What
worried me about Squidoo was the creation of the new term “lens”. This
means that before you can talk to anyone about Squidoo, you have to
explain what a lens is and why it isn’t called a home page or a topic
or a portal etc. The best new ideas, it seems to me, don’t start out
trying to create new terminology as part of their marketing. It is
particularly difficult when a new term is seen as proprietary - which
means it is less likely that anyone else will start to use it. “Wiki”
and “Blog” just grew in use because a) anyone could use them and b)
they described something that was new and generic. Del.icio.us didn’t
create a new term for the links you store, it just called them
“bookmarks”, which everyone was used to.
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What worried me about Squidoo was the creation of the new term “lens”. This means that before you can talk to anyone about Squidoo, you have to explain what a lens is and why it isn’t called a home page or a topic or a portal etc. The best new ideas, it seems to me, don’t start out trying to create new terminology as part of their marketing. It is particularly difficult when a new term is seen as proprietary - which means it is less likely that anyone else will start to use it. “Wiki” and “Blog” just grew in use because a) anyone could use them and b) they described something that was new and generic. Del.icio.us didn’t create a new term for the links you store, it just called them “bookmarks”, which everyone was used to.