Collin1000.com

THIS POST IS IN UPDATE TO AN EARLIER POST MADE HERE.

Earlier today, one of my favorite bands, Creed, announced their new “official fan club” – I checked it out and was instantly furious. Their tour date listings, Discography, “Purchase Ticket” feature, and EVERY SINGLE LINK OF THE WEBSITE, had been “locked out” behind a 25 dollar membership wall. Now, call me crazy, but I have no plans to spend 25 dollars on a website to see tour dates or buy concert tickets.

An angry (very, very, very) blog post followed. I contacted the company that manages the fan site via email, and spoke with “Eddie” – who, after a bit of discussion, understood my points.

After a series of 22 back and forth emails, the website has now been “opened” more or less. Their tour dates, the ability to buy tickets, the update blog, and their discography are now open to the public and “general fan base” – as it should be. The “Exclusives” such as the Media Content, Forums, and “Blog” posted by Creed are all still behind the locked wall – where one could argue they belong.

I was pleasantly pleased that my feedback and criticism was met with a company that had the band fans in their best interest. In this age, with the current economic state (and the state of the music industry) the last thing you want is to be “locking out” things like tour dates, and charging a fee to view such content.

I will happily pay such a fee to view “premium” content, behind the scenes footage, forums, and other features. It was the way I felt like fans were being “shut out entirely” for not paying the fee.

In my email exchanges, I compared fansites to porn sites, movie trailers, and consumer goods. Previews, Samples, Try before you buy, and return policies are all common in those industries. Who would blindly buy a 25 dollar subscription to an adult site without knowing what the model even looked like? By “opening up” parts of their site, instead of totally locking it down, fans still can access the site and not feel “shut out” if they are unwilling to pay the membership fee to join the “Official fan club”.

“Eddie” has told me he will look into a video or sample clip of these “Fan Forums” and the other exclusive content.I was told there are 10 hours of behind the scenes videos and interviews with the band – well worth paying for. However, from their previously totally locked out website, how was I to know that?

Now, if you excuse me, I need to download and watch my hours and hours of…. music.

Those are the 3 steps to launching a successful web2.0 app or website. Step 1, take an already existing idea. Step 2, Add new features. Step 3, do everything else better.

Mafia Wars/Mob Wars/Mobsters are now in copyright/Intellectual Property lawsuits against each other.

What this brings to light is each company trying to dissolve the other so they can be the one “big” mob style game. With 3 games with almost the same feature set and goals, they need to have a constant struggle to be the one users prefer. In the world of the Internet, If you do it better, you win. Take the big rise of search engines: Google did it the best, they dominated. Take webmail: Gmail came out, it did everything that hotmail and yahoo did, but it added new features, and did everything else better. Facebook, same story. It made myspace’s clutter look neat and tidy, and it continues to innovate and add new features, while Myspace now sags behind. The trick of the game is to keep making improvements. Bigger, better,  faster. (stronger) Innovation can go wrong as well, for example, FunWall/SuperWall -> Improve on facebook’s own wall. (Both of these apps have basically failed to exist in their original form anymore after the new profile update)

If you know of a way to make something better, you have an idea waiting to be profited from. Because lets face it, almost anything that will ever become a facebook app, or website for that matter, has “been done” -> All that needs to happen now is the continual improvement process. It is challenge, the need to compete, the drive to be the best, that will cause innovation in the world. Keep giving the masses what they want: just do it better than you did the day before. Much as a department store gauges customer satisfaction, web developers writing scripts or apps should have a metric to judge how well they satisfy the need of the users.

Competition is always a good thing. It keeps us moving forward. If there was only one forum system forever, we would all be stuck with that and whatever was invented for it. Thankfully, we have phpBB, IPB, vBulliten, and a host of others. With IPB and vB neck and neck competing with each other, they both continually improve on design and feature set. Facebook / Myspace also sees this, and that is where it shows that Myspace is lacking in the site management department. They saw how Facebook launched Apps, they saw all the problems Facebook had, and when they launched their platform it STILL did not do as well as FB.

Clone something (website or idea) out there. Innovate new features. Dominate the competition.

Authors Note: Yes, I wrote this at 2AM. Silly me. Follow me on twitter @Collin1000 for more random ramblings.

Have you ever been twittering with someone only to begin a long discussion, often finding that you need to move to a DM? Then finding that DMs are too slow or (oh no!) you cant fit things in that short limit? Or, need to tweet with many people at once? TwitChat is a new web service intended for use on mobile phones with twitter. It is the most basic, bare bones chatroom. Check it out for yourself! More upgrades are headed for it in the next few days, including an auto post to twitter, twitter login auth, and anything else I can think up. For now, here is the link to check it out.

http://collin1000.com/twitchat2/

Feedback is welcome either here in the comments, or tweet me @Collin1000