hutcheson - 1:26 am on Dec 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

I would agree that standalone directories are a niche that will be increasingly hard to fill in the future. Nearly all the successful directories will be generated by organizations that already (for their own reasons) have the data.

For instance: imagine building a phone directory by going around talking to people and asking them to let you publish their phone number. Insane! when the phone company already HAS all that information, and publishes it. You can't compete with that. Again, "house for sale" directories can't compete with MLS, and anyone would be an idiot to even look at one, rather than going directly to MLS. (Anyone who wants to market to the above-room-temperature crowd will ADVERTISE in MLS, then, also.)

I think we'll see more successful niche directories generated by other organizations who simply repurpose data which they keep (for good business purposes) and which people give them (for long-standing business purposes.) And the days of collecting commercial links by random Googling, or random webmaster suggestions, or random cold-call telemarketing, are numbered.

In such a world, the "general-purpose" tools (including directories and search engines) would move further and further away from commercial data, and more into social, cultural, and personal data.