What don’t they do well?
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.
Related reading:
[...] It is great to see that they are trying to build some community features into their site, but I don’t think this was the best way to do it. The service just comes off as gimmicky. If you are sitting down and thinking about creating a competitor to Technorati and you ask the question “What don’t they do well” you will have a clear cut answer sitting right in front of you. So if you are the Technorati CEO what do you do? [...]
By Okay, so you’re the CEO of Technorati… » Wisdump on February 1, 2007 2:44 am
For the past year, many people have predicted that the company who will take down MySpace will be open and work with existing data sources people have already established for themselves. Nobody wants to create yet another photoset and upload more photos (they use Flickr, or Smugmug, or whatever), or upload videos (they use YouTube), or upload content (they already have a blog, or 2, or 3), they just want something that works seamlessly with all of the content they already have. If you’re building a social network that revolves around the idea of users coming to your site and re-uploading or re-writing data that they’ve already written elsewhere, I think it’s time to rethink that strategy.
By Mike Rundle on February 1, 2007 4:21 am
I found it a little challenging to personalize my MySpace page. I’m comfortable with CSS and HTML but it really is quite a beast to deal with. Not surprisingly a lot of companies are attacting consumers to their MySpace pages by offering customized templates that incorporate branding elements. I think the Dodge Nitro MySpace page is an excellent example of this: http://www.myspace.com/nitro. The main feature is creating your own template, and the branding is not excessive, IMO. This is a good way of trying to fiddling with the design yourself.
By Toby on February 2, 2007 5:20 pm
[...] Why don’t we ask ourselves more often what a company doesn’t do well? asks Scrivs [...]
By adaptive path » blog » blog archive » Signposts for the Week ending February 2, 2007 on February 2, 2007 7:23 pm
[...] Last week I asked the question of “What don’t they do well?” and I had Ali in mind when I was writing it. For me, most social networks try to sell me on too much stuff that I don’t need. I already have sites that I write on so I don’t need a blogging option. I use Flickr for sharing online photos so I don’t need another place to do that. del.icio.us handles my links and last.fm watches my music. So as you can see I really don’t need another platform to handle this data, but it would be nice to have a place outside of my sites for others to see what I am getting into. [...]
By my.9rules: Bringing Social Back » Wisdump on February 9, 2007 4:40 am