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
