Owning or renting the space online?
Yesterday, I was asked why building my own space instead of opening a blog at the off-the-shelf blog sites. Several reasons:
1. Ownership: I like the feeling of owning my personal space with my own domain and my personal touch. Renting a space from the landlord doesn’t incentivize me to cultivate it with 120% effort because what i can do with it is very limited. From the business perspective, the return on investment will be different. It doesn’t need to go further when news spreaded out that sites like engadget could be sold for millions…
2. Customization: What I can do with my space is limitless. As long as I want to learn, there is a vast resource online to teach me how to put all sort of things on my space, from blogging, content managecommerce, galleris to BBS, online chatting even e-commerce components. When I was little, I was really longing for a set of construction toolkit, with which I could make skyscrapers, crane, fire-fighting vehicles and even the very crude transformer. I remembered I was lingering at the store doorstep (成都市人民商场玩具部）for hours, begging my mom to buy the set for me. The trial went in vain, just because my parants could affort. It was one of the most expensive toy at that time, almost worth a whole month of my mom’s salary… While my mom always said that it would took her half a year to save the money enough to buy a pair of leather shoes… Well, with the internet, I can finaly play an engineering role, although clumsy almost to the extent of idiot in the begining, I enjoy the process every day. It does’t cost much, thanks for the endless hosting choices and all the open source softwares. It doesn’t stress me out if anything goes wrong. After all, all the visitors just have to bear temparary broken links or 404, 500 errors… What’s a big deal?! So, I am addicited to learning, trying, making mistakes, correcting them, and moving on.
3. Sense of achievement: The feeling is great when every bit of work goes live!
The experience actually makes me think how the internet/e-commerce companies shall cope with the outcry for more ownership and sense of control on the net. According to Kenny Pate, my manager at ebay, it’s time to make the walled gardens open!! I just can not agree more. Think about it… Once hundreds and millions users use your software perform the most important tasks to them daily, even if they never come to your site any more, are you still afraid of lacking channels to reach and supply the air to them? 前一阵热炒的讯雷、天空等软件的收购案大概也是沿着这个思路吧。