My buddy Ben Barren has just released his blog search engine, Gnoos. Even though recently I declared that the world doesn't need another blog search engine, this is my second post about them this week! Techcrunch and Mashable, amongst others, have already gone over the feature set of Gnoos. No need for me to repeat that, except to note that Gnoos is a local blog search engine - for Australia. Which means it does count as one of my Top Ten Underserved Web 2.0 Markets after all, because local services was one of my picks :-)
Do non-US countries need local versions of Web 2.0 staple products?
Let's explore the 'local' angle a bit. Do countries outside the US require their own media and web 2.0 products? In countries that speak different languages, there is unquestionably a need. In China, Baidu kicks Google's ass in the search engine market. The real question though: is there also a need for local services for other reasons? Ben thinks so and he told me:
"If you are outside America, it's hard to find what the local conversation going on is. You couldn't even find a place to find local blogs when we were developing gnoos. As technorati indexes 30 million+ websites and Google indexes tens of billions of documents, gnoos is indexing 30,000+ RSS Feeds (growing 10% weekly) that matter to Australians."
Interestingly Ben claims there is "far less international expansion" amongst seed-funded Web 2.0 startups these days, due to less VC and IPO funds in the post-dot com bust world. Which Ben says provides opportunities for companies like his, Feedcorp. So it seems not only is there a need, but US-based web startups may be leaving the door open by not expanding internationally.
Local matters, as I've heard Ben say a lot of times. I agree totally with him on this (it's why I put Local Services in my list of underserved markets in web 2). Also I'm seeing this trend all over - little non-US startups are creating their own local versions of the main '2.0' categories. Blog search, photos, maps, feed management, etc. All those things that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, Feedburner, Flickr et al supposedly have conquered already. Maybe there are opportunities to add community and other localized social touches to those 'template' products - and be successful in their backyard markets?
ZoomIn is an example of this in my own country, New Zealand. Even though Google Maps has just entered the market here (I suspect because of ZoomIn), the local product ZoomIn actually has a lot of nice community features as well - which Google Maps doesn't have... maybe will never have because it doesn't understand the local users and market as well as ZoomIn. Remember that one of the cardinal rules of web design is that you must understand what the user wants. I think Gnoos and ZoomIn have that understanding, in their local markets.
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The succes of local template products all depends on the type of product I think. We just launched a Dutch version of Digg (http://www.ekudos.nl), and that's just a concept which calls for communication and conversation. What better way for discussion than in your own language and with people of the same culture? A search engine is somewhat different in that way.
Posted by: Robert | June 2, 2006 5:15 AM
I definitely agree that localization is an important key to make applications useful for users. In fact, I think most of the time, applications are so skewed to the masses of people (mostly in SV) that localization isn't even part of the conversation.
Posted by: James Yu | June 2, 2006 7:44 AM
Interesting post on the need of local "web 2.0" services. I've been wondering myself if there is a need of smaller (narrow) local national services instead of just joining the global "soup" of services like Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati etc.
For my part, I got really interested in RSS in the beginning of 2004. Looking to find Danish RSS feeds, the were hardly any to find in the international feed directories (Syndicat8 etc) and only a few static webpage lists in Denmark. So, I quickly established a database-driven portal, which quickly became the largest (if not only) RSS portal in Denmark: http://www.overskrift.dk (Overskrift means headine or heading in Danish).
With blogs being the premier driver of RSS feeds, it's also now the largest index of danish blogs. From there it developed into Denmarks "live web" search engine.
Still the question is: is the a need for such a local/country-specific version of "technorati"? I believe there IS a need- in the case because of the language, naturally some danish words have a different meaning in English, so when searching for these words, strange (English) results shows up. Also by focusing on a single culture/country (Denmark being of only 5 mill. inhabitans) the completness of results is so much higher than in bland international services.
That's my 2 cents - what do you think?
Posted by: Stefan B√∏gh-Andersen | June 4, 2006 1:11 PM
Absolutely agree Stefan. Interesting you mention the cultural aspects as well as the language ones. When you say completeness of results, do you mean the overall quality of results is better in Overskrift than in Technoratio (for Denmark)?
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 4, 2006 3:55 PM
By completeness I mean that by focusing on a local area, Overskrift for instance is more complete in the number of Danish blogs and feeds. We are in cooperation with a number of larger and smaller online weblog services - weblogs which do not show up in for instance Technorati searches.
So by having this local focus it's possible to serve the local needs better I think.
Posted by: Stefan B√∏gh-Andersen | June 5, 2006 1:29 PM
Robert, isn't your site build on Pligg or Meameme?
I think local blog is good focus, however why not put up a site where you can switch your focus? overall been playing with Gnoos, and I like its clean design plus the voting feature. What will be interesting when you get more people in the community and see how the information is organized based on the votes.
Posted by: Daniel | July 27, 2006 1:16 AM