If you were starting a site in a competitive field like search engines or social networking sites what would be the first question you would ask about your competition? Today I was thinking about search engines and how so many new sites are popping up claiming that they do X better than Google, but to the average person what doesn’t Google do well? Maybe you do have better blog search technology, but does it matter if your cousin thinks that Google does just fine?
Why don’t we ask ourselves more often what someone doesn’t do well? Instead we like to sit and analyze what we think we can do better than the competition. Yahoo has this problem as well as Technorati. They both claim to do something better than Google (ads and blog search), but then again do their target audiences (marketers and blog searchers) believe that Google isn’t doing those things well?
Let us look at Social Networks now. Virb has a couple of people interested because it allows you to customize the CSS on your profile and admittedly looks better (not hard). However, to a MySpace user what doesn’t MySpace do well? Many are comfortable customizing their profiles on MySpace through premade templates so to them MySpace does this very well. Others don’t see any problems at all with the exception of outages.
When Friendster was at the top of the social networking world all you had to do is sit back and think what they didn’t do well. The answer was simple, they couldn’t keep the site up. That’s what MySpace did better. Sure you could customize your profiles and add annoying music, but Friendster had the people and yet they didn’t have the uptime.
What didn’t Yahoo do well? They didn’t let people cut right to the chase and get their search results. Google did and they won. So as you can see sometimes it isn’t about finding what you can do better, but understanding what your competition doesn’t do so well.
I just got done reading this thread over on Digg about someone who did a Myspace homepage redesign and although it is better than the current version, many of the commentors agree that there really is no point since Myspace will not change. Let me rephrase that by saying Myspace can not change. Myspace is stuck in the position they are now and it would take some mighty fine programming to get people to move to a new form of layouts and code without breaking the millions of disgusting ready-made templates already available. But I got to thinking and what if they just simply created another Myspace?
They have all the data they need in their databases, so why not just create a whole new site on another domain? You can start fresh and scale as you wish with new features while also slowly moving your current userbase over to the new site. Many people believe that over time when a person gets tired of Myspace that they will simply go on to the next best thing. Why can’t that next best thing be done by Myspace?
Maybe I am being feeble-minded here, but I can’t help but draw comparisons to how games work. Every once in a while a great game comes along and a strong community builds up around it. Maybe the community is focused around modifications (mods) of the game and continue to make it exciting for each other as time goes on. However, there comes a point where you can only take a game so far and by this time the game publisher is usually already hard at work creating the next version.
There is a chance you will alienate a small population of your audience with the new game, but you have a greater chance of bringing even more people on board. People like new versions, with the exception of movies. Hell, I was even going to suggest Myspace2.com as the domain, but that is uglier than Myspace 1. In any case, am I thinking crazy here and why don’t we see this done more often outside of video games? Isn’t there a time where you just can’t add anymore to your website and you need to start from a fresh perspective?
When it comes to social networking sites, the biggest features aren’t what the site can do, but who is using the site and Myspace has that feature on lock.
I’m a big fan of Digg and have been for a while. Of all the websites out there they are probably the highest mentioned one on this site over the past six months. During that time there is always speculation that someone is close to buying them up and in all honesty I came to a realization today that nobody should buy Digg.
I don’t mean that companies shouldn’t look at a Digg acquisition, but take a step back and look at everything that Digg stands for and ask yourself if you can really see it prospering under corporate rule. There is enough speculation about how Fox News portrays Obama or if Microsoft is cheating by paying people to edit their Wikipedia articles and it is easy to imagine those powers using Digg to their advantage.
Who is to say that Yahoo wouldn’t buy Digg and start to plant articles that shine them a in a brighter light than Google? We already know that the ones who write the history books are the ones that control past events, but do we need a corporation to control what the web is going to talk about in the next year? It isn’t scary to think what can be done with Digg under the wrong hands, because if shady stuff starts to overshadow the good stuff people will leave and go elsewhere, but I’m sure not too many people want to see that happen.
