"I would actually argue that the entire Internet is made up of lists, but there are a few things that change the way we see them:* Cadence (how often the lists changes)* Content type (what got on the list and how did it get there)* Sort (how the content is sorted)"

"I wonder if nailing the single user case forces a company to build features that are orthogonal to the publishing use case."

"Listmaking is the kind of thing that really lends itself to the internet architecture."

"if you can get the obsessed listmakers on your platform, you can build a publishing network that millions will use without having to create any of the content. That’s a recipe for success."

"I wonder if listmaking is really a vertical thing instead of a horizontal thing. That would suggest that there will be successes in verticals like food, travel, shopping, reading, film, music, etc but that each will be its own thing and not part of some meta listmaking community."

"I am somewhat perplexed by the lack of breakout success to date in listmaking. It’s an obvious category. And it is certainly not for lack of trying. The commercial internet is 20+ years old now. So you’d think someone would have cracked the code by now. But I don’t think anyone has."

"there are two modes of listmaking; making lists for yourself (task management) and making lists for others (publishing). It would seem that by focusing on the single user case (making lists for yourself) a startup could bootstrap itself into a network (making lists for others). But to my knowledge, no startup has successfully done that."

"A Delicious-like service would be much more powerful if it had excellent search (and indexed the pages that were saved / tagged to augment the frailties of human memory)."

"Google monetized search by matching your discrete searches (lists) on products with others and then aggregating/referencing those matches into a new list which they presented to the brands. The question is how does one create the lists of intersecting points and monetize them with a lot of random lists?"

"I think it stemmed from their original notion that they were not the destination, but merely a stopping point. They eschewed advertising on their site which was contrary to popular opinion at the time."

"The real value in networks is in the core and at the top. Google achieved that by crossing all the silos and boundaries. It solved the one-to-many, many-to-one problem to get sustainable network effect and value creation."

"foursquare, yelp, yellow pages, etc.Many are layered onto maps."

"There’s no “reward” for the creator. And bias by creator. Tribe-made lists are intriguing, but isn’t that what polls do?"

"The real gold is at the border between single user lists (incomplete and too personal) and general crowdsourced lists (too long and too impersonal). In other words, an algorithm which takes the same (perhaps very long) general list and orders it based on a single user’s personality and preferences."

"The trick to make a list stick is to have a quality factor. The quality of a list is directly related to the insights it provides, and when the list’s content is not so obvious, the value increases."

"people who use lists successfully to get things done, they have an inherit ephemeral relationship with lists. This is not conducive of networks in the list to self category.Content based lists, like what buzzfeed does or more interestingly what producthunt does suffer from similar symptoms. They are fun to consume once, but do not lend themselves to repeat engagement overtime which is need for network engagement."

"Yahoo started out as list of websites to visit on the web. Craiglsist was started as a simple lists of events. Interesting how lists evolved in general and adding complexity maybe the reason why the concept has not been able to retain the simplicity."

"Most lists don’t solve any sort of urgent problem, which makes building a business from it quite tough."

"“Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.”History scholar Henry Thomas Buckle"

"They just happen to be lists with novel interfaces and useful ways to interact with the list (searching, filtering, sorting, etc).Perhaps “lists” are just groups of items that have few useful ways of interacting with?"

"Devil is in the utility details."

"My biggest concern with creating lists is to ensure that my lists be on an open source decentralized system. That way if the incumbent disappears I can just simply move my lists over to another provider."

"Your listmaking model overlooks a third state:- list for yourself (task management)- list for others (publishing)- list for teams (work management) <= missingAtlassian’s Jira, Asana, etc fit into this missing bucket."

"The problem with single-user vs. publishing use-case within list-making is that they only intersect for a limited subset of things. For instance, I’m only liable to make a list for new things to try, not catalogue all that I already have tried and loved, which would really be the most useful from the publishing standpoint, but has almost no intrinsic value from an individual standpoint."

"as search was so broadbased and multifaceted that through the law of large numbers Google could establish relevance and intent for the brands. Much harder to do with lists. One way is to think of all the ways the list makers (senders) might interact with list readers (receivers) and provide tools that make lists dynamic and actionable and create loop-backs and network effects between and across senders and receivers."

"list-based sites are superior to google for discovery, and a combined list-site/discovery-engine could be a huge boon for finding new and relevant content on the internet."

"We’re missing a “site map” of the internet, and a horizontal list site has the potential to provide the navigation experience that we need"

"Generating lists from URLs isn’t pleasant on mobile (I haven’t found a satisfying way around this yet), so I suspect the power-users will come from a web-first generation"

"a true horizontal list-building site will take a patient long-term approach that will emerge in thriftier times when rent and talent is cheaper and entrepreneurs are freer to try wild ideas."

"Community is the key. Slightly contrarian but I see the injection of too much capital as a potential killer of list-based ideas. “Easy money” (if there is such a thing) and not-enough focus on fanaticizing an early user base will be the death knell of all who enter this space. (tangential question: Can you create a community of introverts?)"

"What is the correct balance between altruism (wikipedia) and narcissism (social products)?- What are the lessons from Delicious? By all accounts, it should have “won” but lost its way somewhere (the acquisition?)."

"Social bookmarking still deserves a better solution.- I think the original list spaces of a horizontal winner will come from an area that is extremely nichy, extremely nerdy, text-heavy and unprofitable (or not obviously profitable). Maybe it’ll start out with poets and researchers and spread from there?"

"The smaller the community, the better, because there’s greater recognition for contribution when everyone knows each other."

"If you want to bootstrap a peer to peer network, you can’t start with the mainstream use case. You need to start with the highest value use case, even if it is a much smaller niche."

"The same is true of Snapchat. People made fun of Snapchat in its early days for being a “sexting” app. That was the “high value niche use case” that bootstrapped the network. And once critical mass was reached, the broader use case of a network for ephemeral photo/video sharing could emerge."

"if you want to build a peer to peer network, you have to find the use case that is high enough value that some people will do things (like put content into your application) that most people won’t. If you nail that, and win the hearts and minds and activity of that small high value user base, then you will have to opportunity to go mainstream."

"But the original use case for Waze is the one Josh had landed on last night in his effort to avoid another speeding ticket on the LIE."

"They report the speed traps to everyone else in real time. Which is what the first users of Waze did."

"That led to more people using Waze to avoid speed traps."

"People made fun of Snapchat in its early days for being a “sexting” app. That was the “high value niche use case” that bootstrapped the network."

"So if you want to build a peer to peer network, you have to find the use case that is high enough value that some people will do things (like put content into your application) that most people won’t."

"If you nail that, and win the hearts and minds and activity of that small high value user base, then you will have to opportunity to go mainstream."

"If you aim for the mainstream users first, you are setting yourself up for failure."