Business model based on another’s shortcomings? January 22, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : On Topic , add a commentI saw the announcement when I logged into Twitter about their service going down for two hours tonight.
This isn’t something new as we all heard about their outage during the MacWorld conference as well as a general trend of their uptime edging more towards downtime. It got me thinking about business models that focus heavily on another company’s shortcomings. I guess that is really how startups get their start anyway because one’s failings create opportunities.
At MessageDance, we have a new service that sends our users’ messages to Twitter (by email or through MessageDance.com) and will batch them up for delivery if Twitter is down. This is great during periods when Twitter has these infrastructure issues, but what about when they get it together? If you’re a one-trick pony company, then that’s about it for you. Your best hope is for grabbing as many users as you can and then figure out how to serve them after the storm has passed (any good examples out there?). The good thing about us is that it is just a nice feature that came about because of another’s shortcoming, but it isn’t the meat of our offering — it’s still all about Just One Email.
The Killer App of 2008 January 4, 2008
Posted by geoffwolfe in : Off Topic , 1 comment so farI wrote before that I believe email is still the killer app. When email is used in the context of social media, serving as a communication platform across social networks, it becomes even clearer that email’s value to a social-society goes through the roof. There is some buzz today about social network aggregators being the killer app of 2008. At MessageDance, we are using email as the tool to not aggregate conversations from multiple social networks, but instead, spread a singular conversation to all social networks. The end goal of social network aggregation — negating the complexity of a presence on multiple sites — is realized by social email — realized by MessageDance.
An earlier post of mine talked about how and why people are on several social networks. Some data points collated by Ujwal Tickoo really illustrates in bare numbers how the same person can be very active on several social networks.
- 20% of MySpace members are also Facebook Members
- 64% of Facebook members also belong to MySpace. (MySpace has nearly 3x the unique visitors of Facebook and a few years head start.)
- Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster all share more than 49% of their members with MySpace
- LinkedIn shares 42% of its members with Facebook and 32% with MySpace
So, I feel our opportunity for 2008 is incredible: email (killer app) + social networking (essential app) + simplification (killer app : better than aggregation) = MessageDance.