After the success of ‘Pinterest’, curation is becoming new trend of mobile internet. When I discussed about some applications with developers and service managers, many people didn’t know what curation is exactly. The unclear fever for curation will be maintained. For now, curation is just one of many functional differentiators. It means that curation is not a definitive way to get users.
Screen Capture of Pinterest
Regarding UX and a visual factor, curation still is important and effective to get a customer’s interest. But it is a complementary role to support its core concept. Maybe curation gave a serious meaning to applications which launched last year or before. Now, most services adopt the feature that sets up its data or user generated contents for each user’s preference. I would like to explain how successful applications get high valuation in terms of wider viewpoint including curation.
So what will differentiate your service from others?
The first is the choice of the genre or content. For example, Instagram puts focus on pictures while Zite deals with articles. And it is very interesting that vertical social services are photo-related. It means that emotional contents generally intrigue more people’s interest and interaction than informative contents. For this reason, photo is a very attractive content to evolve into a social service rather than other contents such as video and information.
The second is a simple authoring tool to record a user’s life log or post. The reason that many people use ‘Tumblr’ is easy to make and maintain a blog. In the case of “Pinterest”, if you want to make your own photo board, you click on a favorite photo and push the button of ‘Pin-it’. Many users are reluctant to write a long post and upload a photo from their devices.
The third is how to display. It is not limited to arrange images or data esthetically like “Flipboard”. As many technical methods are applied in mobile services, expression gets more diverse. “Wallit” gets more interests based on ‘Augmented Reality’ which enables users to read ready-made messages at a certain place with a smartphone. Recently there are several interesting projects tried by Google and Microsoft separately (Google’s Project Glass Demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4).
Even though you got these three factors in your service, it is not sufficient to boom up the service. Most of all, all you need is passion for your business and to ponder over the direction of a service based on a user.