Today’s guest post is by Matthias Galica, Product Manager @WooMe.com.
What do you call something that’s never existed before? Remember rolling your eyes at the first mention of “social networking”, “social bookmarking”, or “micro-blogging” – only to see them end up in the popular lexicon?
That’s sometimes the difficult flipside to facilitating an entirely new and exciting behavior online: you have to give it a name. Even worse, you may need to stick with it for weeks, months, maybe years – during which time no one has the slightest idea what you’re talking about.
But it’s incredibly validating when that strangely-named baby becomes the popular new kid on the block.
WooMe is currently the slightly awkward adolescent: we’ve just had a couple growth spurts, it’s the summer before high school, and girls are starting to pay attention to us.
Internally, we’ve been using the term “introductions platform” because our community has outgrown the online dating label. The lion’s share of visitors still come looking to meet and interact with potential love interests in real-time, but WooMe has also become a valuable tool for engaging new people in a fun way online.
People are screening new roommates, challenging each other in spirited discussions on news and politics, even vying for the attention of their favorite celebrities. With hundreds of thousands of live sessions, chats, and video chats at any given time, the number of different ways our users interact is increasing exponentially. Calling ourselves purely a dating site would be limiting and might neglect the myriad activities for which our users have appropriated the technology.
Essentially, we’re recreating in the virtual space all the things that relative strangers can do in reality, and it’s an amazing to watch. (See for yourself on WooMe TV).
So does it make sense to publicize the term Introductions Platform? No matter how hard you try and coin a term, sometimes it just doesn’t stick. Even mighty Facebook has had little traction with “social utility” and there’s a veritable graveyard of Web 2.0 buzzwords that now inspire little more than a chuckle (heck, “Web 2.0” might be one of them). Sometimes you risk completely missing the target with “e-tailing”, “life caching“, or “hypertasking“.
Our current tagline is “Introducing the World”, but we’re planning on trying out a more simple and straightforward “Meet People LIVE” in the coming weeks.
Which do you think does a better job of getting the idea across?
Photo is of Matthias at TechCrunch 50 in 2009.
