Internet: Did anything 'CHANGE' because of it.

Today when I opened my mail, I had a mail from Infomedia Yellow pages, and the first thing that came to my mind was, " Did internet actually CHANGE anything?"

You can see that the stress here is on the word change, why is it, will be explained later in the post.

So let me tell everything from the beginning. First of all, what is Infomedia. Infomedia is an online yellow pages co. They have various listings for different services, for eg. you can find the nearest mall, cab services etc. Nothing unique, right, there are many such services viz. just dial, ask laila, sulekha.

Now let me explain what did I mean when I said CHANGE.

Well what would you say, are the 2 biggest changes happened due to internet. If you asked me an hour before writing the post, I would have said that

1. It has reduced the information asymmetry, which was so dominant in our society that poor became poorer and rich became richer, and
2. It removed the middlemen, the person who ate a big chunk of your profit and made things dearer for your customer.

But did it really happen, if you are saying yes, than think again. Which is the website you visit the most or which others visit the most. Is it your mail, your blog, your picture and video sharing website. I don't think so, according to me the most visited website on world wide web is Google.com. And it is a search engine. So how is Google being the search engine is related to the two problems.

Well, if you look again you will find that on one hand Google is helping people to reduce information asymmetry but on the other hand it itself is becoming rich and richer day by day because it has the highest amount of information, so who is becoming poor? Those who are paying Google and other such search engines for listing their product and services.

Also, in this whole process of people searching things and products on these search engines, don't these search engines work as a middlemen. They do and they still charge a heavy amount for it, the only thing that has been MODIFIED and not CHANGED is that earlier the middlemen use to earn without giving information but now they earn by giving it.

Hence we can see that nothing has CHANGED here, it is the same as it was in pre-internet era. But why talk about it, yes it has happened and we can't change it, we are so ADDICTED to search engines and yellow pages that whenever we need anything we simply go to a search engine.

Well it is simple, those who thought that the time of middlemen is over because of internet wake up, the middlemen is still here and he is more powerful than ever before. So why lose the opportunity, information is the new power and if you have it, being a middlemen can be the best profession one can ever have.

Internet, services bundling and Google

When my professor said that in order to succeed on internet you must have a different name from your offline name, I couldn't agree with it. Why go through all the pains of choosing a new name and branding your service again when you already have a successful brand. And why wouldn't any customer accept the offline name, which is synonymous to quality and good service, and want the retailer to have a different name.

Today, while talking about a new networking site, I got the answer. And the answer is Internet, as any other service, is intangible and thus it is all about the experience it provides. Well in that case a firm that provides good service can keep the same name offline.

The answer is NO. Because the parameters of experience on internet are different.

Some of these parameters are ease of communication and ease of navigation i.e. how easily the pages load, how easily you can move from one page to other, is there any chance of posting of user generated content, the graphics of the site, no. of features on that site for eg. chat, picture and video sharing etc.

Another parameter is the experience associated with brand. And this is where it all makes the difference. on internet, if you are established as an e-mail site you tend to remain as one. If you help user share content or if you are a micro blogging website you remain one. And that is the reason that e-bay is the first name that comes to mind when you have to shop and not Yahoo! shopping.

This brings us to subject of today....BUZZ. Yet another extension by Google to compete with Twitter and Facebook. Many are optimistic that Buzz will surely take away the market from Facebook and Twitter; the reason being: it is integrated with g-mail so now people do not need to go on other sites for social networking.

But I feel it will not affect Facebook and Twitter in any ways apart from introducing some more members to the world of micro-blogging. It will help in growing the market but it will not take away the share of Twitter and Facebook. The reason being it simply doesn't provide the experience of Twitter and Facebook. When you Buzz you still are on g-mail and that is the experience you get there, while on Twitter, Facebook and even Orkut, the experience is completely different.

So, I think if Google really wants to fight in the micro-blogging space it should develop Buzz as a completely different platform and not just as a add-on to g-mail.

The best examples will be, people use you tube for watching videos and not Google videos and the writer here is using Blogger for writing this post and not Buzz, though the features are combined.

So, Buzz has the potential to be successful but it should come out of the shadow of G-mail and Google and develop itself as a different brand.