A New slice of the pie
Here’s an interesting bit of new technology coming our way. Firstly, we know that IE still has the lion’s share of browser voice (around 85% use IE), and Microsoft has been pretty good at gently (or not so gently) encouraging people to upgrade their browsers when new releases are published. So, it’s a certainty that in pretty short order, after the final release if IE8, that a strong number of users will be using it.
Baked into IE8 is a very interesting user-feature called Web Slices. There’s a video explaining it. Basically, the premise is that individual users can subscribe to a page-part. So …
- take a slice from eBay of a listing and watch for changes.
- take a search result on a job site and watch for changes.
- watch for breaking news changes on news sites
- the sky is the limit… those are just a few examples
More importantly, …
- what is this going to do to personalization sites?
- what is this going to do to alerts?
- when a user can monitor a page section directly in by browser, how will this impact paid advertising?
- is this “page-part view” considered a page view or unique visitor (specifically with ComScore or the others)?
Basically, this is Tivo for the browser.
With these in mind, some search, classified, or marketplace sites could embrace this and others will hate it.
The end result for a user could be that updates to his specified criteria get pulled into his browser, and he could click directly to the listing. That’s OK for some (if their business model is baked around connecting buyers and sellers or selling listings), but not OK for others (if their business model relies on display advertising). For those that rely on both listings and display, it’s going to be interesting to see who wins.
Personally, I think the vast majority of employment sites won’t care too much and will like this. They might see an erosion of users registering for alerts, but the (hopeful) increase in traffic to the listings will make them happy. With automotive sites, display advertising is at a premium pretty much everywhere, I think the typical automotive site will hate this because the browser is sucking part of the search result page and the site doesn’t get to show the traditional display ads. For real estate sites, the answer is all over the place.
Food for thought.
Interesting. I had thought that the new web slices were going to be an interesting technology for users to use, but I hadn’t thought that some sites may not want to make use of them, like you say, those that need traffic ON thier pages to serve ads.
However, I wonder if this is the same fear those kinds of sites had when RSS first came out? I guess time will tell if technologies like RSS or Web Slices (or anything else the next-gen broswers will invent) will help drive traffic to sites by giving users notification, or if they will drive traffic away because people are simply OK scanning the headlines and not drilling in for the full story.
In either case, this is just further proof that the home page is no longer the home page. All these (RSS & Web Slices) drive people directly do the article page (or the detail page), bypassing the home page. This is not new; usability folks have known that the detail pages get seen without home pages for a while.
Great article, thanks!
JS