Allow me to officially signal the beginning of the end of the Destination Age on the Web. No matter what your new web app does, it's now critical to think about how it will play as a feature of other sites and applications. This means your content needs to be able to get other places easily are part of your plan for it. By the same token, if your new app doesn't create / manage / foster content that potentially adds value in other contexts, you might have a problem. The new deal is what I like to call the "Featureful Web" and, yes, I know featureful is not really a word. Neither is website though, we're all adjusting.
The building blocks of the Featureful Web are already with us (and beneath us in the vast majority of current sites and web products). I have started to view "Web 2.0" as having been a lot about this transition intentionally or not. I see shops and products starting to approach problems in a featureful way on purpose more and more. The core ideas that inform Rest, JSON and Ajax are impelling us toward the Featureful and away from the landing pages and destinations of yester-month.
"Huh? What the hell do you want me to do about it?"
Well, for starters I think it means that we can begin to ramp down on being destination-centeric with some or all of our efforts. It's more and more okay if you can't find that perfect domain name now because a lot of people who use your product won't ever go there anyway. Instead, you might let them experience and get value from your product as a google gadget, or embedded in the social networking site of the month. The web is finally in a place where you can reliably let other people leverage your ideas and data as features of something they are working on. Of course when you do that, you should also make sure you have a plan for your product to thrive when being used that way!
It also means that your product's micro-branding is becoming a much bigger deal. You can't just sell yourself as and purely identify with your domain. You can't count on "doing ads" as your revenue model. When people interact with your product remotely at "destination-that-is-not-yours X," your product has to let them know who you are and what you stand for but do it in a way that still adds value to the content around it. You can do that with UX, with look and feel, with the consistent kind of utility of your features, and with your visual branding. Those things all need to work together fundamentally to make a single message about what your brand is and what your attitude is. Have a look at what Google Checkout is doing as an example. They are experimenting with taking themselves out of the destination game, and offering checkout as a feature for your site, right inline. This allows you to keep your users and not send them off to the checkout domain, probably never to return. This also means that your brand and Google's brand need to play nice together. Notice all the subtle things they are doing to make that possible: checkout.google.com/seller/gsc/beta/demo
Come with me on a brief thought experiment about what happened with soft drinks in the stupid real world. Coke for example started as some kind of bullshit patent medicine with actual cocaine in it (or so the legend goes). It was sold in plain bottles out the back of a wagon or some similarly quant delivery mechanism. Ineffective, lame or nonexistent branding was tolerable for them because everyone had to get it from the source (are you listening, evite?). Think about how disconnected Coke is from each 12 ounce can in South Dakota! The branded can is now critical, because they can't possibly predict where it will be encountered or in what context. They need to make sure that the object itself is a sufficient bran messenger or be doomed. In a Featureful Web, your brand will need to work just the same way and though none of those standards are anywhere near established. They will grow up organically just like the 12 ounce can did in the US. There is no Wikipedia entry on the origin of the soda can btw.... Bummer.
By Aubrey Anderson
The building blocks of the Featureful Web are already with us (and beneath us in the vast majority of current sites and web products). I have started to view "Web 2.0" as having been a lot about this transition intentionally or not. I see shops and products starting to approach problems in a featureful way on purpose more and more. The core ideas that inform Rest, JSON and Ajax are impelling us toward the Featureful and away from the landing pages and destinations of yester-month.
"Huh? What the hell do you want me to do about it?"
Well, for starters I think it means that we can begin to ramp down on being destination-centeric with some or all of our efforts. It's more and more okay if you can't find that perfect domain name now because a lot of people who use your product won't ever go there anyway. Instead, you might let them experience and get value from your product as a google gadget, or embedded in the social networking site of the month. The web is finally in a place where you can reliably let other people leverage your ideas and data as features of something they are working on. Of course when you do that, you should also make sure you have a plan for your product to thrive when being used that way!
It also means that your product's micro-branding is becoming a much bigger deal. You can't just sell yourself as and purely identify with your domain. You can't count on "doing ads" as your revenue model. When people interact with your product remotely at "destination-that-is-not-yours X," your product has to let them know who you are and what you stand for but do it in a way that still adds value to the content around it. You can do that with UX, with look and feel, with the consistent kind of utility of your features, and with your visual branding. Those things all need to work together fundamentally to make a single message about what your brand is and what your attitude is. Have a look at what Google Checkout is doing as an example. They are experimenting with taking themselves out of the destination game, and offering checkout as a feature for your site, right inline. This allows you to keep your users and not send them off to the checkout domain, probably never to return. This also means that your brand and Google's brand need to play nice together. Notice all the subtle things they are doing to make that possible: checkout.google.com/seller/gsc/beta/demo
Come with me on a brief thought experiment about what happened with soft drinks in the stupid real world. Coke for example started as some kind of bullshit patent medicine with actual cocaine in it (or so the legend goes). It was sold in plain bottles out the back of a wagon or some similarly quant delivery mechanism. Ineffective, lame or nonexistent branding was tolerable for them because everyone had to get it from the source (are you listening, evite?). Think about how disconnected Coke is from each 12 ounce can in South Dakota! The branded can is now critical, because they can't possibly predict where it will be encountered or in what context. They need to make sure that the object itself is a sufficient bran messenger or be doomed. In a Featureful Web, your brand will need to work just the same way and though none of those standards are anywhere near established. They will grow up organically just like the 12 ounce can did in the US. There is no Wikipedia entry on the origin of the soda can btw.... Bummer.
By Aubrey Anderson
