Tuesday over in Notes I asked is it time to bring the focus back to new media again? Over the past couple of weeks I have been playing with podcasts and vidcasts and have had great success with each and I am beginning to wonder why we aren’t seeing more of this interactivity on our own sites or even business sites? I’m not preaching that we make a return to all Flash sites, but in this broadband everywhere world wouldn’t offering something a bit more give you that advantage you have been seeking?
I think the web will always be ruled by text and rightfully so, but there are limitations to working in a text only web. I can write about how I work, or I can show you how I work. Which one do you think is more effective?
Should all your vital information and important messages be only in audio or video form? Of course not, but they should complement the text on your site. Wouldn’t it be nice on the Company’s About page where you list bios to have text and a video so people get to actually see the person and hear what they have to say about themselves. Sure you can have pictures up, but that doesn’t give you that much insight into the person.
Maybe an issue is that so many of us creatives aren’t comfortable with trying new channels of creativity. Once you get into the web design groove it’s easy to want to stay in that comfortzone without having to push your limits any further. If that’s the case, do you think a time will come where you will get left behind? In general though, why don’t you think we are seeing a push into new formats of passing along information and communicating? YouTube and MySpace have shown how effective video and audio are to the masses so why aren’t we exploiting these channels more?
Remember those times when us crazy Web Standards zealots were preaching death to Flash and all that is evil on the web? Okay, maybe we weren’t going that crazy, but you know where I am coming from. Does anybody else out there think it’s time for us to start exploring new mediums of communication with our clients, user, readers, etc? It’s great that we have stuck with simple sites and putting what is important as the focus of our sites, but do we rely to much on text to get our message across?
Don’t some messages deserve a more effective medium of communication? What has stopped you from exploring those different channels such as Flash, Sound and Video?
You know those thoughts you carry around in your head for days, months, or years and wonder when someone else is going to have the same thought because it just makes so much sense to you? Well today I finally found someone outside of the core 9rules group that has the same thoughts as me when it comes to the 9rules model. To say the least, Chrisitan Montoya in this entry has us pegged almost to a tee and I love that.
What I find most interesting about all this is that, despite all the blogging networks out there, there is still only one for people who blog for the sake of blogging. If you want to blog for money there are a lot of options, but for blogs that serve a greater purpose, there is only 9rules. In an industry that breeds imitation, I find this very surprising. 9rules is obviously a great business model, and they have even shared how you can build your own. The only thing missing is the courage and hard work to do the same thing Scrivs and Co. have done. The question is, why not?
What’s interesting is that these networks do exist, but for one reason or another I guess aren’t as well known as 9rules. Not once since we began this Network did we think we were one of a kind in the sense that nobody could copy us (and that’s ironic since we are copying a lot of concepts the Web’s past), but we did want to make sure we weren’t following. Since we had the understanding that our model wasn’t unique we had to find the things that would differentiate us from the competition.
Design
Design doesn’t make the world go round and many Networks and sites have proven that pretty isn’t always necessary to win, but we wanted that advantage. When you are asking independent sites to join your Network you have to give them something to be proud of and the first impression many times is our only impression. When we first started nobody knew what we were doing or what we were about, but we made sure to put up a kickass homepage and I’m sure for many people that alone enticed them to pursue admission into the Network or at least find out more about it.
It’s interesting that so much of the “competition” doesn’t put a greater focus on design because that could easily become a differentiating factor for them.
Community
We were fortunate enough to already have some strong connections in the design community so initially building up a community wasn’t as hard as we thought it might be. However, not everyone else has that advantage. From the beginning we were able to pull in some recognizable sites, which got others interested and it kind of snowballed from there.
Another important aspect of our Community is that we make them happy because they are our customers. We don’t want to have to go out and promote and hype 9rules because we know if we do our job our members will do it for us. People like to talk about things they are happy with and if they don’t talk about it because they aren’t happy it’s in our best interests to fix that.
Balls and Stupidity
It might be because too many entrepreneurs only see the conventional blogging network model (put bloggers on payroll and have them write contrived cookie-cutter blogs) as the way to go. It might also be because very few entrepreneurs looking to imitate actually have the courage to do something as difficult as what Scrivs has done.
