With my project, I have the ideal aim of people using this website as a home page for their browser that allows them easy access to the sites and services they visit daily as well as a way to connect with their friends as a hub of their online activity.
This isn’t the only service that offers similar results, though, so here are what I consider to be my main competititors in this space and what I think my project can offer that they can’t (which, generally, falls into specificity – my website is specifically targeted at one audience and can be designed with that audience in mind).
iGoogle
Ultimately, in this field, iGoogle is by far the biggest competition that I have. Millions of people visit Google.com every day, and plenty of users already have it set as a default home page one way or another – 7.1 million people in 2007. It wasn’t as much as Yahoo’s (50.2 million), but when you consider that a year later, 20% of all visits to Google were made through iGoogle, that’s a lot, no matter what way you cut it.
iGoogle allows for instant customisation of the page, displaying content appropriate to your interests, theming it to your liking and localising the content dependent on your location in the world. The design is also responsive to the size of your window, a design choice that may allow for greater overall room for content, but ultimately looks poor on window sizes of either extreme of small or large.
The content of iGoogle is varied and almost wholly customisable. The possible additions range from widgets such as small casual games to widgets that list your Facebook news feed. This Facebook function is a key overlap with my project – however, there are some key differences to what is available in these widgets on iGoogle and what I plan to do with my project. Primarily, these widgets are just another box on a page on iGoogle and are not connected in any other way to the actual page.
On my project, I aim to allow users to not only access their Facebook news feed on their page, but also to combine it with Twitter for a single networking feed – something that could in time expand to other social media as required. In addition to this, I aim to allow users to filter the content that this feed displays (possibly as a separate feed) so that it only shows certain Facebook friends (such as those from an online community they are a part of) or specific gaming related Tweets (for example, a user may follow the game developers, Sega and wish their Tweets to appear in this specialised feed).
From my research, I haven’t been able to identify any similar applications, but again, I aim to make mine specific to gaming as a default (giving users default options, for example: to filter out Tweets related to Sega into a feed that also includes Facebook friends and groups from a Sega related online community they are a part of), which would set it apart from any other possible competition in providing a crafted experience for the specific audience.
Positives
iGoogle succeeds in providing users with a genuinely fully customisable home page that provides them with plenty of great starting points for their daily browsing. Users can visit the site and instantly be directed towards the latest headlines, the latest videos they are subscribed to on Youtube or general information from their social media accounts. There’s a lot of room for expansion, also, with widgets that can be created and submitted by any developer for use by any user.
Negatives
Although there are a lot of themes available to change the look of iGoogle, and plenty of content customisation can take place, there is ultimately a lack of personalisation to the page. A user would find it difficult to identify their iGoogle page as a representation of their online presence. This isn’t really a failing per se, as it is clear that iGoogle’s not designed to give users that sense of identity – but it is a key difference between what I will be aiming for in my project and what iGoogle provides.
My project will give users a place online that they can point friends and family to and say “this is me and these are the games that I like” – to be able to create an identity and share it. My research into other social media sites, such as Facebook, shows that being able to craft and share such an identity is a key part of their success and I aim to make crafting that identity specific to gaming with the aim of giving that audience a deeper experience in doing so than generalised media such as Facebook and Twitter are capable of
