Nowadays there are so many web services out there that do the same or similar things. How do you choose which is best for you?
I’m continually finding it more difficult than I would like to settle on one or another web service to use. I’ve recently been conflicted with competing services such as Jaiku vs Pownce vs Facebook Status vs Twitter or Beanstalk vs SpringLoops or Viddler vs Vimeo or Basecamp vs GoPlan vs ActiveCollab vs [insert-your-favorite-wiki-here]. It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult.
I’m going to generalize quite a bit for the sake of this article that there are two types of web service focuses on the web.
- Social: sites where the quality/size/content of the network of users is a key factor for its users.
- Application: sites where the value is in the application, utility is primarily personal, and the network is either a side benefit of the service or the network is not a factor.
It’s easy to follow the crowd
On purely social websites it’s often fairly easy for a new user to choose which one to jump on based on which one has the most people in your network at that time. If the network relevant to me is there, I’ll go there.
The extent to which the network matters also depends a lot on what I’m going to use the site for. For example, there is value in both the networks of ma.gnolia and del.icio.us but which will best serve my core/long term bookmarking needs? The popularity factor may be useful in the short term but it’s important to figure out in the long term with which I will wish I had put time and effort. I do enjoy having my networks there to send people links using built in application functions but since not everybody is on one or the other I’ve found ways to deal.
Sometimes the crowd doesn’t help
On other social websites where the application is the primary focus or where the competing networks are fairly even across the board, there is no clear choice.
The biggest dead-end choice is when the site is mostly application-focused and the crowd doesn’t help. Sometimes the features are almost exactly the same, the implementations similar, the pricing structures irrelevant. In these cases I will choose based on reputation, but reputation isn’t always clear — and I’m speaking as someone who lives in the internet. Most users are not as experienced or familiar as many of us are on the web and will find it much more daunting than I do.
The trouble faced by new players
How does a new player in the web service arena stake its ground?
I’ve been specifically troubled by this question while strategizing Mavenry. If there is no obvious culturally accepted or reputation-obvious choice service providers just have to do their best and hope people give you a chance. That is, if all you provide is a very non-specific approach to the market and don’t stake your ground somewhere unique. I can’t help but think about Facebook here and how it started out providing a seemingly similar social networking service as everyone else but they went after a specific market to build a certain network. That worked then, but now with things like OpenSocial coming into fruition the choice of social network is increasingly hard — assuming your network has no significant footing in any of the available options.
Grounding on a specific market can be limiting, yes, but it will guarantee a social service at least some full segment of the market. And, it’ll help its users make more informed decisions.
On the other side, how does a consumer choose between such evenly matched players?
My recent exposure to this question has been while trying to find a good bug tracking/code browsing/subversion hosting/documentation hosting provider. I see many providers out there with what seem like such similar features and benefits that there is no overwhelmingly significant reason (at least from my perspective) to choose one or the other. In the end I’m afraid I’ll just choose whichever site is prettiest to look at (admit it, you do it too).
When new players succeed at specifying their target market and making it clear to the user that it is “right for them”, people like me will find it easier to choose — whether or not it’s the best choice for either party. For example, I found it easy to choose Facebook because they made it clear that it was “for college students”.
It’s not so cut and dry
Of course, these are all generalizations. In most cases there are many more reasons why I would choose between sites such as the site’s openness, growth trends, or how well the company’s goals align with my own. You could even argue that how the site just feels to me is more important than any of the other factors at hand. In the example I made earlier about ma.gnolia vs. del.icio.us I often come back to thinking that the only real meaningful difference to me is the visual design of the site — and that just doesn’t seem right.
Increasingly sites are providing more and more ways to get at your data and to easily take your data with you when you leave. Flickr comes to mind here because through their API you can get access to your entire collection of photos and can easily export your data at any time for your own use or to other competing services like Zooomr. I expect trends will continually force services to open up and embrace open standards like OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, and you could even argue OpenSocial. I expect that having everything be more open and evenly matched will not help end users at all but instead it will make it more and more difficult to weed through the drunken haze.
Many of these trends also apply to desktop software as well. For an end user with simple needs where is the benefit in choosing something like Pages over Microsoft Word when I know Word will always work with the people I deal with on a daily basis. Yes Pages is faster, nicer to use, and has more features, and will work with Word documents just fine, but still.
This is not a problem that will ever be completely solved unless the man starts to decide for us against our will, but I continue to find it oh so intriguing none the less.