What I really enjoy about our model is that to many people the financial benefits aren’t readily apparent and that scares a ton of people away from giving it a shot. Some might think it was courageous to do what we did, while I’m sure others call it stupidity for not trying to go the quick money route, but for us it’s neither because we understood our vision and following that seemed like a no-brainer to us.
Same concept can be applied to 37signals (ahh shit here comes 37s again and Scrivs, everyone run or get your guns out). They consciously made the decision to move away from a successful consulting business to pursue development in a project-managment application that does a million things less than the competition (good thing). Balls or stupidity?
I’m all about taking risks, but they do have to be calculated. There are so many chances to innovate in this type of environment that it’s said to see so many of us have fallen into the copycat syndrome hoping to cash in quickly.
Less is More™
We had two options with regards to bringing sites into the Network. Accept all of them or become very selective. Accepting all of them made no sense to me because we might as well start a web directory to accomplish the same tasks. Our path might make us look like the Evil Empire or the A-List club to outsiders, but with a good site anybody can get in and that’s what is important. Name doesn’t matter. Traffic doesn’t matter. Content matters.
This level of exclusivity has helped us tremendously, but as we grow it will be tough to balance that image along with providing our readers and members with mroe great sites that fit their interests.
Final thoughts
I just wanted to highlight some quotes from Christian’s entry that show viewpoints the public may have about us that we never planned on producing.
For one thing, 9rules has just about become the official word on what makes a good blog.
In a sense this is what we intended because we want our readers to know that every site we bring in is going to be good, but the downside to this is this thought…
Any blog that submits on May 17 and gets rejected is automatically seen as a lesser blog than any of the ones that make it in…
That causes some anger in a lot of people while others take it in stride and work on improving their site. We never claim to be the standard when it comes to quality blogs because honestly it’s just a small group of people selecting the sites and who is to say we always know what we are talking about?
I enjoy reading entries like Christian’s that give us an outsider’s perspective on how 9rules looks because as I have talked about before, when you are on the inside your vision gets clouded and maybe you begin to lose sight of what is important.
A couple of weeks ago I linked to Rich Ziade’s Reality Check 2.0 which highlighted how our Web 2.0 darlings compare to Web 1.0 counterparts. Yesterday, Colin, Mike and I had a discussion, which led us into talking about the brilliance of Myspace and their ability to keep you coming back.
Web 2.0 is about giving users the content and letting them run with it. APIs and RSS feeds keep content closer to us while in the Web 1.0 world you would never see something like this occur because to make money from advertising you need pageviews and what good is it to allow people to take the content off the site? When you get a new message or comment on Myspace you get an email simply telling you that you have a new message/comment. They don’t tell you what the message or comment is and their reason for doing this is due to “privacy” concerns. If a Web 2.0 app did this you would probably here a lot of complaints, but not in the Myspace world.
And that’s part of the brilliance behind it to me. Myspace does so many things wrong in our world, but they are about to become the most popular site on the web. So the question becomes have we listened to our geek peers too much in trying to make data accessible everywhere without thinking of keeping people coming back and greedily hoarding them to ourselves? As a user I think its obvious that we want data the way we want it, but as a businessman what do you do?
To us Flickr is the most popular photo site on the web, but they pale in comparison to Yahoo Photos and Webshots, but on Flickr I can export my photos while on the other two sites that becomes a major chore therefore keeping you on the site longer to avoid any hassles.
So in the end who do you cater to? Do you go for the glory?
When I go out I always get the question what I do for work. I can’t explain it well enough because I do so many things that focusing on one is a bit tough so I figured the best thing I could do was at least show people how I work and hopefully this gives you a better idea of the inner-workings of the Network.
Lot of heavy-duty stuff happening there so be careful.
