Personally, I’d like to see you go more the route of Google, lots of cool features if you want to use them, but for a casual user they’re kept behind the curtain away from the main attraction. Anyhow, praise jebus for no spam and unobtrusive advertising.

Yes, with the original 9rules idea the concept was on the celebration of great content – and it exceeded at that. But 9rules was small and niche, and limited in it’s possibilities. Now, as we know, 9rules has expanded into other areas – a kind of hybrid feedback directory service, I like to think. But the number of participants has also inflated, and in some ways this makes 9rules slightly unmanageable.

That is to say, once upon a time I could visit 9rules and get a listing of recent entries from great blogs on a similar subject area (business/design/web 2.0)… now it’s a completely different beast. Better or worse? Neither necessarily, but the original concept is dead in place of something else.

And of course, there will always be elitists who believe that the growth of such a community, and the introduction of new members cheapens the product. But these people are just snobs who like to rule their closed kingdoms.

Now, with the advent of my.9r and Notes, 9rules is part of my daily grind.

I guess this is what it’s like being on the opposite side of the “dashboard effect” (also known as the “indie-band-sells-out-and-goes-national effect”)

See, the way I see it, a lot of people were all about 9rules when it was small because it was somehow “theirs” and it was intimate and it was like a sort of social hangout for all the hip bloggers and they were happy to be getting recognition. It made them “different” from the Xanga and Livejournal people.

When 9rules started to open their doors wider and wider, the “specialness” started to fade. Now it’s a thriving community, and the people are still great, but there are too many, and the original fans of the site feel like The Rulers have abandoned them, or at least the community doesn’t work for them anymore.

Take all that with a grain of salt because as I said before, I wasn’t there in the beginning… This is all gleaned from what I have gathered and what I know of how pseudo-underground things go.

The bigger you get, the less and less your original followers are going to like you. I’ll admit right now, if 9rules gets as big as MySpace, I’d find it difficult to enjoy it.

Tough skin, Scrivs, take care of that tough skin.

Across that offering of products which all may be geared towards the “same goals”, some may ebb and flow and that may be where people see things “dying” (kind of overkill, that word).

In any case, I agree, that if you stay true to your original goals there’s a good chance that you are going to do well, especially if you listen to your market.

(I’d love to hear the metrics that have people rating 9rules as dying)