TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING
Michael Arrington highlighted something in a post today that I've been thinking about for some time now. In a post titled "Brilliant New Startups: Useless Account", he describes setting up an account on a new Web 2.0 site:
"Once you’ve created your account, you can log in, and edit your account. That’s it. The reason this is really, really funny (for us) is because that’s what we do all day - create new account after new account at every new Internet startup that comes along.
I am a seriously huge expert on account creation."
Which brings me to the thing that's been bugging me of late.
In the last year or so, with the exploding number of Web 2.0 startups, I like many early adopters have signed up for dozens upon dozen services.
The problem is we seldom go back to them. We may try the site once or twice. We may even bookmark it on our tool bar and re-visit it a few more times. But more often than not we forget about them.
Of course we get counted as a "registered user" for the site in question, which allows the site operators to use that metric whenever they talk to the media and/or potential investors and partners.
Every once in a while the site operator may ping us with an email or two reminding us that we registered at the site not so long ago, and would we please come back and check this or the other cool thing out at the site.
But more often than not, these sites become just another feature and/or application we were intrigued enough to sign up for, but too overwhelmed to remember to use it on a regular basis.
As Michael said, we've all become serious experts on account creation...we now need to focus on account utilization.
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