Whether you are designing software for the web or working as a consultant and developing a new process for others to use, the delicious lesson applies. There needs to be a personal value/benefit in it for the users for them to truly embrace and use it.

Small but interesting point I would add is that apps may need to provide personal value as a kind of fuse to get the network effects going.
I would make the argument that YouTube isn’t “first a great, free service for storing videos,” as you say (how many people use it in each of those capacities and how often?), but may have been seen as such by the first people putting up videos. Certainly by now YouTube is more network value than “isolated individual” value.

Another real-world user tendency which needs to be taken into account in providing personal value without depending on network effects, is that people tend to do more consumption than production, which means that there is an initial hump in the perception of tools purely for individual use which needs to be overcome.
Which is probably why photoshop comes with a ton of tutorials and included pictures.

Thanks for the article!