Leveraging the long tail

The seventh pattern in O’Riley’s writings of the web 2.0 movement, leveraging the long tail is about expanding the internet market into previously untouched territory; focusing on the far and wide rather than the short and narrow of the world wide web.  This technique see’s the creation of many different web services that are of interest to a small and unique section of the web market.

With the abilities web 2.0 provides, lower cost of development see’s a huge number of online services being produced, all targeting a small market, or the ‘long tail’. The web provides an infinite amount of opportunity for new services with significant market opportunities.

The growing use of mobile devices and other platforms has further increased the demand for new innovative services; furhter stretching the long tail away from centralized highly popular web services.

The best practices in the long tail concept is creating new innovative services to further extend the long tail. Let the user’s be in control – by registering an account they are able to service and customize their own dashboard. By creating these long-tail applications on the ideology of self-managed accounts, these long-tail applications become viable and cost-effective with no front-end support required. With successful implementations of long-tail applications, the tail can be further extended and the growth and demand becomes even more great.

A particular example of a small, low cost, innovative long-tailed service is Slashdot. Slashdot is a social news website that targets a specific audience in the web, providing specific news on technology. It’s slogan being “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” (slashdot.org). Slashdot’s administrators post articles on the website and allow user’s to comment on the threads, as well as +1 or -1 other user comments and flag them in a category. This opens a discussion on articles.

(Slashdot.org)

Slashdot.org utilizes best practice techniques derived from the leveraging the long-tail pattern through it’s targeting of a specific audience. The idea of the long-tail is to capture a service and deliver it to a marginal and unique audience. In this case people highly interested in keeping up-to-date with technology and discussions on trending technological advancements. It is a no-cost service to the user’s, attracting more subscribers, with non-subscribers being hit with advertising campaigns to produce revenue. The website is user-centric and users have the ultimate control over the website’s trend. This being the users control the popularity of articles and can participate in polls and discussion pages.

These long-tail web applications are the way of web 2.0. A never ending sight of new services pop up everyday with new innovative services being provided to users constantly. The old legacy web 1.0 applications of highly-hitted centralized websites are no longer the top priority requirement of the new-age internet user. With users now in demand of unique and specific services.