Today our product team met with Shel Isreal to show him the alpha version of what we are building here at Radar Networks and get his feedback. Shel had a lot of good insights. We showed him our full product and explained the vision, and gave him a tour of the new dimension of the Web that we are building. We also showed him how content providers such as bloggers and other site creators, and content consumers, can benefit by joining this system. Then we asked him how he would describe it.
Shel suggested that one way to express the benefit of our product is that it helps content creators, like bloggers, become part of more conversations. "Conversation" is a key word for Shel, as many of you know. He views the Web as a network of conversations, not just a network of content. In a sense, content is a means to an end — conversation — rather than an end in itself. So from that perspective we are advancing the state-of-the-art in conversations (broadly speaking, not just in the sense of discussions, but in the sense of connecting people and information together in smarter ways). That’s an interesting take on what we are doing that I hadn’t really thought about.
Shel also suggested that even though we are still a ways from being
ready to launch the beta, he thought what we had was "so much better than anything he has seen" that we should start talking about it more — without getting into the
actual details of how we are doing it (gotta save something for later,
after all!).
I’ll explain more in future posts.
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