better technology != community killer

They could add all the bells and whistles they want, but coining something as a "community killer" (or "Digg killer" in this case) is laughable at best.

The only way Digg can be killed is if a community shows up that is in some way culturally hip. For example, if some celebrities were to band together and unexpectedly show how hard-core geeky/nerdy they can be, I'm certain it would be more of a Digg killer because they immediately will be pulling attention away for the right reason (what geek wouldn't love to associate themselves with Keanu Reeves if the real-life Neo turns out to be a automata theory junkie!?!?!). Communal value is immediately created around such an individual in the same way Kevin Rose is the focal point for Digg (I'd be hard pressed to be convinced otherwise of Kevin Rose's celebrity status).

A concrete example is del.icio.us. Yahoo! ended up purchasing del.icio.us even though, one may argue, Yahoo!'s service was technologically superior (tell me otherwise and I'll merely point to the fact that del.icio.us, prior to acquisition and for a period of time afterwards, suffered frequent outages the likes of which would cause heads to roll at Yahoo!). It's true that availability might be classified as different than "feature-set", but my counter argument would be that the reliability of ANY application contributes to the user experience in either a positive or a negative way the same way the color selection might impact the overall user experience. The community wouldn't leave del.icio.us for a reason, and so it didn't matter what technology ANYBODY (Google included) would build to try and move the critical mass away.

From where did del.icio.us originate? From the mind of an overworked quant jock working for a market maker in Manhattan; Joshua Schachter even got turned down for a job at Google, and I suppose it is up for debate that tagging has revolutionized (ala Clay Shirky) the way we interact with the amount of information we sift through on the internet, but it has definitely changed things in a rather dramatic way. The reason why I mention this last fact is because there is something to be said for hiring people that are not "optimized" enough on their resume because sometimes ideas that formulate from nowhere turn into revolutionary concepts. Similarly, I have very little faith in groups of engineers who can create technologically superior platforms to understand (on average mind you) the cultural/social aspect of WHY certain cultural phenomenon grow in the first place anymore than I would expect TV show writers to understand inductive reasoning/logic and how it relates to creating quality software.

I would place my money on a geek/nerd who spends his spare time playing with Legos to come up with the next big community than anything that would come from the minds of one of the big internet giants because chances are the geek is more in tune with a trend that is likely to catch on with his friends and then grow virally as opposed to engineered, advertising-driven attempts to create online culture. But I wouldn't at all say that such a community would be a "Digg killer" because the reasons for assembly are different, at a different time, and for the sake of a different user experience. And this type of user experience has NOTHING to do with how windows might expand or hide the way they do on OSX vs. Windows.

Social software operates on different principles of competition than does software that helps people achieve something. To illustrate further, you don't hear people in the entertainment industry make statements such as, "Is 'Heroes' Going To Be the 'Lost' Killer?" - of course not!

Social groups are very nebulous and they assemble for reasons completely different than why somebody might choose a web browser, operating system, or any other piece of software that involves achieving how we interact with computers. Social software is about interacting with others and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, the quality of that interaction.