Emerging Technologies

Customer tool kits and context orchestration

By Brij ⋅ September 6, 2007 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Don Tapscott in Wikinomics:

Forget about static, immovable products. If your customers are going to treat products as platforms anyways, then you may as well get ahead of the game. Make your products modular, reconfigurable, and editable. Set the context for customer innovation and collaboration. Provide venues. Build user-friendly customer tool kits. Supply the raw materials that customers need to add value to your product. Make it easy to remix and share. We call this designing for prosumption.

This essentially means adding a new checklist in the product feature roadmap - hackability of your product. How hackable is your web2.0 project?

Update: On a similar note, here is Biz Stone of Twitter fame -The API has been arguably the most important ..thing we’ve done with Twitter.

Full interview here. API part -

Biz Stone: Well, it depends on what business model we
decide to pursue. We’re still very much weighing our options there, but
there are definitely leading contender business models that we have
mapped out where the API plays a significant role in generating just
more traffic to our system. It puts us in an enviable position.So, the
API becomes not only crucial for us on a creativity level and something
that we can offer to the developers so that they can build their own
applications and experiences, but it also becomes a way for us to grow
and a way for us to potentially - depending on what business model we
choose - do well there, business-wise. No matter what, we’re going to
be considering the API. We’re going to be considering what folks are
doing with it going forward so that it becomes part of what we are and
what we do.