It seems that everyone’s exit is to get bought up by Google or Yahoo, but where does that leave the independent social web that we have been so hard at work trying to build? Nobody is saying we should turn away millions of dollars, but in our celebration of Web 2.0 acquisitions we are failing to see that we are losing the principles of what made Web 2.0 so great in the first place: openess, freedom and us.
Over at 9rules we are working on a couple of new things that we haven’t done before and that required us to go out and see how competitors in the field do things. Just like in eating your own dog food using your competitors’ products can either be a humbling experience or comedic gold. I have yet to understand how people can build something and leave it at that without having the itch to make it better or knowing what it takes to make things better.
Admittedly there are some things that I like that the competition does and either we will implement them in our own way or completely reinvent how they are done. What’s interesting about this method is that I am finding that many of the ways we are handling things is the complete opposite of how others do it. In some cases doing things better simply means not doing them at all.
For example, if you go back one or two years and look at blog networks, everyone seemed to be starting one. Each network owned their sites and in principle you couldn’t tell one apart from the other. On a site-by-site basis you could definitely see the differences, but describing how your network functioned sounded just like the next person’s network. At 9rules we took the complete opposite approach and owned none of the sites with the exception of our own personal ones. When Networks were throwing complicated Member Agreements at people, we gave our Members a simple one.
We didn’t look for revenue sharing between the sites, we just wanted great content. We knew there was a chance we would become one of the largest entities of independent content on the web (wow did I just that? sorry), but that wasn’t what we were striving for. In the blog network game you needed either a couple major homerun sites (Gawker, Engadget and Joystiq to name a few) or you needed a lot of mediocre sites to make a name for yourself. We just went for the best content that came across our path because we wanted that to be what set us apart.
Before we started 9rules I admit to sitting down thinking I could create something bigger than Gawker and Weblogs, Inc., but in reality there was no way I could compete on their level. What I mean is that I wasn’t willing to write 20 entries a day on a site 6 days a week and to compete against them that is one thing you need. So I figured I would start something that nobody else in their right mind would want to do because they couldn’t see immediate financial success from it. That was our competitive edge as twisted as that sounds.
Now we are moving forward and I’m back to looking at the playing field and it is pretty fun. You get to ask a lot of questions and try to find the answers.
- Why did they design it this way?
- Why did they give people this choice?
- Why are they allowing people to do this?
- They do the same thing as this site, but have more people, why?
In doing so I find that I’m not creating a list of things that we must do better, but things that I do not want us to do at all. The Japanese didn’t compete with US automakers in the 70’s by creating huge ass cars. Linux didn’t compete with Microsoft by closing everything up. Apple doesn’t dominate the mp3 industry by out-featuring its competition.
When playing with the competition, decide if you want to be them or be your own company. You may think that you are already your own company because you do X better, but that probably doesn’t separate you at all. More than likely you are just like the rest of them and somewhere someone is playing with you while getting ready to do things in a completely different way. No worries though, once they are finished you won’t even realized you’ve been displaced on the food chain and you can go back to wondering what happened.
If you haven’t seen it already I would appreciate any feedback on the Friends Widget that I have added to my sidebar. Mike has become enthralled with widget design lately since many of them that we find tend to look like ass so we did one up for ourselves and you can see the results on the left. Anyways, if you could let me know what you think.
Many thanks all you kind people out there. Oh, also let me know if you are having trouble with my feed because WordPress and FeedBurner don’t seem to be best of friends right now.
You knew a Web 2.0 shakeup had to occur sooner or later and 2007 seems to be that year. If you read TechCrunch you know that Arrington has a Deadpool section that he puts sites going under in. January has seen a lot of activity in this section and I don’t think it is going to stop anytime soon. What I find surprising are the people in the comments of these entries acting surprised or thinking that it must be a bad time for the web.
When Amazon or eBay go under then you can worry about the web, but when a site that copies everyone else and thinks one of the big boys is going to scoop them up goes under there is no reason to panic. If you were thinking about starting a web company or have one already this is a great time for you because this is where you can really shine.
