A week or two ago Mauricio posted asking ISPs to work in niches in order to differentiate themselves from the norm. His comments related manly to speed and traffic customizations but news from GoDaddy (via RWW) shows that there are other, and cooler ways to differentiate themselves.
GoDaddy has launched SmartSpace, in essence a mashup of web hosting and personalised homepages. It allows users to obtain a domain and then aggregate data from their social media applications, RSS feeds and specific content all onto one site. It also allows for very simple setup of filtering, inline chat and email etc.
Personalized homepages are a big market – with NetVibes, iGoogle, Yahoo et al entering the fray – this is a smart move for GoDaddy, as it ties the hosting of the URL to the actual homepage – thereby increasing stickiness.
My pick to watch for would be the roll out of simple e-commerce functionality to go with the personal homepages – thereby creating a one stop shop for hosting, web presence and transactional functions. Nice work guys!
