Tom and I have had this talk many a time, I’ve mentioned it on my blog as well. Core Competency is important. Too many people over look it and branch out in ways that make little to no sense and only hurt themselves and their customers/product.
Today’s example, Facebook. ReadWriteWeb has an interesting article on Facebook suffering Twitter Envy.
Facebook is doing quite well as far as I can tell. I’m a casual user, keeping my info up to date, creating events and such for my work efforts, but it’s not open in a tab in Firefox all day. Heck, my mom is on Facebook, it doesn’t get much more mainstream than that!
But facebook is drinking it’s own kool-aid and rather than watch Twitter, see what it’s doing, and see where the complimentary connections are, good ol’ FB wants to take Twitter on. Why? Who knows? Twitter is microblogging, instant chatter, and often noise. So why would FB want to compete with that?
My guess is the same reason FB has been adding features for the sake of adding features, because they can and have nothing better to do all day. Beacon, tabs, new look, apps, who cares? Sure I can give my friends plants, and poke people and junk, but I don’t do any of that. That’s all noise for what FB is about; posting updates and photos for my friends to see.
Whether Twitter “gets it” or is just too busy keeping the servers up to think up new things, they’ve kept Twitter exactly as it was (more or less) when it launched. 140 characters to tell whomever is listening, what you’re doing, reading, eating, thinking. There’s no apps platform (short of an API), there’s no pokes, green patches, fan pages, or events. There’s no ad network. It’s exactly what all of us signed up for.
Too many businesses seem to feel the need to expand and compete where it doesn’t make sense. Stick with what you’re good at, that’s really what matters, and the markets and such will follow.
Sooooooooooo All that said, to bring it back around to 360|Conferences, Tom and I while we might like to own a hotel chain that is specifically designed around conferences, and while we might like to form a car company, etc. We stick with what we know, and that’s helping bring people together. In person at Conferences or now, through eBooks that make purchases reasonable.We’ve thought about expanding to Sony PlayStation game dev events, thought about an event for event planners, but events for the sake of events, isn’t our thing. Events to bring a community together to learn from and interact with each other, that’s our ‘thing’