Remember Your Core Business
Forrester makes the point that Yahoo and Technorati both headed downhill once they forgot their core businesses and started getting enthusiastic about being "content providers". Is Facebook in danger of going the same way? Well, they are adding RSS/Atom news reader capability to the news stream. Now, this could end here, and be the live "river of news" that Dave Winer always talks about... or it could go down the road to hell:
If there's any risk of the content provider tragedy happening again, someone in the PM team at Facebook needs to speak up now. Why do people use Facebook? To connect with friends. The applications are cute ways to connect with them in more ways than just posting and poking. Anything that interferes with that activity dilutes the core value of Facebook. (And news feeds aren't the only source of potential dilution, by the way.)
Technorati Tags: business model, management
Comments
Re: Remember Your Core Business
[W^L+] February 4, 2010 22:28:21.755
I'm not a Facebook user, but even with Yahoo's awful page, they continued to have more visitors than nearly any other site until recently. When they added all the junk that slides in front of the page content (most recent site redesign), that's when the exodus began. I have to say, they were still profitable last time I checked, even during one of the roughest recessions in recent memory.
Doing the Bing deal hasn't been good for Yahoo!, either. They have the unenviable task of trying to convince people that their search engine is good enough to continue using, all the while saying that they are replacing it with Bing's engine, which they can already use.
That doesn't even touch the continuing sell-off of anything that might give someone a reason to use a Y! site.