Chris Peters: Web Developer

In the spirit of yesterday’s book review of Unleashing the Ideavirus , I figured I should point out an excellent live example of an ideavirus created by BrowserCam.

BrowserCam is definitely a service that appeals to a narrow audience: Web designers and developers. It allows designers and developers to view and use their work in a wide array of Web browsers. The service can either take still shots of Web pages or can give you access directly to one of their many different remote computers. This gives you access to many popular browsers on different operating systems. Essentially, BrowserCam has bought a lot of different computers so that designers don’t have to.

Where does the ideavirus come into play? BrowserCam allows its members to create public galleries of screen shots of any Web page accessible on the Internet. Non-members can look at the screen shots. Most marketers and executives would exclaim, “But that means members can give away our service for free?! No money?! Argh!” This would be followed by eye twitching and heavy panting and maybe a busted blood vessel or two in their eyes.

I disagree. This is the perfect way to get schlubs like me to advertise BrowserCam for them, for free. If the service is remarkable (which it is), most people in the hive (target audience) who see it will say, “Wow! I need to have that!” And who would really want to ask a friend to take screen shots and then have to wait on the friend to do it for them? Being a paid member allows you to have the convenience of getting screen shots whenever you need them. Plus non-members don’t have access to the service that allows you to actually use the different OSes and browsers, not just view them.

Here’s an example of how this ideavirus works. Check out this conversation on the COMMUG discussion list . It shows how I essentially helped BrowserCam sell their services, without their incenting me to do so. After I provided a free public set of screen shots for another member of COMMUG, this was his reaction:

Wow. Browsercam is great. I’ll have to sign up for that. What a great idea.

As a sneezer (influencer), I was also willing to give more information after seeing the other member’s reaction:

Yeah, the best part is that they also let you VNC into the different machines to play around with live browsers on the different platforms they offer.

So BrowserCam has been willing to trade off the disadvantage of this service (read: freeloaders) for the incredible marketing it does for them. Whether this was intentional or not, I am willing to bet it is doing them more good than harm.