The value of sharing
by johnWhen building a new product a company needs to be careful to position the product correctly. A common concern is whether the product can stand up on its own, or whether it is only valuable enough to be a feature of something larger. As we continue to define what zintin is, we want to take this concern seriously. I decided a good way to start is by looking back at past examples. When I thought of previous new and unexpected networking technologies I thought immediately of the web (sorry to be cliche). The web lets people share documents between computers, and in it’s first incarnation, not much else. Well guess what, there were already word processors that let you generate such documents, the web must have sounded like a great feature for word processors.
What is missed by this simple view is that sharing is actually much more valuable than document generation. Document sharing on the web is not a feature of some larger product like MS Office, it is a first class product, one that has reshaped the world. At zintin, we are aiming at taking sharing to the next level. We want to connect our users to the people around them so they can share things with anyone they interact with. Of course this sounds like a great feature for lots of products, but we strongly believe that this kind of sharing is going to be valuable. We know we aren’t going to be as big as the web, but we are confident that zintin will be a first class product.