Who needs a website?

I wrote recently about twitter and facebook as sort of minimalist social apps on the lopico blog. These two sites are a unique combination, because of the draw that they have ~ and not much else. But it is the draw of these two that I think could really give just about any company enough justification to drop their web presence anywhere else. Maybe LinkedIn too…

For most businesses, more people are on facebook, twitter, and linkedIn (FTL for the rest of this post) at this very moment than are likely to be on your site in the next year. Why not simply harness that power of that network and similar networks, and forget about trying to build up a site that will see low traffic?

Use Facebook as a storage for content, twitter as a thought provoking conversation tool, and LinkedIn to draw contacts and job applicants.

This is drastically different than what I said in the aforementioned Lopico post in which I said - build from scratch, don’t build off of existing networks. The difference is one of audience. If I am talking about building a web app - I think innovation is hurt by developing on top of platforms. However, if we are talking about traditional businesses looking to harness the power of the web (e.g. a bar, law firm, or even a band) then why not go where everyone else is, instead of asking them to come to you?

You don’t need a website, but you do need the web - and you need to know how to use it.

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I should at least partially credit this post to a quick conversation I had on twitter today with @kevinokeefe