We are sure to see Groupon pop up on a series of best-of 2010 lists. It has been a good year for the coupon/daily deal site.  Some wonder whether its growth is a temporary fad, or just the beginning for the next huge Internet company.  The New Yorker's James Surowiecki sees neither outcome in Groupon's future.  He describes it as a "real company," unlike compared to the YouTubes, Facebooks, and Googles:

Groupon, by contrast, is a much more old-school business. It doesn't have any obvious technological advantage. Its users don't really do anything other than hit the "buy" button. And its business requires lots of hands-on attention: thousands of salespeople to sell to and service local businesses, copywriters to come up with the right pitches for customers (Groupon's clever ad copy is one of its selling points). Groupon isn't just flinging piles of deals at users; the idea is that it's performing a "curatorial" role, and is relying on humans, instead of on Google-style algorithms. All these things are real assets-and a reason that Groupon is less vulnerable to competition than people think-but they're also very labor-intensive. Facebook, with five hundred million users, has fewer than two thousand employees, while Groupon, with some forty million subscribers, already has three thousand employees. Groupon can obviously add subscribers easily (all it has to do is send out more e-mails), but serving them enough deals to keep them happy is another matter: the more business it does, the more people it has to hire. Recently, Groupon has experimented with a self-service system, which would let it outsource some of the work to local merchants, who could set up virtual storefronts. But, unless it wants to abandon the approach that made it successful, scaling up will require more work and more workers than the Twitters and YouTubes of the world need.

Read Groupon Clipping here.