It's been a huge disconnection around me lately, and I think it's important to point out that popular does not equal cool. Would you rather have 100 cool users or 1000 users? For me, the answer is always always always 100 cool users. Well duh, right? Not so! Turns out for *almost everyone* in america, they'd take the 1000 users, not matter who they were or what they were up to or what impact their use of your product had on its brand.Let's call this "Coca-Cola Economics" (CCE for short). For me, this line of thinking ties directly back to the DNA of the Old Economy: the blockbuster, hit making, top 40, the superstar. I believe it's all but antithetical to the DNA of the New Economy: the conceptual age / long tail, deep and vertical, featureful, open source, economy of free.
Is popularity... bad? Certainly not, but cool should always trump popular and act as your guide though the inspirations toward mediocrity that popularity injects. In America at least, popular almost always equates to poor quality, bad taste, gratuitous execution. From McDonalds to the Joanas Brothers, this kind of CCE-based bullshit exists not because of organic demand or genuine cool factor, but because of a researched, manufactured, and carefully engineered demand, a primary tool of the Old Economy. CCE's ability to engineer demand depends, sadly, on an uneducated, undiscerning audience which is why Kentucky Friend Chicken can only garner an ironic appreciation in say, Japan, while it basks in genuine appreciation here in the states.
This is all to say that, in the New Economy, Cool has a better chance of success and longevity, and yes even making money than Popular does. On the Web, where communication is fast, knowledge easy, education and taste-making are effectively side effects of every blog entry and every twitter exchange. Bullshit can't survive, and critical mass means the beginning of the end. What happens to Facebook's cool factor when your mother and father have accounts? What happened to MySpace when Murdoch bought it? What happens when you try to apply Old Economy thinking to the New Economy?
Thankfully for all of us who love the Web, failure happens.
Yeah, so in the in old way popularity has been manufactured by money through manipulation via control of the medium. Now communication has never been so open, free, and unforgiving that to be popular in it, it has to vet as authentic. The only way to be popular is to be good. And most products aren't.