sergiosantos.info

blog and works

There's no room left for "just" products

13.Oct.2007

The number of Internet users has suffer an enormous growth in the past years and we’re still experiencing it. But from the developers perspective, the number of websites/services has also increased significantly. Besides the big players like some portals (Google, Yahoo, MSN, ...) and social networks (Facebook, MySpace, ...), there’s a long long tail of all kinds of products built.

So far, all seems to go well, there’s still a big market. But we are no longer thinking about user numbers, we are thinking about their actual value. And what all users got to offer is their attention, generating the so called Attention Economy. Although content creation is also an important asset, it still isn’t something all users are doing explicitly, and marketeers haven’t found out good ways to take advantage from it. Attention is really a volatile asset. Even though humans are quite multi-tasking, there’s always a limit to the volume of information they can process, and we all end up limiting our choices to some favorite places.

By Storm Phantom at Flickr.

All the supply available on the web is cutting out room for new products and it’s not like users are demanding more, since their are already reaching their attention limit. Web development has also became a more popular activity and creating products has became easier than ever: more development and deployment tools, less money required, more early adopters. However, sending a good product out there in the open, won’t just do it anymore.

What really distinguish web products is their user experience. That’s what makes users return to your website or paying attention to what you say. It really doesn’t matter if their hearing you from a RSS feed or some YouTube video, as long as you got them listening you. Make the users feel welcome when they come to you website. Engage them, build a community if you can and spend time with them. Also listen to them: you can’t create followers only with a one-way conversation. Basically, make them smile, even for a bit, and the rest will go just fine.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS Feed