[Sigia-l] Taking card sorting online

[Manu Sharma]

Ziya:
> Success in providing service/consultancy and custom software at the same 
> time is pretty rare. [...] Doing both sides equally well takes a toll and 
> usually one or the other side suffers.

I'd tend to agree. 37Signals which has been doing this for quite some time 
has vastly limited their design work. 
http://www.tompeters.com/cool_friends/content.php?note=007936.php

> For example, this: <http://www.google.com/analytics/> could pretty much 
> obsolete overnight one of the tools you mention: 
> <http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000799.html> or this: 
> <http://www.haveamint.com/>

> While they don't target at exactly the same market as the new Google tool, 
> they are close enough for many to get the short shrift and die on the 
> vine.

That's a bit generous. You're assuming MeasureMap would survive on its own 
if it had no competition. I think analytics is an attractive business for 
the enterprise market but I have serious reservations whether one can make 
good money providing analytics for blogs. People like knowing where their 
visitors are coming from, which posts are getting the most attention and 
most freely available tools provide this basic information. Sure it's not 
done in a great way, it's hard to understand. But will people pay for this? 
Remember the furor when word leaked out that MT will start charging?

For the millions of bloggers out there, most of whom don't pay anything to 
blog, getting to know what _exactly_ people do on their blog is a 
nice-to-have. Definitely not a must-have. You want to know what _exactly_ 
people do on your site when you've invested resources into it. When you make 
money out of the site. When that traffic comes at a cost. When your survival 
depends upon it. That's the e-commerce and enterprise market and that's the 
focus of Google analytics, Webside Story and several other analytic tools. 
But analytics "just for blogs"?

I could be wrong but it seems like a bad idea if they're expecting to make 
money out of this through a subscription model. The business might sustain 
itself (if Google doesn't offer a blogger version of their tool) but I don't 
ever see it becoming a success story the way 37Signals' products have, for 
example. If however, it's being done in the spirit of Web 2.0, is just an 
experiment and comes for free, then I wish it a success. As I said somewhere 
else, tools designed by UX firms can only be a good thing for the users out 
there, freeing them from the tyranny of poorly designed interfaces.

Manu.