Posterous has been gaining a lot of attention lately. Most people see it as a great way to fill that gap between a tweet and a blog. Some people see it as a next generation content management systems for the Web. Other people see it as a lifestream. Whatever you want to call it Posterous is gaining in popularity.

One of the biggest drivers of technology adoption is the group known as curators or collectors. This is the noise 10% on Twitter sharing all those links. It’s also the group that flocked to FriendFeed. It’s that same profile that made Delicious the early New Media breakout service 5 years ago. That is until it got acquired by Yahoo.

In my (not so) humble opinion, the biggest missed opportunity was all that valuable data Delicious users where creating. They tag, curate, comment on and share tens of thousands(?) of links a day, the very thing that has been, arguably, the biggest value of Twitter.

But I’ve seen a trend lately. A lot of people I follow on Posterous and Twitter have started using Posterous for their curation and sharing instead of Delicious or FriendFeed.

Granted this isn’t a fair comparison because Posterous wasn’t intended to be a competitor to Delicious but between great features, a very slick bookmarklet and integration into services like Feedly it becomes a much more feature rich substitute for bookmarking.

On top of that Twitter favorites and Reader shares are also starting to replace this saving and curating activity. It’s still too early to tell if Delicious traffic is really headed down or if it’s just monthly movement but for what it’s worth my favorite bookmarking service Diigo has had slow but steady growth. Of course they have a ton of features Delicious doesn’t have.

Why is any of this random speculation and juxtaposition of traffic data worthy of a blog post? Because as I mentioned before, the curator/collector group is a powerful group if companies can tap into it like Twitter is and Delicious/Yahoo failed to.

What say you?

[UPDATE] It looks like Delicious managed to stay ahead of Posterous for the time being. But I wonder for how long?

Related articles by Zemanta

• 25 Time Saving Bookmarklets You Will Want to Have in Your Browser (maketecheasier.com)
• Read Your RSS & Social Feeds In A Whole New Light With Feedly (makeuseof.com)
• Pandora Makes Music Sharing on Twitter and Facebook Easier but not Music Blogging (newcommbiz.com)
• Be a Social Media Black Belt with Posterous (newcommbiz.com)
• I Love Link (newcommbiz.com)

None Found

I think it’s interesting that Yahoo has been able to succeed where Google has failed with the news industry. Instead of trying to be disruptive, Yahoo is just doing what it does best: get clicks on content.

Whatever the newspaper industry ends up looking like after everything is over this could prove to be an important advantage for Yahoo.

Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium Keeps Growing

Yahoo’s newspaper strategy has seen success because, unlike Google, it never tried to get into the business of selling print ads. Instead, Yahoo focused on helping newspapers get more traffic to their Websites.

None Found

5 years from now the non-early adopters will be using dozens of services built on top of Twitter and they won’t even realize it

Q: When will we stop talking about Twitter’s business model?
A: Never.

Why do you think we’ll stop talking about it once they have a business model? Heck, a week doesn’t go by when I don’t read a story about Google, Microsoft or Yahoo’s business model why will Twitter be any different?

I recently posted on Twitter a link to a post I did encouraging people to build the features they wanted on top of Twitter and had a great dialogue with a friend in Seattle.

tacanderson: Want new Twitter features? Build them yourself. http://bit.ly/MRd03

philoking: @tacanderson I think if Twitter’s plan (which I doubt) is not innovate and allow 3rd parties to create the value for the service, it dies.

tacanderson: @philoking sitting on all that cash i think Twitter will acquire the services that provide monetization.

philoking: @tacanderson This may sound silly, but Twitter’s advertising health will have a lot to do with how many celebrities they can get to tweet.

tacanderson: @philoking that’s assuming Twitter wants to go the advertising route. (I don’t think they will) but you may be right if they do.

philoking: @tacanderson how would they stay solvent? Selling premium accounts like Pownce? That worked. lol

tacanderson: @philoking there are more ways to monetize the web than premium subscriptions and advertising

While some people find it amusing that us rank and file social media types have derived years of pleasure and blog posts about Twitter and their plans for monetization (Twitter VC Laughs at the Idea that Twitter Has No Business Model – ReadWriteWeb) I personally think Twitter finds itself in a similar situation as Microsoft or SalesForce.com.

Even if Twitter develops a way to monetize (which I’m sure they will) there will be huge amounts of money left on the Twitter table.

With an open API, more buzz than most think they deserve and a boat load of VC cash I think eventually Twitter will go on a shopping spree. They’ve already demonstrated the ability and desire to do this with their purchase of Summize and Values of N (while the latter was really just a talent acquisition).

In recent posts I’ve talked about Twitter as the last bastion of Web 2.0 innovation (yes that’s a gross exaggeration) and the rise of the micropreneur.

Why do I geek out so much on Twitter? I see Twitter as the future of communication. OK, to be fair I see all social media that way but I think 5 years from now the non-early adopters will be using dozens of services built on top of Twitter and they won’t even realize it.

Old model: build large audience get acquired by Google. New model: monetize large audience someone else has built.

So the answer to my initial question: Yes. Twitter and many others will acquire startups that can monetize Twitter (or any other social network).

None Found