Spezify

Me new favorite website is Spezify.  It produces a visual collage of search results pulled from all media (web pages, videos, images, tweets, etc.).

I like it (a)because it’s just plain cool and (b)because I can scan a hundred search  results in multiple media in the time it takes to skim through the first page (10 links) of Google search results – and the experience is much richer for being so visual, and much more likely to uncover hard-to-find gems.

For example, here’s the Spezify results page for “billionaires pledge” (click the image to browse the results, which really is the cool part).

Spezify isn’t for finding the quick answer to a question, it’s for getting a sense of a person, an idea, an organization and how it’s represented – in prose, pictures, videos – on the web.

So now what?

After you’re through spezifying you (of course you will), if your organization is part of the overwhelming number of shops whose website is just brochureware (rather than places for people to come together or a real call to action), how about replacing your website with your Spezify results – just redirect your URL to Spezify, or have a nice-looking homepage and a box that says “everything people are saying about us can be found here” for people to click on.

And since getting people to change what they do is harder than getting people with a blank slate to act differently, if you’re starting something new, why not take this as the opportunity to do away with a website entirely.  You still want your URL, but instead of wasting mental energy, time and real cash on putting up something that looks nice, you can instead put your energy into being remarkable and having people say cool stuff about you, in real life and online.  Your Spezify results will reflect that work better than a website that you’re constantly scrambling to keep full of fresh, relevant information.

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