Brad Burnham 15 November 2005 Comments

Sessions Top Ten Insights - Seven - Less Control Can Create More Value

There was a lot of discussion about the relationship between web service providers and consumers. This relationship is obviously especially important in services where the consumers are also the producers of the service. One thread of this discussion was about control. I hate to lead with Jeff Jarvis again but he is so quotable.

“If you give people control, they'll use it, and if you don't, you'll lose it.”

Jeff’s point here is that consumers increasingly expect control of their web environment, and that most efforts to control or contain them will lower the value of the service to the consumer.

A couple of other threads are less often discussed, but perhaps more useful to someone building a consumer web service. The first of these, which I have not got a great quote for, was that it is only by giving up control that you can learn from your users. It is intuitively obvious that if you allow users only the choice between a red widget or a blue widget, the only thing you can learn is whether they prefer red or blue, but by allowing them greater control over the way they use your service you can learn much more.

The second thread had to do with abuse. Mike Frumin made the observation:

“if you think about the fact that [the business of] Mastercard or American Express…. is having your data, and … if you found ways to make your information available to you and selectively to other people, a lot of that opportunity [for abuse] goes away. I mean, you wouldn't get spam about refinancing your house if there was a way for you to tell everyone who was interested in offering you a mortgage that you wanted a mortgage, but there's not…. So in terms of … abuse, the more you are in control, the more you share, frankly, the less room for abuse there is”.

So the provider of web services must, according to Jarvis, give up a substantial degree of control if they are to build and hold and base of users. The good news is that there are benefits to doing so. Learning more about your user base and spending less time and money managing abuse are two, are there others?

“If you give people control, they'll use it, and if you don't, you'll lose it.”

Jeff’s point here is that consumers increasingly expect control of their web environment, and that most efforts to control or contain them will lower the value of the service to the consumer. A couple of other threads are less often discussed, but perhaps more useful to someone building a consumer web service. The first of these, which I have not got a great quote for, was that it is only by giving up control that you can learn from your users. It is intuitively obvious that if you allow users only the choice between a red widget or a blue widget, the only thing you can learn is whether they prefer red or blue, but by allowing them greater control over the way they use your service you can learn much more. The second thread had to do with abuse. Mike Frumin made the observation:

“if you think about the fact that [the business of] Mastercard or American Express…. is having your data, and … if you found ways to make your information available to you and selectively to other people, a lot of that opportunity [for abuse] goes away. I mean, you wouldn't get spam about refinancing your house if there was a way for you to tell everyone who was interested in offering you a mortgage that you wanted a mortgage, but there's not…. So in terms of … abuse, the more you are in control, the more you share, frankly, the less room for abuse there is”.