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Are Platforms the Web 2.0 eMall?
Over the past few weeks a variety of platforms have launched including: Facebook, Meebo and Google OpenSocial. At a basic level, each one of these platforms allows a company to set up shop within these sites. As I started to think about this type of connection a bit more, I came to the realization that we’ve seen this type of setup before… the eMall. The analogy is eMall=Platform and Store=App.
Remember back to a simpler time — Yahoo was king, Google was barely indexing a hundred-million results and eCommerce was the hot stuff. At CKS, I saw pitch after pitch for eMalls. One CEO came in and said the following, "if a mall works offline, why can’t it work online?" Of course today there are no eMalls. eBay might be the closest thing to an eMall.
We have developers and entrepreneurs running to these new eMalls with the hopes of finding gold. It seems that even the biggest installations on the Facebook platform had a bit of hanky-panky to get the counts they have. Will OpenSocial change the way the current platforms work? I don’t know but I do know that in the last week I have received more requests for publication around platform apps than any other category.
Using the eMall analogy, for the one shop in the mall that’s worth a damn, we have 1000 others who are selling a product that might be lucky to have one total sale. One of the reasons that the eMalls weren’t successful was because the eMall expected the shop owners to market the mall. For the applications inside a platform to be successful, the platforms need to market the applications as well.
So I ask, are platforms the Web 2.0 version of an eMall?
I think the gold rush could work this time around. eMalls were terribly unfocused and knew nothing of their users. The exact opposite is true of these platform apps. They are very focused (long tail) and have a large amount of info on their audience — a seller’s dream!
Very nice post, Allen!
In the early days of the Internet the landgrab resulted in companies like etoys, webvan and many long forgotten ones to rise to prominence briefly and disappear as fast as a shining star. The survivors (Amazon, Ebay etc) provided great user benefit and did good marketing. The first wave of successful apps/widgets (photobucket, rockyou, slide) provides good user benefits and these guys have mastered viral distribution. The next 10,000 apps will need to be a lot better to attract their users and/or spend the money on Marketing – and that is regardless of which platform they’re being built on.
A big part of the pitch for eMalls was, “Come on in, an easy to set-up store, and the traffic’s already here!” Eventually, stores set up their own presence, and realized the Internet itself was the real mall.
I think the same thing might end up happening with people. At some point it just won’t make a ton of difference ‘where’ the person’s presence is, as you’ll be able to do all those things the social sites promised, but across all kinds of sites.
Who knows. I’m wrong at least once or twice a year.
Very interesting article Allen and good comment from Morgan. In a way the emalls exist … the sellers in ebay, amazon etc are the shop owners.
Would you consider Amazon an eMall? Amazon being the landlord and the sellers being the tenants. The major change with the platform as an eMall is that it allows…um….”Squatters”
Ok; maybe not squatters but free suites to anyone with any sh*t to sell.
interesting – what I remember about the eMalls is that so much of it was spammy type products – but the “house” of the emall that you speak about makes a good bit of sense.