While I was away from The Social Software Weblog for a few days, my friend and fellow blogger Barb Dybwad blogged a few posts for me. One, most notably, on the 'long tail' and how it relates to social software.

Joe Kraus, a founder of Excite and Architext, has a blog—Bnoopy, An entrepreneurship blog—wherein he writes and shares a presentation (a PPT file) on his experience with the long tail of software.

In this post Joe asks and answers the question: Why did Excite go out of business? Quite simply: "...We couldn't figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn't figure out how to make money from the long tail – from those queries asked only once a day…"

A good read on the long tail that Joe mentions is this one by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who coined the term "the long tail".

Kraus talks about phenomenons like: Google, eBay, Amazon, Rhapsody, Netflix, and iTunes that really work the long tail and recommends to all entrepreneurs that the tail is where it's at! Serving the head ain't bad but: "...figure out how to serve the tail of your market efficiently and you've got a blockbuster…"

[thanks to Tom Munnecke for this longtail tip]