The other day Stan and I had a chat with a guy at Boulder’s tuesday night “French Table” (at L’Absinthe). We talked a while about generic internet startup business stuff when all of a sudden the guy asked the seemingly naive question:

How many users are there? In general?

The moment I was about to answer with the counterquestion regarding which particular service his question was referring to, I understood that he actually meant all users and that his question was spot-on, while my misunderstanding just reveiled how my concept of users was outdated and flawed.

It is no longer that a service can actually refer to people as their users, simply because these users are also users of search engine X, social networking platform Y and blogging tool Z.

People are uploading their videos to YouTube and embed them on MySpace, which then get indexed by Google so that others can find them via Wink. People are using Bloglines to see which stories from the Del.icio.us hotlist their friends have submitted to Digg.

RSS and APIs have freed users from being forced to stick with one service for everything: Think of these two as acronyms for the drugs of a promiscuous age of the web.

: rss, api, wink, google, delicious, myspace, bloglines, digg, users, unionofusers

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