I've never been a fan of virtual malls. It means that the user
must surf to several malls to find what they want. Admittedly
in a few years agents will do all of this for us and we won't
need to do it ourselves, but in the mean time, it does the user
a great disservice. Jakob Nielsen made the comment in a recent
article on the Sun web site that surfing is a dying pasttime.
It really is.
Take job hunting for example. There are some 2000 corporate web sites
that put their job descriptions on their web site. How many people
are going to visit each of these 2000 sites to check on jobs and
how many are going to go to misc.jobs.wanted or someplace like
www.career.com? Do the math. We succeed by making life easy for the
user.
Remember, this idea was orignally proposed by Chris Locke in the
original incarnation of Mecklermedia's stuff. The idea was great.
The concept of investing $25,000 in what was then a really unproven
concept was a disaster area. I think if the same idea was proposed
today, it would have a radically different reception.
Do remember however, that one of the key items about Chris's vision
was that there would be content areas. The model of the future is
something like Golfweb www.golfweb.com where there is tons of
content and a place to shop - not a vertical market mall and
a little fluff around the edges.
Mary E. S. Morris
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