SROYS

“Internet is a terrain and not a tool. Its about emerging and not appointing. Create intricate touch-points in a community, based on what is required by the members. Such as a new employee who logs in to the company intranet, may find ads with houses for rent and suggestions for new like-minded work-buddies and projects with similar skill-sets.”

There is always way more than what we can understand when we first glance over a line of text written by an intellectual giving you advice, and I am still trying to figure out the first point and trying to apply this into our perspective.

What I guess he mean is that when you are building an application you can’t think of it as a tool like say a computer (by definition - a device or implement used to carry out a particular function.) - a computer is a tool - the internet is a terrain. So we should want to be discovered as part of the internet terrain and not just a tool to do a specific job.

And how do you do that? By “creating intricate touch-points” - so basically it mean meet the user where he/she is, at that time. Something that is customized to where the user stands. To understand this let me just quickly think of a few services which do this well - this is an extremely difficult thing to do so I think probably only the greatest of services will list here:

Google - Gives you exactly what you are looking for and it gives you ads that are relevant.

Khan Academy - they create your profile and depending on what you are trying to learn they will guide you step by step from one lesson to the next and help you master the subject.

Twitter - you follow the people you are interested in - depending on what the user is interested in - and your timeline or feed is different from other people.

Amazon - again gives you exactly what you are looking for - depending on your search, pages viewed or wish list.

All of these are basically building a profile of what you want from them and then delivering what they have in that context.

The web eventually WILL become more and more concentrated towards what YOU want and not just what THEY have. So first advice give the user what they want and not just what we have.

Now let’s try to look at the opposite - strangely the first service I can think of which is huge but doesn’t quite do it yet is:

youtube.com - it has become a tool for video sharing - but now we do see a huge push by them to make it a terrain - they have revamped the home page to just show you recommendations depending on what you are subscribed to. Basically they are trying to move people into using youtube as a preferred place to watch videos (which it is) but not in a discovery mode but on a regular basis. You don’t go to youtube thinking “Let’s see what my updates are on topics I am interested in” - we mostly go to youtube via a link share or when we want to search a particular video or in case video creators when they want to upload a video for the purpose of sharing.

It’s clear that something will emerge that will aggregate all your subscriptions and give you one single dash board to look at - kind of like an interactive map of the terrain. There are many companies who are trying this streamy, friendfeed etc but I don’t think they are doing a good enough job - which is why they don’t have hundreds of millions of users.

I think this will eventually be done by an operating system or a browser. Something that will allows us to explore whatever we are exploring on the internet but also add our subscriptions to various sites in widget formats. Kind of like the imac dashboard application where I can move my mouse to the extreme bottom-left and a screen appears which has all my widgets.

But there are still no services which allow webmasters to create widgets for their sites easily - and even the apple dashboard feature lacks in lots of ways so it can’t really be used like this. So we wait.

But it’s clear that the advice we received is very sound - we need to grow bigger than being just a tool. And it fits in perfectly in our scenario - we are used by people only when they want to find some particular document and we are mostly discovered via search engines. We only have about 15% of users who are regulars and come to us to read new discussions or think of us when they have a business problem. We want to grow that percentage.