It's a little unnerving to see everyone working on the same thing - in this industry, it's often the folks that aren't working on what everyone else is working on who thrive. But I'll save that discussion for another day.
The larger implication of all these man hours going into wiring a myriad of services into Facebook and Twitter's rivers is a fortifying of those two companies against future competitors. If Facebook's newsfeed comes pre-wired with every popular web service, it's a massive advantage. If every popular Web service uses Twitter for alerts / notifications / shouts, it will be an almost insurmountable task for a future competitor to take them on.
Fred Wilson posted yesterday that once you become a default behavior, you're tough to knock out. I will go one step farther and say that if you are a default behavior AND thousands of complementary services have put in serious labor to wire their services to yours, you are sitting pretty indeed.
