Its funny to see some of the feature fighting tactics, so popular in the first portal cold war during the late nineties, coming back 2.0 style. Then, like now, portals continually played an escalation game over functions like chat, mail, and personalisation - mirroring each others' feature sets until a kind of lukewarm median had been established. This time, although the buzz is about social networking, video uploading and tagging - the logic is pretty much the same. New toys, same problems.
In recent weeks AOL have launched both their MySpace clone AIM Pages and just today, AOL Uncut - a video uploading service in conjunction with Video Egg. Google have also given birth to a flotilla of beta products from their Google Labs division - coverging everything from video hosting to voice communications (a la Skype) and now, a Del.icio.us clone called Notebook.
In my view there is a big difference between core applications that support a site or brand's underlying purpose, and things that exist on the periphery. A brand's core purpose is not always apparent at the outset. MySpace's mastery in music was emergent, as was YouTube's popularity with video remixers and viral advertising campaigns. Peripheral applications, which do not support the main reason that people use a site not only add marginal value, they risk diluting the core brand proposition. Ask Ries and Ries what they think about that.
The growth in vertical applications should be instructive. Despite the fact that photo sharing has been a function of portal services for nearly a decade, Flickr took off among users and was an attractive acquisition target for Yahoo because it executed well on a clearly defined purpose. Namely - building a strong community around user generated images. A similar thing is now happening with Youtube.
Working out what is core purpose, however, is not easy. MySpace adding videos and photo uploading features to its core offering is helpful to its users and may assist with keeping page impressions within the network, but shouldn't be exclusive. MySpace need to take an agnostic view about what multimedia platform their members choose to host their content. The reason for that is their core purpose is faciliating social interaction, not being an application platform for video clips. To lock people into using all their applications risks alienating people from the real reason they came to the brand in the first place. Hence the unhappy users who were suddenly forced to register with Yahoo to keep their Flickr accounts active.
To be fair - focus is an issue that the online media giants struggle with constantly. With every new disruptive technology and punk upstart startup that comes on the scene - the big question arises - do you buy, build or partner? To do nothing is to risk missing the boat on the next big thing. To do too much, is to undermine your raison d'etre.
Sun Tzu never said it, but probably thought it more than once. Strategy is suffering.
