During my travels, I managed to wrap up Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point. It was a great read, and deserves the level of attention it's received. The theories behind the work are well fleshed out, compelling and supported by very good examples.

What is the Tipping Point (for those who haven't read it):

...why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics. The Tipping Point is an examination of the social epidemics that surround us.

I wanted to transition this to specific communities on the web and look at when and how websites "tip". Below are a few recent "tippers":

  • MySpace.com
  • Facebook.com
  • YouTube.com
  • Zillow.com (tipped at launch)
  • Digg.com
  • Skype

Of these, the most fascinating story to me was how YouTube, specifically, tipped. The Alexa chart for their rankings, is, according to data from Hitwise, not entirely accurate. What actually happened was that the single video, Lazy Sunday (not available anymore - see Boing Boing for why), spread through YouTube over the course of a week in December and pushed the site above Google Video, Yahoo! Video, Blinx, Metacafe and others that previously were more popular. See their chart and blog post here.

What tipped the others? I think there's some common themes:

  • Serving hungry audiences
  • Creating true value in an inefficient market (particularly Zillow & Skype)
  • Appealing to those things that web users love to do online (research & entertainment)
  • Leveraging the power of a viral spread through the web community

With everything we develop in-house, we're certainly trying to remember these lessons. Are there any others to be gleaned from their successes?