Lots of good stuff on my new link blog (done thanks to Google Reader). I read hundreds of feeds so you dont have to. Theres a feed here too.
Everything on there is less than a day old right now, so feel free to surf through all the pages.
While I was reading my feed I saw Matt McSpirit talking about Blinkx, which is a video search engine. So, why didnt Blinkx close the $1.65 billion deal that YouTube did?
Well, for one, the name. I can say YouTube even after drinking four beers. Now, how do you tell your friends to use Blinkx? I cant even spell it. I had to look at the logo three times just to make sure I was spelling it right. If I cant tell my friends about something new your growth wont be as fast. Make sure I can say your name on radio. Or on stage when Im talking. YouTube works. Blinkx doesnt.
Also, the home page is WAY overbearing. Too many moving things. And one design principle I learned in college: pick ONE thing and make that twice as big as anything else on the page. YouTube wins here. Why? Because your eye needs something to enter the page with. If everything is the same size, as it is on Blinkx, your eye feels uncomfortable. Doesnt know where to look. And instead of picking something will just leave. Dave Winer reminded me of that last night when he said he hadnt watched any of my show because there was too much for him to pick from. He wanted a page design like Ze Frank or Rocketboom have: just one video. On my ScobleShow, I pick one video and make it bigger than the others.
Back to the home pages, Blinkx has lots of big-name videocontent. Movies. TV shows. Etc. YouTube has lots of small-name videocontent. Kittens. Goofy videos. Were all looking for different kinds of content. Stuff to impress our friends with that they probably wont have seen. Heres a hint: your friends and family have probably already seen the latest Lost. But they havent seen the latest cute kitten video. Microsoft makes this mistake too (remember IE 4 with ActiveDesktop? What was there? Big name media companies. No small guys. I wonder if Microsoft will learn that its the small guys that make an experience different and interesting?)
Its not hard to see why YouTube built a brand name and audience worth paying billions for. And why Blinkx didnt.
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