About Me 0091: Making Money With Website

And so Comic Con International: San Diegio have closed registration again after, for the second time, the whole computer system crashed.

Epic, the company handling the online registration tell me that it’s Comic Con’s fault, they are unable to handle the amount of registrations that Epic are sending to them – but evidence is that few people are able to even et that far and the Epic website just can’t handle the traffic. While they boast on their website that hey can handle 100,000 registrations, I guess that doesn’t mean all at the same time. And everyone is making “epic fail” jokes. Comic COn have apologised for the inconvenience, especially for those who got up early/got to work early/went without breakfast to register. And they promise an update soon…

Here are a few people’s experiences

t_WILLI: i got in but then it crashed again. i got my hopes up too!

SirJaffacake: Apparently Epic Registration spent the last three weeks making a bunch of new error pages.

lalabun writin a letter toc10900 Granite St Charlotte, NC 28273 USA i bet it will get there faster than them fixing the reg pag

DRBCH if nerds can’t handle computer server issues, TWICE, what have we come too as a society

slaprabbjt: All I want is a badge with my name on it. made it to step three.

EmilyGuilfoil You know you are a nerd when your Twitter feed is taken over by people complaining about the ComicCon registration site crashing

hyperpearlgirl: They have better servers at McDonalds.

Twitter launched a number of new features for its website today that allow more companies to embed their content in the site’s right-hand media pane, making the site feel even more “app-like.” Coincidentally enough, while Twitter was making this announcement Google was launching Chrome OS, and talking about all the great apps that users can download from the Chrome store — many of which cost money to download and have features that don’t work fully unless you are using a Chrome browser or the Chrome OS. One is about the web and the other is about apps.

Obviously, Twitter has apps too — it has an iPhone ( aapl) app, an iPad app and an Android app, and may even be working on a Chrome OS app. But the company has also been spending a lot of time and resources on its website and adding new features to it, including the ability to embed Slideshare presentatations, Instagram photos, iTunes links shared via Ping, YouTube videos, Rdio tunes and other multimedia content. The new version of the site (which is still being rolled out to users) even feels app-like in the way content slides out into the media pane. But you don’t have to download it and you don’t have to pay for it.

The features that Google’s Chrome OS apps have to offer are nice as well, and the user interface in many cases is very slick, but they still represent new apps that users have to find and download from a new app store, just as they have to download apps for their iPads or iPhones, or their Android devices. Everyone seems to want to have an app or an app store — even Mozilla is apparently developing one — in part because of the monetization potential that many see, not just from users paying to download the application, but also from in-app purchases or subscriptions or upgrades.

So what happened to just using the Internet and the regular web? The father of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wrote recently in Scientific American about the rise of the walled-garden approach to applications, and his concern about how users are being restricted by proprietary platforms, with limited abilities to link or share content, both of which are at the heart of the web’s power — and he is right to be concerned. In some ways, the web seems to be getting subsumed by a flurry of different platforms and app stores.

One of the powerful things about HTML5, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his talk following the Chrome OS launch, is that it allows developers to produce rich, interactive websites that look and feel like applications. So why don’t more companies take the approach that Twitter is taking, and develop better websites instead of focusing on building apps for a dozen different stores? Obviously apps have a number of benefits — monetization through downloads being one of them — but there are a ton of benefits to just having a better website as well, and one is that anyone can use it without having to pay for it.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d):

Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners

What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

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Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Making Money With Website

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