Published in Marketing on Friday, February 24th, 2006
Steve Rubel proclaims in his post "Ri.dic.u.lous" that Yahoo won [the bookmarking app area] when they bought del.icio.us
. I don't think so.
Call me crazy, but how has anyone "won" yet?
I would think that there is still plenty of space for a bookmarking app to "win", and would hazard to guess that will be the case until one company "wins" over mainstream users, not just niche areas occupied by web power users (internautas, as they call them in Spain - love that term).
Impossible? Too specialized for the average/mainstream web user?
Okay, maybe one of these services can win over a niche that isn't full of semi to full power users. Build one around an existing community, like Scuttle inside Yahoo, for example (yeah that's right). Or set up for group research/bookmarking in corporate intra-nets, corporate libraries etc.
Librarians researching topics, writing summaries, the RSS feed for a given tag auto-generated into an e-mail and fired off to the engineering department who don't have to waste their time searching the web - or maybe they have added links too, it is the corporate intra-net, after all.
Power users could be right into having bookmarking on a corporate intra-net, especially with the data portability that things like open APIs and plain old vanilla RSS offer. Non-power users would have it "pushed" on them, and lets face it, it's not that hard to grok.
Huge markets just waiting out there, I say.
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Comments and Feedback
I agree—wide open market.
I also agree with you that we need a term for 'web power user' and 'internautas' is great! (Provided that's what it really means...)
Check it out!! Not quite "power-user", I suppose, but man, they have an association.
I've even seen billboards with advertising :D
I agree. Nobody's won yet. Google, for one, could win in a day if they launch a bookmarking service. And most people haven't heard of del.icio.us at all. Wide open.
Yep, I've experienced this with the Code Snippets software. It's basically just del.icio.us for content (in my case, code snippets!) but quite a few people are now using it to manage code and other assets in-house. As a Rails app though, it's definitely not got the take up a PHP app would, so Scuttle may just pull it off!
Especially since the strongest benefit of del.icio.us is the fact that bookmarks are saved online. Okay, okay, the tagging thing and popular list are great, and that's what people are excited about. But I have digg and blogs and countless other ways to discover new sites on the Internet. The only reason I use del.icio.us is so I can bookmark sites at work and find them at home.
And if this is typical, then there's literally unlimited room for bookmarking apps.
Yeah, my wife said the same thing: bookmarking yes, discovery no.
I use it for both.
I completely agree with you! There is lots of opportunity left and we are definitely trying to break into the market with www.blinklist.com. So far our adoption is very strong and we are rapidly responding to our community. Mike
Internauta is not necessary a power user, is anyone who uses internet, in english could be something like internaut. But i agree, it's a great term