There have only been a handful of killer applications for the Internet (not definitive of course):
- IRC
- BBS
- Usenet
- Email
- Instant Messenger
- MySpace
Maybe you don’t consider Myspace a killer application, but you do have to consider it as a killer-something. In any case all of these apps have one thing in common and that’s their ability to help users communicate. Communication has and will always be the killer feature of the Internet and arguably any period of time. Anything that makes communication between individuals easier will most likely become a success.
So as a business what can you learn from Myspace and how it allows people to communicate with each other? Let’s have a look at some things.
Asynchoronous Communication
This is what Myspace is based around. You can leave comments on a user’s profile page or send them messages that they can check in their inbox. It’s really no different than an email, except for one thing. With email there is a sense that you have to respond to the individual and uninvited emails hit our inbox everyday. With Myspace only the Friends you approve can send leave comments and there is no need to respond, but I guess it would be the cool and polite thing to do.
Note: You may wonder how a site like Myspace gets so many pageviews and once you play around with it you can easily see one of the reasons is that they force you back onto their site if you wish to see private messages or comments sent to you. Annoying, yet brilliant at the same time.
As a company does this mean you should open up a way for your customers to communicate with you? Well hopefully you have some form of contact on your site so that they can at least email and if you have a blog maybe taking the Myspace approach to “friends” could work wonders. I don’t think every company should open up comments to the world, but doing so to a select group would help both the company and the customers out in the long run.
Planting the seeds to community growth
If you are looking at building the “next great thing” think about how you can make it easier for your users to communicate with each other. You think online games such as World of Warcraft are popular because people like to feel alone? Sure in the end every successful online game or social application look as though its success is based around the community, but if those first people aren’t able to effetively communicate then you will not have a community to promote.
The current 9rules model would not work if there weren’t forums in place to help members communicate amongst each other, but even that isn’t good enough. Next we created an IRC Chat to help communication between not only members, but readers as well. Even that isn’t enough and in the next phase of 9rules you will see a more effective model of communication between our readers and members, which in turn should allow for a more thriving public online community.
The Addiction
There are a lot of reasons why Myspace is popular and a great thing about it is the people that I have been able to connect with from years past. Never would I have thought I would be able to say what’s up to some of these people and because of Myspace and it’s asynchronous communication methods, people aren’t ashamed to drop a line because it’s much easier talking online than it is face-to-face for some reason.
Mike D has finally put the guide I have been waiting for and which essentially helped me create an even uglier Myspace profile. So many ideas now and if you dare to get caught up in the phenomenon at least do so tastefully.
Note: If you want to see other examples of Arno at work checkout Kartooner and Adactio.
Last week I am sitting in my chair stressing like crazy because I am trying to figure out how to pay for Mike’s love for cars, Colin’s love for milk (inside joke) and Tyme’s love for…ummmm…toys, when suddenly an email comes across my desk from a Mr. Arno Zimmerman. I never heard of the man in my life, but you know when a guy like Arno Zimmerman talks to you, you have to listen. So I read the email which said:
Dear Mr Scrivens,
My sincere apologies for writing to you unannounced. My name is Arno Zimmerman and I am CEO of an Internet domain name acquisitions agency based here in Los Angeles, California.
My agency is currently engaged by a well-known Hollywood studio. The studio is producing a new religious movie called The Nine Rules. Although I cannot give you full information about the movie, I am authorized to tell you that the movie is about Moses’ early years before he was given the Ten Commandments. The story tells of his early experiences and the first nine rules that he was given by God. The movie has an all star cast, including Brad Pitt in the title role, and will be released in the fall.
My client is therefore very keen to purchase the rights to the domain name 9rules.com from you.
I am sure that you will understand that I cannot provide you with much in the way of information about our client at this time. However I can assure you that they are sincere in their offer, and that they are keen to conclude this purchase quickly.
I would be interested to learn how much you would require for this transfer of ownership.
Many kind regards,
Arno Zimmerman
CEO and Internet domain name acquisitions
Hot damn, I’m about to make some money. Sell off a domain and I still own ninerules.com, which I could sell to him if he wanted it. Of course there are some logistical problems such as backlinks and all that type of stuff, but maybe I could work out some .htaccess agreement. I could think of a new name and 9rules would kind of have to start over again, but with 7 digits sitting in our account that wouldn’t be too much of a problem. God bless Arno.
