I've written a blog post over at pluck.com about how important it is to show casual visitors to your site that stuff is happening in your community. There's some quite interesting results from one of our customers who made a change to surface what was going on and saw a 60% increase in activity.
(I originally wrote the whole blog post here, but felt it was more appropriate for the company blog).
Recently a Google engineer, Steve Yegge, posted an epic rant / manifesto / resignation letter about what he sees as Google's biggest weakness. He says that with a few exceptions, people there think of Google as a product company. Because they've had such a phenomenal success with some products (search, gmail) and because they're all so clever, they assume they can consistently design the perfect product.
He contrasts this with Facebook and Amazon, who think of themselves as platform companies. They provide platforms and let other people figure out how to deliver products on that platform.
He points to Google+ as a prime example of this. There is still no full API available, so the Seismics and Hootsuites of the world can't add features, we're reliant on Google for Android and iPhone apps, and if you're on another platform like Blackberry you're totally out of luck except for a very average mobile optimised site. (One of my first thoughts when I started playing with Google+ was "wow, I bet the API for this is really cool." My next thought was "oh.")
I think Yegge has hit the nail on the head. Too often in software we think we know our users and audience so well that we can design and build exactly what they want. We're often wrong, which is why successful software projects tend to be ones that start simple and grow based on feedback from their users. It's an approach we reccomend to Pluck customers - start building your community with our out of the box functionality, then learn what your community wants before you spend loads of time building custom features for them. After all, we've learnt from our customers and incorporated what _they_ want in our functionality, so it's normally an excellent starting point. I do hope the powers that be at Google take on board what Yegge says and make the kind of radical transformation into a services based organisation that delivers platforms Yegge advocates. I'd hate to see Google+ fail - our industry needs a serious competitor to Facebook and Twitter - and I fear for Google in the long term if they continue on their current path.
Blathering about social media, technology, cycling, running and photography. Mostly. Views my own.
