{"id":53,"date":"2008-12-10T14:16:43","date_gmt":"2008-12-10T13:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/?p=53"},"modified":"2008-12-10T14:16:43","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T13:16:43","slug":"features-are-not-key-to-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/2008\/12\/features-are-not-key-to-success\/","title":{"rendered":"Features are not key to success"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At least not for social networks. A blog by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.basicthinking.de\/blog\/2008\/12\/10\/bleeper-alternative-zu-twitter\/trackback\/\">Robert Basic about new features at blepper, a German Twitter alternative<\/a>, got me thinking.<\/p>\n<p>What is the main feature of a social network? Connecting people! And to enable connections between people, you have to reach a critical mass of people first.<\/p>\n<p>There is already a million ways to connect to other people. Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and German services like StudiVZ, WKW, XING&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Most of them are not perfect. But just providing a more feature-rich service than an established competitor is a recipe for disaster. <a href=\"http:\/\/pownce.com\/\">Pownce<\/a> had to learn this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2008\/12\/01\/pownce-deadpooled-team-moves-to-six-apart\/\">the hard way.<\/a> Facebook never really took off in Germany, because StudiVZ took the German market first. My experience is that almost every German you find on Facebook, met people abroad. She didn&#8217;t sign up for the better photo gallery, but for people.<\/p>\n<p>StudiVZ grew big fast and then sucked for a long period of time. Lots of performance and privacy issues. People stayed.<\/p>\n<p>Twitter  grew big fast and then sucked for a long period of time. Lots of performance issues. People stayed.<\/p>\n<p>I simply can&#8217;t think of one example where a new social network overtook an established competitor due to features.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At least not for social networks. A blog by Robert Basic about new features at blepper, a German Twitter alternative, got me thinking. What is the main feature of a social network? Connecting people! And to enable connections between people, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/2008\/12\/features-are-not-key-to-success\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-20"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/55"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daniel.hepper.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}