Does
the platform change user behavior or does user behavior compel the platform to change?
That’s really a chicken and egg story! But when it comes to the web of today,
there is a very obvious shift from search to discover. Like I said, it may be a
platform pushed thing, or maybe user behavior called for it. Either ways,
discover is the new ‘it’ thing.
Facebook
earlier today announced the roll out of hashtags. As per the blog
post announcing the same, ‘Similar to
other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on
Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a
larger discussion. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed
of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.’
It
goes on to say, ‘Hashtags are just the
first step to help people more easily discover
what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public
conversations.’
Opera
Software, makers of one of the most popular desktop and mobile browsers, also
recently launched 2 products – Opera for Android and Opera Next, that have
‘Discover’ as one of the most prominent features. Discover feature provides a
new way of discovering content on the web. From the Discover panel of the
startup screen, users can read a selection of popular articles and dig deeper
into their interests.
Discover
really sums up the new age web of today. While the previous era was more search
centric, where the focus was to plug out information from the oodles of it
lying up there in the world wide web, the current focus has shifted to
discovering more relevant information suited/ customized to the individual’s
needs.
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