May 9th, 2008 It’s all about the Views
It is with great pleasure that I announce I am now an employee of Viewzi. It’s a great bunch of folks working together on a great product, and I am extremely excited to be part of it. I began contracting for Viewzi on April 7 after a whirlwind interview/discussion period. On May 1 I became a regular employee and showed up on the About page yesterday.
Viewzi’s got several great ideas all rolled up into one product. Ask yourself, should search results always look the same (e.g. a text list)? No! The display of results should merge two things: the intentions of the searcher and the results. I may enter “Madrid” as a search term, but I likely have a goal in mind such as “I wonder what it would be like to stay in Madrid?” or “I think that song I heard on the radio had ‘Madrid’ in the title”. Should travel information and MP3s be presented in the same way? Not to humans. Viewzi solves this need. It’s all about the Views.
Also, should everyone be forced to use the same means of traversing search results? No! Even with multiple Views, you still need to be able to customize your experience. Viewzi is currently hard at work on the first wave of enhancements to support user customization.
What about the long tail of niches? If you know you are searching for recipes, why get song titles or travel destinations in your search results? Why even search sites other than recipe sites? Why indeed? Viewzi tailors niche Views to appropriate data sources. So for general search Viewzi uses the big 4 and others. But for all the other Views, it pulls from a rich diversity of specialized sites and data sources.
And all this is built on an open platform that (eventually) allows anyone to build their own View. Viewzi isn’t trying to figure out the best way to search automobiles. Instead, Viewzi is building a platform that will allow the wisdom of crowds to settle that issue, and even come up with a diversity of answers.
If you are interested in joining the beta, I’ve set up 50 referrals for our steadfast readership. Go to www.viewzi.com/invite and enter the referral code “hornes.org” and you are in.
May 9th, 2008 at 11:49 am
[…] As a bonus, he also got a new job. […]
May 9th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I’m still tying to figure out the Oreo analogy, but congratulations!
May 9th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Chris, think of customer-facing folks and R&D folks as two cookie wafers with distinct pressures and goals. Sometimes they can be brittle. Good product managers are like the filling: they glue it all together and make the whole better than the parts.
May 9th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I can’t get past the image of scraping you off with my front teeth before devouring the rest…
May 10th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
“I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that?!”