My buddy Ben Barren has just released his blog search engine, Gnoos. Even though recently I declared that the world doesn’t need another blog search engine, this is my second post about them this week! Techcrunch and Mashable, amongst others, have already gone over the feature set of Gnoos. No need for me to repeat that, except to note that Gnoos is a local blog search engine – for Australia. Which means it does count as one of my Top Ten Underserved Web 2.0 Markets after all, because local services was one of my picks 🙂
Do non-US countries need local versions of Web 2.0 staple products?
Let’s explore the ‘local’ angle a bit. Do countries outside the US require their own media and web 2.0 products? In countries that speak different languages, there is unquestionably a need. In China, Baidu kicks Google’s ass in the search engine market. The real question though: is there also a need for local services for other reasons? Ben thinks so and he told me:
“If you are outside America, it’s hard to find what the local conversation going on is. You couldn’t even find a place to find local blogs when we were developing gnoos. As technorati indexes 30 million+ websites and Google indexes tens of billions of documents, gnoos is indexing 30,000+ RSS Feeds (growing 10% weekly) that matter to Australians.”
Interestingly Ben claims there is “far less international expansion” amongst seed-funded Web 2.0 startups these days, due to less VC and IPO funds in the post-dot com bust world. Which Ben says provides opportunities for companies like his, Feedcorp. So it seems not only is there a need, but US-based web startups may be leaving the door open by not expanding internationally.
Local matters, as I’ve heard Ben say a lot of times. I agree totally with him on this (it’s why I put Local Services in my list of underserved markets in web 2). Also I’m seeing this trend all over – little non-US startups are creating their own local versions of the main ‘2.0’ categories. Blog search, photos, maps, feed management, etc. All those things that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, Feedburner, Flickr et al supposedly have conquered already. Maybe there are opportunities to add community and other localized social touches to those ‘template’ products – and be successful in their backyard markets?
ZoomIn is an example of this in my own country, New Zealand. Even though Google Maps has just entered the market here (I suspect because of ZoomIn), the local product ZoomIn actually has a lot of nice community features as well – which Google Maps doesn’t have… maybe will never have because it doesn’t understand the local users and market as well as ZoomIn. Remember that one of the cardinal rules of web design is that you must understand what the user wants. I think Gnoos and ZoomIn have that understanding, in their local markets.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)