Yesterday over at 9rules Notes I asked why do people pay for services because I was wondering (again) why more companies don’t charge for their services. A great response came from Teej who says:
Yes, all of these services have a focus on being easy to use, powerful, and professional but that’s not what’s most important. The biggest selling point of these services is that they help their users make more money and make money faster.
What makes the businesses willing to pay? ROI.
Now I don’t think paid services only apply to businesses as he implied (Flickr is a great example), but think about the last thing he has said. ROI. Such a simple concept, yet so many businesses fail to embrace it. How many of these services actually increase your ROI. Now your investment doesn’t have to be in money, it can be measured in time as well.
How many free web statistics programs are there that people can use yet Shaun Inman’s Mint is still selling copies. SmugMug actually charges you to upload photos in its user community, which you can do on Flickr for free, yet they are profitable and making around $10 million a year.
Maybe I’m a sick person to get more excited about seeing companies drop out of the race than to enter it, but I’m sure I’m not alone. Yeah it sucks to see a good company go under, but I can’t say I have seen one yet fall. Instead, the ones that seem to be leaving the web space are the ones you could have expected to leave when they first entered.
To think of it another way how many of you would get distraught to see 95% of the design galleries disappear?
I haven’t talked about the business aspects of, well, running a business for a while and when I was up late last night doing some tweaks to 9rules and looking around the web I realized something. The Web 2.0 era has empowered many individuals to believe they can accomplish anything with a couple of resources. This is one of the reasons why you see so many copycats sprouting up.
How often though do these sites actually catch your attention and keep it due to innovation, design and technology? Anyone can pick up a book or head to a website and learn to code up 99% of the stuff that is being put out there today, but that doesn’t mean you will have the best code or the most efficient. Hell, it doesn’t even mean you will finish your code in a reasonable amount of time.
Anyone can learn XHTML/CSS and open Photoshop to create some basic graphics, but does that mean you should be the one doing the design for your company/site? Even worse, anyone can respond to emails and help out users, but does that make you the best at communicating with them on a one-on-one basis?
How often have we refused to admit that someone can do something better and therefore should be doing it? Too often do we hear the excuse of “not enough resources” and to me that just sounds like “not important enough to find better”. Of all the crappy, hard to use and plain jane Web 2.0 sites out there, how many can you think of that have actually improved over time? Digg is the only one that I can think of that has gotten progressively better as time goes on.
It is a basic business principle of bringing people on board that are better than you at certain tasks. So how come so many of us are still trying to do everything on our own? How come so many of us are quick to partner with the first person that comes around instead of going out and grabbing the best? Sometimes you can’t afford to think that you will just get by with what you have at the moment and instead of worrying about catching the next great VC offer why not think of a way to pool better talent around you and create some real magic.
I’m a firm believer that anyone can do anything when they put their mind to it. However, that still doesn’t mean that they will do it better than the next guy. I will never be the designer that Rundle is or the people communicator that Tyme is and to be honest, that is fine by me.
Somehow you have come across a magical $1 million and the only way you can use it is by investing in 3 web properties. Who do you invest in, why did you invest in them and how do they use the money?
- Reddit: I like Social News, I really do and I love the community around this site. Seems a little more mature than the Digg one probably because it is smaller. The only problem that keeps me from going back? That hideous design. I put some money in to get a decent design up so I am actually enticed to go back.
- Solution Watch: I might be biased since they are 9rules Members, but the guys over at Solution Watch always seem to provide the most indepth reviews of Web applications anywhere on the web. My problem? They don’t do it enough because they have other responsibilities. I invest money so they can do it full-time and make it big.
- Habari: With 9rulers Chris Davis and Khaled Abou Alfa behind the project I have enough faith to “donate” some money to speed up the development process of this upcoming blog software.
