Hence, I always thought the most appealing part of Flipboard was the manually curated directory of sites to follow. It's a list of lists, but it isn't trying to encompass everything, and so, unlike Yahoo, it isn't unmanageably big. But that just relocates the problem - what if you want a list that isn't on the list of lists? If you wanted to find 5 new sites to read about a topic you care about - ice-climbing, or vintage furniture, or experimental electronic music, or children's picture books - where would you find it? Can you create a platform for all those lists without turning into Yahoo? And it's worth remembering that Google hasn't actually solved this either - it might give you one blog post, but not a list of 20 sites to try. (Indeed, one could suggest that blogs themselves break Google in some sense - you're looking for a stream, but Google can only give you the post.)

Apple Music and Spotify both have an angle on this; they both make the observation that 30m tracks and a search engine is a poor experience, and that you need some form of filter, based in some way on your preferences, but ultimately arbitrary all the same. Apple's model in particular is interesting because it's a hybrid - it uses automation to match manually curated playlists (again, lists) with (mostly) algorithmically-determined tastes. So the list is made by hand, but the machine finds the list for you.

Equally, with Facebook, you make your friend list by hand, and you and your friends share things into that pool manually, but the Facebook algorithm automatically suggests stories for you from that pool - again, a hybrid. Indeed, one could suggest that you don't actually need to know any of those people for the system to work - 'these are things that people in a sample of 300 people in your rough socio-economic demographic clicked on'.

Something that sits in the back of my mind when thinking about this is that department stores and supermarkets, the Amazons of their days, didn't kill small retail. They were not winner-takes-all models. They did kill people who couldn't match their service, selection and price, and were simply end-points to a logistics chain out-competed by a more efficient end-point. But one thing I saw growing up in South London as supermarkets deployed was that small food shops tended to disappear, and then re-appear in new incarnations, providing service, curation and selection that supermarkets themselves couldn't match, for people willing to search them out and of course pay the premium, and where there was the density to support this. They didn't scale - they didn't turn into chains of 30 artisanal butchers - but they often prospered. One saw something similar with bookshops: Waterstones put many out of business, but many also got created (just before Amazon took 25% off the top of the market, of course).

This in turn reminds me of a story in the New York Times, many years ago, about small Japanese shops who wanted only word-of-mouth customers and so made themselves hard to find (even by Japanese standards). In particular, there was one denim shop in a back-alley of Tokyo called 'Not Found' - so as to be ungooglable. One can call this curation, or hipsterdom, or just a Veblen good. But in the past, such things were always geographically constrained - you had to live in a big city (while chain retail took homogenized versions of the same thing to everyone). I wonder, as ecommerce matures, how much will be carved out into exactly the kind of spectrum of large and small retail beyond the big aggregators, and how far this removal of geographic constraint might make it easier rather than harder for them to take sales from the giants, in part by removing that density problem. That is, there might be a lot more lists, they might be hard to find, and not be part of some global aggregator, and that might be OK.