Software trade-offs: strategy under fire

You built a great product. Your software is the dominant player in the market. Yay!

New competitors appear with new features. Those features target your specific strategy, exploiting it to expose a weakness. Or, "misuse" of your service also exposes a weakness of your strategy. How do you respond?

Keep in mind that the strategy is or at least has been critical to your success. Any changes could compromise the value of your software.

Lew Moorman sees Twitter theatening Google. (Via Robert Scoble.)

Twitter is building a human powered search indexing engine. It is an engine that will build better results than any rules based index and has gotten millions of people super motivated to contribute for free every day (even though they don’t know it).

Robert also points out that Twitter and other real-time interactive sites will provide better late-breaking searches.

Meanwhile, the lack of human contact on Facebook has made it difficult to recover from scams.

Facebook confirmed Rutberg's identity theft story and says it's beefing up security in reaction to the new scam. But Rutberg isn't sure how effective the social networking company has been. His main complaint: There is no way to call the firm and sound the alarm that a crime is in progress. The company confirms it doesn’t accept phone calls.

I think Facebook's problem is the easiest to resolve: put a "I am the owner of this account, and it has been taken over" link on the site, which immediately gives you access to a live person. This phone number would also be used for people who have been locked out of their accounts illegitimately. Yes, it would cost some money, but that would be managed by limiting the calls to only identity issues: those who accounts have been blocked by hackers or Facebook.

Google can hope that greater "stickiness" among their various tools -- gmail, reader, etc. -- leads to a greater percentage of people logging in, which in turn makes it easier to track specific user's behavior and who's reading whom. This will allow them to generate searches based on personal networks. Longer term, I think some amount of loss to niche searching is inevitable. This actually creates a healthier online infrastructure for us, as users.

The key for Google is whether an exploitation could turn fatal (as Google's was for Yahoo and Excite, etc.). So far, I would say this one is not.