And that’s what I came up with. Admittedly the original title was 5 web investments, but after struggling for over 30 minutes I couldn’t even get to that number so I am left with three. I would love to hear what your investments would be so please share.
Here is a quick question I have for everyone out there that I can’t seem to find a clear cut answer for myself. For all of these sites looking to get users to register for their services how come more of them don’t publicly show you how many users they have on their system? Why must that always be a big secret so that when someone is talking about the service they can only guess at the amount of users they have?
Is it only safe to do after you have 50 million users? I know companies don’t want to be open about everything, but I never saw what was wrong with this. Even if there are just 100 people using the service it would be nice to know that I am not signing up for something where nobody is around. Even if you can’t give active users at least show registered users.
Maybe it is because you can never really give an accurate figure to the amount of people that signup for multiple or spammers looking just to be seen. In any case maybe someone out there has a better explanation than I do.
If you have read this site long enough you know that rarely is there an original idea on the web anymore. Instead what you get are sites that either take an idea and make it better or just give you the idea with some fanciness behind it. Best Party Ever is a party planning site and I’m not sure about any others that exist, but I hope that they focus more on the functionality of ease of use of the site over sticking as many AJAX effects on it.
What I Don’t Like
When you go to the site for the first time you are presented with a video. Videos can be a great way to introduce your users to your service, but rarely is anyone willing to sit down for a 6 minute video that at best is unprofessional. The video just doesn’t have enough polish to it and could easily be shortened to just show the essentials of the service. At most I would like to see a 1-2 minute clip here. Even better is give me a homepage with no video and after I signup send me to a page on how to use the service and keep that video readily available at anytime.
Signing up is easy and you don’t even have to wait for the confirmation email to arrive before logging in. However, when you do login you are sent to your profile page that allows you to edit your details. This page is essentially empty and I would think that the purpose of the service is to enter my party details, not edit my profile so I think the Party Planner screen would be a more appropriate place to send people after they login.
Now as I just mentioned the purpose of the site is to create parties/events so you would expect the party planning page overview to give you that option. There is an “Add description” button on the side and an event tab, but neither one of them hint at the ability to create a new party. Give me that option front and center and then you have a page users can work with. Why put the work on them to figure the system out when one small change will take care of everything?
Once you figure out how to get to the create new event page you are presented with a simple looking form. Unfortunately almost everything is a text box so you aren’t sure how you are supposed to input the time, location or anything else. To save all the information you just randomly typed into the form you have to scroll back up and click on the “Save your event” button on the leftside of the screen. Why not also give me a button at the bottom of the form since that is where I plan on being after filling it out?
After clicking on the Save your event button you are presented with a AJAX loading screen overlay and then brought back to the form with no indication that it really saved anything. Basically every other page works in the same fashion where you are left wondering how to work the form. No wonder they give you the video at the beginning.
When trying to set the budget for my cool 9rules party I wasn’t sure how to add vendors so I took a chance going to the Vendor directory to see what I could find. I didn’t recognize any of the vendors that they were showing and then realized all of them were in the state of Washington. Being in Florida this didn’t really help me out that much, but at least they used a nice add button to make things easy. Even worse I wasn’t given the option to change the zip code to even check to see if there were vendors in my area.
Oh well, I added my good friends over at Evergreen Speedway located in nearby Monroe, Washington and headed on back to my budget planner page. I set my party budget for $500 and then filled in the form saying that Evergreen took $600 off my money and therefore I went over budget and the system didn’t even warn me. Apparently it thought I wouldn’t mind going over budget and it just kept on ticking. This is where I kind of just gave up.
I won’t bother going into little graphical details (real rounded corners please) that seemed to have also gone overlooked.
What I Do Like
Writing this review.
There is only so much AJAX and bubbly design will get you. I’m not even going to finish this paragraph because my mind can’t comprehend how a service like this could feel that they are even ready to show the public. I would include screenshots, but there is no need to make them feel any worse.
This review is brought to you by the Letters R, V , X, Y and ReviewMe.
