Every time I see a random list of "best new web companies" I get amazed with the amount of diversity there is right now. They all have this web2.0 feeling to them, but try to do a lot of random things. I won't try to go through all of them in this post (because I don't have time for it), but I wanted to highlight two today:
SezWho: I've heard of this site before when it was on inception but it seems now it has some tools available. The idea here is to create communities around people's trust ratings based on people's activities across multiple websites. Sounds like a not-so-bad idea, right? But I don't think it will work as it is today. Why? because it requires the site to be "SezWho-enabled", i.e., the site owner has to do coding work to make sure their posting and comment system actually traces back to SezWho. Who will do this jump of forcing their site's experience through somebody else's system? I know I wouldn't. I could ask SezWho to listen to my site's RSS feed and then provide content aggregation and cross-rating. Making it a part of my site is not an option.
Get Satisfaction: Another site I've heard before but when I saw it was in private beta or something like that. The idea of this one is for people to post comments/questions about companies and their products and then for companies to be able to post answers to those questions. All public and searchable. Not a bad idea, I say.
This one is kind of odd to think that it's not going to work. If I post something public about how I don't like my old Canon printer, Canon might think it needs to participate on trying to defend their printer. And once people see that they really have a connection to the company, they might start to really use it.
My biggest concern here is the silo approach again. You have to post on their site. The future is aggregation, not silos. Make you sign up, register your data source (blog, twitter, etc.) and make them aggregate what you say about companies. Then you let companies comment on their system and that is automatically sent back to your site as a comment (whenever possible) with an ad to their service.
Anyway, we will continue to see a lot of changes coming in the future. I just don't know if people will ever be able to fully change.
Friday, September 19, 2008
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2 comments:
Hey, thanks for writing about us!
I thought I would chime in and say that our goal at Get Satisfaction is not predicated on the idea of customers or companies coming to our site. (We're not based on an advertising model.) We're all about creating a network of support that can live anywhere.
We have the Help Center, a free PHP application which companies are welcome to install on their own site to match their own branding, and we have an open API, which developers are encouraged to use to extend our customer support network in nearly any way they can think to do so.
Hope this helps!
Eric Suesz
Community Manager
Get Satisfaction
Hi Eric. Thanks for the comment. I now see that I misunderstood your goals. But I think my concern is still valid: the big benefit from a system like this (and I think it's a great system) is the ability to aggregate and distribute information tied to known entities (like companies and products). This way we can hope that one day we can transform this chaotic distributed web into something that fosters the improvement of our society.
Right now, the way I see the web, is that everything is in this isolated section and unless you happen to search for the right thing at the right time and then reinforce it by copying or linking it on your site, we won't be taking full benefit of each person's voice.
But now that I see you have an API, maybe I'll give it a try to do some of the things that I've mentioned. I've added the idea to my ever-growing list of things to build.
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