Let me do some research on this man. Damn, can’t Google his name or company. Fair enough, let me check out this movie that he speaks of that comes out this summer. Can’t find shit on imdb and the last photo of Brad Pitt looks like this:
No beard or anything, so obivously the movie is done, Brad shaved the beard and the movie studio is just keeping it underwraps. Fair enough and I think it’s time to reply to Arno.
I would gladly consider the sale of the domain, but a major issue is that my company, 9rules, Inc. uses the domain obviously for our own business purposes so I would have to say that we are looking at something more than just a transfer of a domain. This would require us to come up with a new name for the company amongst other things.
I’m always interested in listening to whatever offer you are willing to put on the table, but I do admit it would take a considerable sum for me to part with the domain. And honestly the lack of information about your company makes me hesitant to further this conversation. I understand why you cannot release details of your client as to prevent me from contacting them directly, but some further information about you and your company would put me at ease a bit more.
Alright Arno, throw me a number so we can get to work here. Has to be 7 digits or I walk to another studio.
Many thanks for your prompt reply. I can understand how cautious you must be in circumstances such as this. Hopefully I can allay your concerns.
My company, Zimmerman’s has been working with our studio clients here in the States since my wife and I moved from London, England to Encino, California some months ago. We have been working with several major film studios and we are currently engaged by a number of Hollywood studios as we specialize in the acquisition of domain names for the film industry.
Recent years have seen a decline in the number of religious movies being made in Hollywood. As I mentioned in my previous email, The Nine Rules tells the story of the young Moses . The Nine Rules will inject new life in the genre and will star a number of popular actors of today.
Moses will be played by Brad Pitt who has grown a beard especially for the part. Natalie Portman has been cast as Esther, a young servant girl with whom Moses falls in love. In the climax of the movie, Moses must choose whether he is to marry Esther or to go walking in the mountains (where he meets the burning bush and is given the tablets containing the Ten Commandments). While the story of Esther and Moses is not told in the Bible, the writers hope that this aspect of The Nine Rules story will present a more rounded character for Moses than has been seen in previous movies. The Nine Rules is adventure, romance and religious epic all rolled into one movie.
Being the CEO of an Internet based organization yourself, I am sure that you will know of the increasing difficulty in acquiring original domain names. I also fully understand that your organization uses this domain name for your business purposes.
I can assure you that my clients are sincere in their offer, and that they are keen to conclude this purchase quickly. I would be interested to learn how much you would require for this transfer of ownership.
Seems like a great story and the logic behind using the religion genre makes total sense to me. Maybe our Religious Community would like to get involved. Okay, I guess it’s on me to throw a number out there so here we go.
Hope you enjoyed your Easter Sunday. I have given this a ton of thought and these are the issues that arise with the selling of the domain:
- 3 years worth of backlinks will not be easy to build back up again.
- A name and brand go behind 9rules and therefore starting over from scratch is not an eviable position to be in.
Since our company has already received a number of inquiries for investment I can not part with the domain for less than $1.7M and understand I must throw a number out since you were reluctant to put one on the table. I am more than happy to listen to any counteroffers.
Alrighty then Arno, let’s see what you got.
Many thanks for your prompt and considered reply. Under normal circumstances your proposal of $1.7 million would have been perfectly acceptable and we would have been happy to agree to your terms. However I have some unfortunate news.
My agency has been informed today that in light of the sensitive situation in the Middle East, the direction of The Nine Rules project has been changed and a new script has been written.
The movie will now not be about a biblical Moses, but will instead tell the story of a young man growing up in the mountains of Mexico. In this new story, Manuel (Moses) falls in love with a young senorita, but despite his love for her, he must travel into the mountains accompanied only by his donkeys. The new movie will be called The Nine Mules.
I am very sorry that we were not able to conclude our business and I will be sending you and your associates VIP tickets to the opening night of The Nine Mules (traditional Mexican costume optiotional) in compensation.
