Get Me Together

Way back in the day on the web, we’d go “surfing” – gliding from site to site, going with the flow. There wasn’t enough “stuff” to take up too much time, a lot of it was drivel, and it was all NEW!
Things have changed a lot in 15 years. Users don’t surf any more – it’s mostly task-oriented work. That’s way making content “discoverable” is so important. I think getting content organized for users is just as important and another new, pretty good example of that opened up the other day.Yahoo Music pulls together a lot of music-related pieces and adds a bunch of personalization features. It also incorporates new partnerships Yahoo has with a number of online content distributors. It has one of the most useful things a site with massive data can have – an internal recommendation engine (imagine what lesser products Netflix and Amazon would be without this  feature and you’ll know why I think this is important). This suggests videos, songs, albums and artists you might like.

Here is the page for one of my favorite artists.  Notice aggregated photos, videos and Rhapsody-powered music tracks as well as widgets that link to Dead channels on Last.fm, Pandora, Flickr, etc.  Obviously Yahoo has decided to balance the service they’re providing with the fact that they’re kicking a lot of traffic to places outside of Yahoo, but what a great way to add value and become the “go to” stating point for online music.

Given the users aren’t coming to visit just because they’re in the neighborhood, how are you adding value?  It’s amazing to me how many discussions I have about building business models that aren’t focused at all on what value the digital business is giving to users but just on what money they can make off of users.  Yahoo demonstrates that whatever other problems they may be having they understand that user-centric thinking is critical and helping users to get themselves together is a powerful way to engage them.