Hi there. I thought it rather ironic that Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox site would ping my Blackberry after class last night. I had just touted the virtues of The Well, a website that shuns the complex, application-rich user interfaces so common to Web 2.0 community sites. As I read the summary of Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, I thought, "finally, the meme has spread itself to my corner":
Ajax, rich internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what's hyped is rarely the most profitable.
So what profits a site the most? Nielsen says that sometimes we need only to tweak the content of our web copy to keep people coming back.
As I check the statistics of my own community site's analytics program, I begin to laugh. I'm only one who has clicked
on all of those fancy Web 2.0 widgets I added to my homepage.
The Well, on the other hand, carefully surveyed its members before adding any Web 2.0 functionality to the site. Apparently, the results are in. Though I didn't hand in my own survey on time, I was pleased to see that the "Writer's Guild of America" conference now has an RSS feed.
How ironic! Though I was whining to Katherine about The Well's lack of searchabilty last night, I've seeded my newsreader with Well Conference feeds this morning. How nice that my favorite site knows its audience!
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