Writing Your Own Content is More Valuable Than Relying On Mash-Ups
December 31, 2007
Was over at Techcrunch looking at their coverage of the demise of Netscape Navigator – the formerly dominant browser which in February will be discontinued, and found in the “Deadpool” the demise of Teqlo.
It reminded me of something that I have always mentioned to people when they’re rolling out new sites – you can use third party content to spice things up, but you need to have unique, compelling content to make money. That costs, but so does developing integration and everything else. There really isn’t the thought put into creating the content with some many folks, as they want the site they do once and then let it be to make them money.
I’ve covered this a little bit in the past – but Teqlo is great proof that in order to stand out, you need to be the content originator or value provider with your site in some way.
Web Success: It’s not the features, it’s the community
December 28, 2007
Thought I should something that we’ve known for a bit, but Leo Laporte’s “Tech Guy” Radio Show/Podcast mentioned and so it brought it to the forefront of my mind.
Leo was talking about his experience at Jaiku – he left Twitter for a combination of feature and legal reasons (namely, the name of “Twitter” being very close to his netcast network, “TWiT.”) And he found, that although Jaiku has all kinds of functionality, no one was there and it wasn’t as useful or fun.
Although Twitter is much more basic and has way fewer features, it is more important and valuable because it has the weight of the community – it’s where everyone is at. This also applies to services like SmugMug which has many more features than Flickr.
What’s the lesson? Find that thing that builds a community, and stick with it. The more mainstream you want something to be, the easier it needs to be to use. Build a group of users and support them and implement their feedback. Anyone can use Twitter – the amalgam of alphabet letters of RSS and all the like don’t come into play like other presences.
Technorati Tags:
Flickr, SmugMug, Twitter, Jaiku, Web 2.0, Social Content
Excellent WoW! Ads
December 20, 2007
Another ad bit – this one is just funny and goes with a set of three commercials featuring Mr. T, Verne Troyer and William Shatner.I just love it when someone creates memorable stuff.
Excellent Apple Flash Ad – “Don’t Give Up On Vista”
December 14, 2007
Sometimes, you look at an ad, and go, “Cool.”
Double-buy ads have plagued sites for years, because so often it’s the same copy or creative just in a horizontal or vertical format – and are just plain ugly.
However, Apple has set the standard again for creatives, migrating their Mac vs. PC commercial to a web page near you (here’s a link the New York Times, but I don’t think it’s going to be up forever, so no guarantees of quality. To give you an idea, I put a screen shot of the ad up there) with a great coordinated ad that takes the usual Mac vs. PC skit on the side and puts it in a leaderboard on the top of the page.
Great work, again. This is the kind of stuff that makes for fun work and innovates to get people to click.
Technorati Tags:
Praise, Apple Computer, Advertising, Mac vs. PC, New York Times, Flash
This isn’t the first time Facebook has had to apologize
December 7, 2007
I start with praise.
Great way to handle a business mess-up.
It doesn’t erase that fact it was done, but shows that there is some self-responsibility at the top, rare in today’s world.
There are two things at work here – although I admire that Facebook is trying to be innovative to support it’s business, it looks like there is a pattern developing of Facebook releasing services and not thinking, or underestimating, the value of or integration of privacy controls.
I’ve heard the argument that unless these companies can leverage your personal information in ways that work for advertisers the business portion of these social networking sites will eventually collapse – after all, they don’t make the amount of money right now close to justifying their current high valuations.
There has got to be a way that strikes a balance – there are plenty of “green” motivations for Facebook and others to figure this out.
Technorati Tags:
Beacon, Facebook, Facebook Apologizes Again
