John Baeyens

Belgium is filled with Web2.0 gurus, technology sellers and people with an opinion on what truly matters online.  The question is if the opinion of all these people really matters.
Kottke’s excellent posting on Fotolog overtaking Flickr is some excellent food for thought on the subject.

Before Flickr was launched, Adam Cypher (at the time Fotolog’s CEO, now COO) was our biggest competitor at PhotoBlog.  We both realised that the need to grow in Latin America was more important then growing in the US and Canada and our dynamics were pretty equal.  Then came Flickr.  With some tools which glued the alpha wolves to them.  The fact remained that we had few or nearly none churn at PhotoBlog of people churning to Flickr.  Fact remains, we decided to sell out instead of gearing up.

Some of my lessons learned:

1. The opinion of European technology leaders as to which features you should carry is completely irrelevant.
2. Customisation of your app in Spanish and Portuguese is a must; Lorenz of Facebox got that one right.
3. Forget China; the few Asian users who’ll access your app will do just fine in English.
4. Whenever a competitor pops up: remain loyal to the roots and culture of the current users of your community; your base of users is key, not your set of features.

No wonder Orkut is taking over Myspace…