Morrie the Toupee Salesman

It’s fascinating to see facebook employ basic strategy in defending their position as the leading social network. The basic strategy can be described as “mimic every interesting feature that a competitor develops.” Additionally, it is possible to measure the size of the response, and the resources to be allocated based on the perceived threat. Friendfeed seems to be perceived as a fairly substantial threat, and so it seems to be getting a fairly substantial response. Another nice thing about being a leader is that even threatening to mimic the features of a smaller competitor is enough, though apparently not (yet) in this case.