Right now, we all know that Buzz did not create, quite a buzz but was a fizz. Nobody would have even given a damn to this, if it was not creating the privacy havoc!
Why did Buzz fail??
It is just against the laws of nature!
In their book, "Origin of Brands", Ries and Ries, state and argue that, "Convergence is Crap", Divergence is Divine. They go on to give examples and prove the above mentioned statement.The book compares the origin of brands and origin of species and gives recipe to successful brands.
Now compare this with the so called social media!!Twitter is for tweets, Blogger is for Blogs. Picassa is to share pictures. Gmail is to send mails. Gtalk is for chat.
You dont mail all people who are in your network in a networking site.You dont chat with all the people to whom you send mail.
Nowadays you have your blog friends, tweet friends, chat friends, mail friends and orkut/facebook friends.
Definitely you dont want to bring all this together. In fact it would be better if they are all kept apart.[and you would want it that way]
And when you try to bring any of these together, all you get is a mess like buzz or a wave that dont reach the shores!
So even for social media, the origin of species do apply! and even here "Convergence is Crap" "Divergence is Divine"
p.s
After reading this post, if you feel, "something is missing in this post" "there is quite something wrong that i cant lay my finger on" voila I(Ries and Ries) have proved my(their) point.
This is what happens to a reader when an author tries to converge a book review and product review.
6 comments:
There will always be an anti-thesis to that thesis. Only that you've to search for it or find it like you found Ries and Ries.
G messed up on the privacy aspect, when they rolled out and got torn to shreds (negative publicity) and secondly they started late, almost too late without a major differentiator. There are always a case for aggregation platforms that combine a, b and c to give you a mashup and manage from a single place. It would be messy to integrate with Twitter/Facebook or whatever comes as the next social networking toy and still hold on to your individuality without being a pure integrator.
Divergence is probably the only way you can differentiate. But then there can be innovation in convergence. Who knows? After all, you manage complexity once you reach a certain point. What was almost impossible in 2000 now becomes possible by 2010.
Ahem, agreed with your thesis of anti-thesis!
Well, I read Ries and Ries long back!. Ries and ries was so convincing and i was completely sold. Now i do stronly believe in divergence against the conventional wisdom of convergence is cool!
This post has been lying in cobwebs hence not so effective as i had envisioned it!
W.r.t G, they did all things wrong. still puzzled why they never had this in their perpetual beta! More over this is not available as stand alone but only wt mail!
There will be a follow up to this on "What google should do ;)"
Interesting perspective zeno. I agree; not only divergence, but also not everybody will take up everybody. I blog and email of course, but don't tweet, don't "picasa" and don't "facebook". Now if one service made me do all this, I'll run !
Hi Ramesh, thanks for dropping by :) am glad you agree!
I was thinking to shoot out a mail to you asking for your thoughts on my business ramblings :)
Apart from the downsides of Tweet and FB, there are certain good things too!
tweeting is fun. I come across some great links and source of info from tweets.
and FB, by posting blog links on FB, you get readership. I was quite surprised to know that most of my friends do read the blog via FB.
Part of the problem why I don't tweet or am not on facebook is also because these are all blocked in China where I live and its just too much of a hassle trying to go through proxies (which I what I have to do for blogging also).But then just like in any consumer market, some people will use all products, some will be selective. Witness the heavy attrition that Twitter faces.
Enna Koduma Sir Edhu??!! Appa enna than blocked kedayathu anga? arab countries a paravalla pola! :(
On thinking back, I should have replied, "one or two" good things rather than telling "Few" good things.
May be twitter is going through some Product life cycle curve, where the demand reduces after the initial launch.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090430/nielsen-were-sticking-with-our-60-twitter-quitter-number/
a good link which talks about attrition in twitter
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