TechNayak(mirror)

Mashups have taken the world by storm and almost every site allows you to mix and match content from other services. Not only that, users expect  to  expose content that they create to be used else where. No one signs up for a photo hosting service if there is no way to share ( aka mashup/syndicate ) those photos elsewhere. When there is such an uproar for on demand services and data, is it wise to bloc yourself from the rest of the world ?

    I shall take two examples to prove a point here. I shall start with MySpace the socionet giant, who until recently was considered a open haven for people to  make services that could somehow be used in myspace. This was clearly a good strategy considering the fact that demographically MySpace had more leads than any other form of marketing. Understandable that many startups built their business models around the giant , completely depending on myspace for traffic and usage. Services like photobucket, slideshare and even youtube were built on top of the myspace phenomenon. The giant turned sore and became very protective, started blocking parasitic entities who were trying to make money out of myspace. Many businesses are scampering to find shelter and look for alternative business models.

   Next I shall take Facebook as an example. Facebook has a very strong community in college folk, until recently they weren’t even open to public registrations. Though the growth of the network has been slow and not many features have been added, its healthy. The network to this day remains closed to the public eye. A beter suited example for India would be Orkut, which is a closed network, meaning all the data is generated inside the network and stays in the network.

  So what am I trying to say here? Both these models have a little to learn from each other. Though its not wise to allow any website to publish content in your service, its not completely wise blocking them altogether. Services have to have their niche to survive, you have to concentrate on you core strengths, but service need to be sliced and diced, thats the essence of 2.0. A social network will demand bookmarking, photo sharing and blogging. Its not wise to build your flickr, del.icio.us or wordpress into your network. Even if on the long run you do manage to build these services yourself, you cannot compete with other services who would have become giants in their own right.
      No service can aim to be a closed service. You have to incororate third party services to make your service better, but make sure you allow the right services inside and keep the baddies out. As the popular Indian saying goes ,” If there is something that can be exploited, then we will ” , people will always try to fit in unparliamentary elements into your service. Delegate them well, decide on how it should work. Making API’s would be a good option. Follow good patterns like those of flickr , use a similar approach. And please do not block content, its what people are looking for.
  And if none of these things made sense, then it was never supposed to.