Quite possibly the most important paragraph in this essay for a product at the customer dev stage (and probably easy to underestimate... it's a very subtle point):
"There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did?"
It's hard to attain the perspective of a completely fresh user when you've been in the trenches hacking away for so long. And as I've discovered, if you can't explain it, you can't sell it, cos no one landing on your site's gonna pore over the genius invisibly possessing it like a ghost in the machine.
I agree. Facebook's strategy ought to be to lock down and defend their niche in social networking. The signs seem to indicate a greater emphasis on connecting person to person: I predict more location and mobile-based features, and more aggressive expansion in developing markets.
Only then would a search product make sense, though it would be tempting to rush it out as a partnership with Bing.
Scrolling down this article is like walking through a gallery of how the world of consumer tech evolved since 1997.
I think the Microsoft partnership was a masterstroke. It lowered the barrier for switchers like me to come onboard. Interesting to see here that the scrumptious iMac was introduced less than a year later.
"There are two things you have to do to make people pause. The most important is to explain, as concisely as possible, what the hell your site is about. How often have you visited a site that seemed to assume you already knew what they did?"
It's hard to attain the perspective of a completely fresh user when you've been in the trenches hacking away for so long. And as I've discovered, if you can't explain it, you can't sell it, cos no one landing on your site's gonna pore over the genius invisibly possessing it like a ghost in the machine.