LibraryTechtonics

The idea of the Web Innovators Group meetings, or WebInno for short, is to highlight new and interesting web and mobile technologies, and to give people a chance to chat about these technologies while doing a bit of networking. You get 30-45 mins for schmoozing and networking. Then, “main dishes,” chosen sites and services (often start-up companies) get 5 minute time slots to address the entire crowd, and “side dishes,” companies and services available for one-on-one discussions at tables around the room.

During the schmoozfest, I ran into a few of my new media/social tech Twitter peeps, and got the good word from them, and in the process was introduced to Laura, who works for the most interesting service: thisisby.us, based in Allston right near the Harvard Business School. She described the site as “YouTube for writing,” where writers can post their writing for free using a very simple web interface, and pimp their content wares to the world. The fabulous kicker: 50% of the ad revenue goes to the writers posting content to the site, and 10% goes to the people who comment on them. For serious.

According to Laura, the majority of the writers who post to the site are stay at home parents, people who have a day job but want to write, and people who find blogs too difficult to use, but love the simple thisisby interface. That’s not all of the writers, but those are the user groups that stand out. Getting the content out on the web is easy using the social bookmarking links on every content page, a function that pushes tons of traffic to the content. Just goes to show: social bookmarking is great viral marketing! Definitely a site to keep and eye on, I think. I’d love to talk to Laura about whether she’s considered some sort of partnership with, say, NaNoWriMo, for posting people’s novels after the November contest is over.

Because of the wicked crowded nature of the group, and because I chose to hang with my Twitterati pals, I didn’t get to the side dishes. However, the main dishes at WebInno14 were hard to ignore, addressing the entire room. And, well, they left us all hungry.

• Frame Media struck me as yet another flavor of feed aggregator with nothing new to offer.
• GoLoco, a rideshare Facebook application with a good idea, had a really bad business plan: connecting with people for rides is free, but sharing the cost through the application comes with a 10% fee to put the passenger’s money in the driver’s account. On a platform where a Free Gift application was developed because, well, who wants to pay $1 per gift in the native Facebook Gifts application. Who wouldn’t just say, “Hey, can I give you cash when I see you?”
• DesignMyRoom had an interesting concept, but it really didn’t seem a good fit for the target “My First Apartment” hip crowd. It seemed a better fit for the gung-ho DIY home owner, or perhaps as a licensed application to a company like Ikea.

It seemed like they all missed the point of knowing the user, and serving the user. All good ideas, just pointing in the wrong direction when it comes to the business and execution plans.

Libraries can learn from this by not making the same mistake when it comes to services, either in person or online. Spend the time understanding your patron user habits, and the culture of the communities associated with the services, before you spend the time setting something up, whether it’s through a simple survey, a quick-and-dirty focus groups, or just some informal interviews with friendly patrons. Because there’s no sense in setting up a Twitter account to advertise to teens when all they use is Facebook.

Even if this month’s WebInno wasn’t all that exciting in the presentation department, it’s always a valuable experience, even if just for the opportunity to network and ask questions. Are there any web technology or new media freebies happening in your area? Have you ever been? What have you learned?

Tags: new media, technology, thisisby, web, WebInno14