So I can’t make my partners happy because of some mules? Ain’t that a bitch.
I asked my good friend Mike Davidson a couple weeks ago if he would be willing to do an interview with me about his company Newsvine. This will be my first interview and I can already tell you the questions I have are loaded and should definitely entertain. Let BusinessWeek ask the boring shit.
In any case, I thought it would be a good idea to stick in some questions from the audience, so leave a question in the comments and I will make sure to ask the five I pick and he will have no choice but to answer.
Besides that I have been knee deep in a Myspace case study. I’m a very social person who goes out a lot and never understood the Myspace phenomenon until I really got to use it and from a business perspective it’s brilliant. So many great lessons that can be learned from it when looked at it from the right approach it is amazing to me how everyone who talks about why it’s a success is completely missing the point (including myself and my previous entries about it). Hopefully I can get my first bit of insight in later today or tomorrow so then I can come back a couple months from now and realize I was still wrong about Myspace.
Yesterday when I wrote about creating 37signals apps for free, I knew I should’ve went with some generic company instead, but I thought a specific example would help everyone reading. However, if you mention 37signals and you don’t praise them to the high heavens there is a good chance a large number of people will misinterpret what you are trying to say and put their own spin on it and attack you back, even though you weren’t attacking them in the first place.
I use Basecamp every once in a while, but I haven’t dived into their other offerings because for now I don’t have a need. I love that the little company made it big. Great inspiration can be found in their story and I think I have said all of this fluff before anyways. In any case I thought I would highlight some of the great comments left yesterday to show how far and wide people can take a discussion. Remember it’s best to read most of these in the comments since some of the logic might be taken out of context.
No, I don’t think 37s would be even remotely worried about a free competitor to any of their products — it just doesn’t make sense.
Why wouldn’t any company worry about a free competitor?
Also, companies turn deaf to using something like Basecamp, no matter how good it is, due to privacy concerns and the fact that their data is hosted on a service based site and not on their own i.e., Corporation paranoia.
Which was one of my points.
Yeah, right. Why just can Sony, Createive and others just get togather and produce an iPod killer over a weekend - that thing is so simple.
I still don’t get, why are you obsessed with 37S…
Why be copycats when you can go and create something different and still great. Or can you?
Because the iPod is iTunes, Apple and status icon.
Wow, lots of ignorance on display here today. No, you can’t whip up Basecamp in a weekend. Go ahead, try. You’re in for a much needed reality check.
Ummm, okay…
Basecamp is great because the team that built it is truly talented. Truly talented people will rarely settle for just copying someone else’s work and releasing it as their own, which is why most copies suck compared to their originals. But, if you can find a talented team that is willing to settle for copying someone else’s work instead of coming up with something of their own… well, then that team is probably not as talented as you think.
An obvious point.
Then when you get to comment #33 you finally find someone who understands where I coming from…sort of..
When I read the post by Scrivs, I have to say I agreed. I like 37s and their products, and I respect what they are trying to do. I can understand why 37s have such an amazing following. However, I understand that 37s have put themselves in a pretty vulnerable position. What they have created is a suite of products which, to be fair, are pretty simple and straightforward. Replicating them now could be done pretty quickly and easily. Not that anyone would want to simply replicate what they have done, but it is possible. And I think what Scrivs is saying is that, in order to hold their position, 37s are going to have to work.
I was waiting for something like this…
Does your desire to put them out of business have anything to do with the fact that 9rules has been a complete and utter failure?
I can’t remember me ever saying or even thinking I want to put 37signals out of business because you know the best way to put them out of business is to start a content network that has nothing to do with what they are doing…
You couldn’t just copy a product, slap another name on it, put them out of business, and expect them to not sue you. Also, , its not just the products, guys. These guys have a huge influence on every piece of development going right now.
Wasn’t sure how to respond to that one.
Overall though if you could filter through the noise, it was a great discussion and I think both sides brought a great number of valuable points which hopefully I can summarize tomorrow. For now I just wanted to show you that if you don’t have a thick skin, don’t say anything about a company as great as 37signals. And yes I do think they are great.
