You Create The Must-Have Widget!
How many times have you seen a product or service come onto the market and be very successful and you cannot believe just how simple it is and how you had not thought of that yourself? One of the things I am seeing more and more when it comes the web is that instead of having this scorched earth mentality of trying to hit everyone and everything; what’s working and working well is when a small untapped niche is found and you deliver something that people like using in that niche.
So I am throwing down the gauntlet to my Hipster community… Let’s come up with the next great “must-have” widget! I don’t care what community it is geared towards, how it works, what it is, anything. The sky is the limit here. I have been constantly amazed at the talented people who I have been lucky enough to bring in as readers and I want to try to tap that talent into a real discussion on what could be next.
I will share just some initial thoughts I have and you can run with these or come up with ones totally on your own, up to you.
1. RSS Readers – I still do not believe there are any RSS Readers out there that does a really good job. The presentation and forcing you to click on each one post to read the entire thing, it’s all a poor user experience. What would the next generation RSS reader look like? How would it work?
2. Analytics – There is a wealth of analytics out there from high priced huge applications down to free services. Getting good solid analytics is now open to any and all who wants it. The issue I feel is users not having the experience, know how or time to truly understand what the metrics mean to them and what to do with them. Could a mashup be created that sat in front of several analytics programs that did some of the work for the user and walked them through what the numbers mean?
Alright, there’s a couple to start with from me. As I said, please feel free to throw in thoughts of your own that has nothing to do with what I discussed above. I would love to really start an interesting discussion, so comment up my brothers and sisters and let’s see where this might take us.
I have a couple ideas.
My first point is in addition to your first comment. To me it’s a real pain to add a blog-click on RSS, decide the parameters you want for that blog,hit another button and backtrack a couple pages to where you want to go (I use Bloglines). It really is a pain, so why not have it so you can simply click the RSS button and that is it.
2nd. i want to save important blog posts easily (there are ways to do something similar through De.licio.us and Google Co-op). Whether it’s to save it for a later time, or just because i think it was a great post, i would like to read it later. I call it a Podbook
3rd. Then I want others to view my Podbook and be able to view others.
4th. i would also like to see how my choices compare with others. Did we save the same blogs? what is the percentage?
5th. i want to see which posts people are saving in a tag cloud.
Extra- I’d like the freedom to post pics and vids in my comments.
Jon, great post my friend. I love the ideas.. There are so many companies trying to be that, but it does not seem like anyone is there yet. Thanks for the great feedback.
Thank you for your amazing comment, you made my week.
Bloglines introduced “image wall” today, which shows a wall of images that are found in essentially every blog post. Click on the image to go to that blog. Very cool idea.
Now, as far as I know, I can’t get an image wall dedicated to my Blogs (the blogs I’ve decided were important). Which is too bad, because, honestly, that would be awesome.
But let’s not stop there. Why can’t we do the same thing with videos? It can’t be that hard.
Here’s another thing:
When I view a post through my Bloglines acct. I only get black text with a white or blue background – very boring. But because we never see the actual site a large part of a bloggers identity, and even brand, is completely lost. So why can’t some of the visual characteristics of your blog transfer over RSS? What if you could design what the readers of your RSS feed see? Right now a lot of bloggers are only words and that’s not what blogging is all about.