InfoWorld says, “Search satisfaction on the wane,” but happiness with web portals is increasing.
Compete, a market research firm, asserts that traffic to social networking sites like MySpace is poised to overtake traffic to portal sites like Yahoo!
Nielsen//NetRatings reports that “User-generated content drives half of U.S. top 10 fastest growing web brands.” PDF Report
At the end of the day, library websites are mostly about search. But what does the growth in portals and networking sites imply about future library site design and features? Should our next design strive less for the clean-and-uncluttered look and more for Yahoo’s put-it-all-on-the-front-page look? As our sites start to include more social features, such as tagging and reviews, what else will users want to go along with them? Which features are most applicable to library sites?
No answers yet, sorry; just asking the questions.