Ivan is a widget guru and has concluded that the url must die.
I had a poke around this myself back in February (Services And The Death of the Website).
But I didn't think through the impact in the depth that Ivan has.
Ivan says:
"In a world where you don't have a central web site, then you don't need to embed your domain name in the minds of everybody who is going to come looking for you. Get that centralising fixation out of your head and all sorts of things can follow.
"So what replaces the elegant simplicity of the URL? ...search engine as a navigation tool rather than as a search tool....
"...throw away the domain name and ensure that your content is locatable by way of search tools. You no longer have a Domain Name or a URL, you have a Search Name and a USL (Universal Search Locator)."
His views have stirred up a bit of a hornets nest - some real controversy. Take a look on the comments on his blog.Strikes me that this insight has interesting impact on marketing and branding. Search terms you want to own are a good way to think about the branding of your 1.0 website, that's pretty obvious.
But where it might get interesting is as the semantic web seeps in. What feel does your brand want to be associated with - and how might that be served by Ivan's USL?
Imagine searching for your brand by images or sounds? Will brands need to 'own' the colours they are associated with through search? How could that work?
I'm really looking forward to sharing some thoughts on this at Ivan's Widgety Goodness event in Brighton on December 6.
As posted on Ivan's blog:
ReplyDelete"
I agree that you'll be able to engage and interact with brands in a huge number of ways without the need to visit their website, or put in their URL...
But I disagree that it removes the need for a central website. For starters, how will all the myriad of widgets be updated without a central feed?
And what about the proportion of the world who still don't use Facebook, Myspace, or other social networking sites?
And finally what about the long tail of search for specific items, rather than a collection of brand widgets? There are very few widgets that would allow me to find a specific story from a site which was published weeks or months ago...
I don't disagree about the importance of widgets etc, but they are a tool of increasingly equal standing to a main website, not a replacement."