A couple of days ago, my friend Patrick emailed me this New York Times article. Slide.com, it says, is among the pioneers of a new ecommerce trend. Up until now, online shopping has required visiting different vendors' websites to scope out items you'd like to buy. Slide.com wants to save us time by bringing product info right to our desktops.
You can sign up on Slide.com to see slideshows of shoes, jewelry, electronics... Within the next few weeks, the service will start pulling data from 50+ retailers, including Old Navy, CompUSA and Zappos. CEO Max Levchin (a PayPal founder) says that "well over half" of his user base have made a purchase. Slide.com gets a 5%-15% commission on each transaction.
Patrick LOVES this approach. He thinks it makes as much sense as using an RSS reader - versus visiting dozens of news sites and blogs individually. He says it's not just about efficiency, but also the comprehensiveness of information you receive. What shoe-obsessed girl wouldn't be psyched to have the latest fashions scrolling across her screen? Art collectors, too, might enjoy dynamically updated slideshows of new works from favorite galleries. Patrick himself subscribes to an RSS feed of Flickr photos tagged "Apple", if some of the shiny toys he sees came with a "click to order" link, they'd totally have a buyer.
So I'm wondering if push-based advertising might work for web hosting. Would prospective customers sign up for feeds of available servers from different data centers? Let's say I'm a developer planning to deploy my new site, or a sysadmin looking to expand my existing infrastructure - wouldn't it be convenient to turn server shopping into a background process? No more opening 7 different browser tabs to compare hardware types and bandwidth allocations; this tedious chore would be replaced with on-demand, at-a-glance access to all the relevant information.
Better yet, it'd be awesome if the system could incorporate reviews, link to recent Web Hosting Talk discussion threads, and offer Amazon-like recommendations based on aggregated data.
And last but not least, the feeds could be distributed via an affiliate program widget that participants could put on their websites, blogs, MySpace profiles, etc.
Doesn't that sound waaay cooler than the same old "showcases" that TheWHIR, Web Hosting Talk and TopHosts have all had since the beginning of time??
Update: Oh my goodness!! Check out this Techcrunch writeup on Dapper:
Dapper provides a point and click GUI to extract data from any web site that can then be worked with and displayed via XML, HTML, RSS, email alerts, Google Maps, Google Gadgets, a javascript image loop or JSON.
I was thinking about the business development challenges associated with procuring data for a web hosting services feed. But as a matter of fact, all the prices, specs etc can just be auto-extracted from different hosting companies' websites. That's way cool!
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