From Marc Andreessen.

This has always been the case — there has always been an “inside baseball” effect within our industry where new trends are adopted and dissected at a hyperactive pace by those of us who care a lot about new technology.

From Josh Kopelman.

If we could get access to the usage logs of the top 10 Web 2.0 properties, I would bet that their 10,000 most active users would all be the same.

From Fred Wilson.

In their places we are seeing second derivatives.  I heard one business described as Google Maps meets delicious, and another described as Skype meets MySpace.  When the first derivative hasn’t fully figured its long term business model (other than getting bought), the second derivatives are pretty scary.

This ties into what I mentioned the other night in response to Mike Arrington’s post on Techcrunch. The only difference between what he mentioned and what these VCs above mentioned is that they were all saying this about four years ago. Has anything changed, or are we just now starting to notice this more?