I don’t get it… I really don’t. When (and why) did silicon valley abandon the idea that technology – particularly the web based variety – had intrinsic value. The kind of transformative value that people would pay for…
Find me two business plans for an online consumer product that don’t have “and monazite via ad sales” somewhere in the business plan – go ahead, I dare you.
On the backs of Google and their transformation of advertising based on keywords and relevance we’ve become lazy. Why deliver real solutions to the problems of consumers when you can just aggregate eyeballs and information? Make something “cool”, something that will “go viral” and “generate buzzzz”. Get people to LOOK, not buy.
Think about it for a second, how different is Facebook from Yahoo circa 1998? Yahoo had tons of users. Yahoo knew a lot about their users based on what they made part of their “portal”. Yahoo sold ads.
I’m not talking about how advertising is evil, I’m not demonizing marketers. I’m asking why we’d have conversations like these: SEO vs. Usability
I’m also not suggesting that if you simply build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door… I’m just suggesting that we should get back to trying to build better mousetraps – and by extension trying to change the world.