Via Mashable
September 29, 2008 – 9:30 pm PDT – by Steven Hodson
Mark Evans wrote a post a couple of days ago that asks a simple question that as far as I am concerned every single web service start up should be asking: “What’s In It For Me?”
While his central point was more about developers asking this question to see whether they were creating something because they could or whether it actually served a real need,I was struck by something else he said. In his post he notes that developers need to watch how people are actually using the site.
The reason for this is that in a great many cases what you thought would be the killer aspect that everyone would want to use the site for turns out to be exactly the opposite. Instead they find some other way that – as Mark says – resonates with them.
The best example of this of course has to be Twitter. Twitter was never intended to be what it is today. Where the company saw a mini-CMS application, the users discovered a dead simple real time communication tool and this almost killed Twitter.
The only thing that really saved them was that what they – or rather what the users saw was something totally new and they were willing to put up with all the problems that Twitter had as it made what turned out to be a massive transition. I don’t think that something like that will be repeated again as users are being geared to the idea that companies can basically turn on a dime and provide what the users want and have it work.
