No One Wants to be a Rookie...
When you first sign up for Pinyadda, this is your image. I thought this was a great way to encourage users to upload an image of themselves. Twitters default image is pretty bad, but no one wants to be a rookie.
End of Summer Reading: Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead & Crowdsourcing
Although the end of summer is coming, I am hoping I still have some time to relax. I have been looking forward to reading both these books for a while. Crowdsourcing
Users Love Simple Products
Users love simple products that are easy to use.
The Google Search Box. No ads, just a search box.
Posterous, the screen to create a post. The user is not overloaded with options just a title, a box for content, a simple way to upload images, and a button “Post”.
Twitter, all they want to know, “Whats happening”, the user types less than 140 characters then presses “Tweet”.
Groupon only offers each city one deal a day, with one side offer.
Just because a product is simple doesn’t mean it’s not effective. I apologize, I’ve already said too much.
Blekko, Google killer? Not Yet
There has been a lot of buzz about Blekko recently from articles in Techcrunch to the recent post on SEOBook. Right now between the hundreds of millions of dollars Microsoft is spending on Bing and then billions of dollars Google is making, it seems like a search engine startup is suicide.
I remember a couple of years ago when Cuil came out, and there was the discussion that this would be a Google killer... that hasn’t happened yet. Blekko is bringing a different approach. They are bringing a much more systematic and realistic approach, rather than a full blitz. One thing that webmasters and SEO’s should be paying attention to, is the information Blekko is going to share.
Everything I have read about Blekko tells me that they will be open with the information relates to their algorithm. The number one thing that comes to everyones mind is linking data. With the Bing & Yahoo! deal, a lot of SEOs have been worried about Yahoo Site Explorer link data being discontinued.
Its exciting to hear about a potential “Google killer”. Blekko will be different from Google and Bing, and those differences will make it tougher for users to adopt, but it will separate Blekko from Google (whether users like it more or less in the end). Even Blekko admits theres no such thing as a Google Killer, they understand the difficulties of building a search engine from scratch. I like the viral strategies that they are trying to leverage in order to build traffic. It will be exciting to see a new player enter the game, it is definitely too soon to know whether Blekko will be a challenger, but it will be exciting to watch the management team try to maneuver the market.
