Destination websites are hard to scale large enough so that they can become successful businesses. Really hard. But if you expand your thinking, and challenge yourself with, “how can I be more than a destination?” you can unlock immense value.
One of the biggest opportunities is for certain websites to become a platform for distributed community on the Web. What that means is making it possible to consume your content or application from many different distribution points.
One of the reasons Twitter is so successful is because they’ve achieved that. Twitter has worked its way into things as wide-ranging as CNN and GamerDNA and has even spawned a whole new group of desktop applications.
Our core mission with GamerDNA is to help gamers find out what’s really happening in the games they’re interested in playing. That’s why we’re building the Helix API, which makes it possible to dig into the same real-time gameplay trends, player information, etc., that we’ve built the GamerDNA service with.
Yesterday, we launched TweetMyGaming — which carries on our core mission in a new way. We want everyone to learn about the buzz surrounding games they might be interested in playing, and to do that in whatever community you participate in. For us, the latest community is Twitter. Using a combination of the GamerDNA and Twitter APIs, we can surface conversations on Twitter around games that we know are being played and talked about–revealing trends in conversations, and allowing you to drill-down into game-specific conversations. We’ve gotten some great feedback on it, and will be adding some of our community’s suggestions in the coming revisions.
We also think TweetMyGaming represents a new type of application. Mashups have been popular for combining data from multiple sources around a specific context that streamlines the process of consumption. TweetMyGaming is what I’ll call a “real-time mashup,” which is built upon multiple real-time APIs, where the information you view provides some type of new analysis (rather than just a composite set of information) that can only be generated by finding interesting intersections between data and real-time conversations.
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