Duplicated efforts toward a common goal
Does it ever bother you how many people there are out there working on the same problems in their own little ways? In my technology centric world I see individuals, groups, and companies have great ideas all the time. Unfortunately they spend so much time and effort trying to make THEIR idea become THE idea for everyone, they often refuse to take a good look around at what other people are doing and try to collaborate a little.
There are so many instances of competing websites trying to fill one niche for example, were none of them really create a good product either because of a lack of investment in the sites, or simply because the competition is thinning out the user base to the point were no single site can emerge as a natural leader. Anyone who has every been into the big social networking sites will empathize when recalling how they tried to get their friends to join THEIR site only to discover that the market is saturated with options to the point that their real life “friends” are on so many different sites, there is no way to unite the whole group, which is kind of the point of social networking in the first place isn’t it?
Not being a big facebook/myspace/livejournal users myself, I notice the disadvantages of duplicated efforts in some of the smaller, more specialized sites that are actually more vulnerable to this type of community split. As a wine lover, I use corkd.com to catalog and rate wine that I drink as well as look for information on other wines that I’m considering buying. It’s pretty good but like so many “user powered” sites, it relies on the constant contribution of thousands of regular users like myself to keep it interesting and useful. The trouble is, the potential audience is split between corkd.com and the competing winelog.net. I recognize the value in having a choice, competition and even good old free market economies, but imagine if you will though if these two sites were to merge and adopt the best features of both into a single tool with the backing of (most of) both communities. Sure there would be some grumbling as you see when any of these transitions happen, but I feel strongly that in this case it would produce a better overall community for all involved.
I’m all in favor of small, independent players emerging in an already occupied market, so long as the big players are companies who don’t necessarily have the common good in mind. A good example of this would be a (relatively) newcomer like yelp.com coming in and doing a WAY better job than a corporate product like citysearch.com . On the other hand, I would love to see the smaller players set their pride aside from time to time and think about how they could be working together rather than competing as rivals to provide their target markets the best service.
The list of potential examples for this goes on and on, and that’s just with websites. Imagine if some of the same cooperation was considered by…oh I don’t know, Senators Obama and Clinton?