How DuggSpace/The Rival Project Could Be The Bellwether For An Innovation Revolution

There was a recent, seemingly innocuous, post over at Digg where a reader suggested that if Digg could be created for $200 then maybe the Digg community could work together to create their own version of MySpace. The working name is 'DuggSpace' although for obvious legal reasons, it won't stay like that.

Mashable thinks it’s destined to fail. I think that's being short-sighted. There are obvious issues with the ambiguity of many aspects at the moment, but it must be said that it is VERY early stages and this stuff can still be sorted out. In any case, Duggspaces's success or failure is relatively inconsequential in comparison to the importance of the fact that it was started at all.

Let me explain…

Digg is a loosely collaborative site, whose function is not inherently social but, rather, to aggregate and filter “news”. Despite this, people are starting to organise themselves, within the comments section of the above mentioned post, into a group with the aim of creating a new and better version of MySpace.

Yep, that’s the same, 6th most visited site on the whole Internet (according to Alexa), MySpace you probably thought I was talking about.

Why is this so important?

Firstly, because what happened was never meant to happen on Digg. There wasn’t even a proper means for these people to organise themselves, so they innovated and used the comments to a post. This tells me that if you nurture collaboration, even in a loose sense, then there is the potential for emergent groups to arise and take that collaboration to new depths in the pursuit of common innovative interests.

Secondly, this group of largely unknown-to-each-other digg users want to work together to improve on one of the most popular websites on the Internet. This tells me that if companies don’t start engaging with their customers effectively in an attempt to promote and benefit from outside innovation then either those customers will bypass the company and create the stuff they want by themselves, or forward thinking competitors will engage with the customers and take them away from you. In each scenario the end-result for the incumbent is the same – 1 or more customers less.

Thirdly, because this happened on Digg. Sure, collaborative software development has been happening for years all over the net, but these people chose to use Digg rather than SourceForge or one of those other sites to kick things off. Digg (74th most visited) and Sourceforge (83rd most visited) are about as popular as each other in terms of visits, but sourceforge is a very specific software development collaboration site and Digg is, while having a strong technology focus at the moment, more generalist in appeal. This tells me that if you give people of different backgrounds and interests a place to hang out and some basic tools, innovation will emerge. Now, if you give them more than just a place to hang out and more than just basic tools, imagine what they might come up with…

This is not a joke. Emergent groups and outside innovation are coming up in a big way and faster than you probably think. The question is how many companies are ready for what’s about to happen?

EDIT: looks like DuggSpace may have changed its name to 'The Rival Project' for now.