As the India Vs Australia fever catches on I could not help myself but watch the last 10 overs of each side. Cricket purists may slam me for missing out on the joy of Cricket, but frankly I'm neither a cricket purist, nor a great fan of cricket. For me the fun is in how each of the teams collectively handle the final moments of pressure and come out trumps with both the teams running to the finish line.
There is another catch to my viewing pattern, I do follow the scores as the teams slug it out. Incase of a not so tight finish I may as well avoid watching the match altogether. Incase it is a nail biting match I may as well watch upto 20 overs of the chasing side. The question is how do I track the scores? With a Net connect of 3.1 Mbps it is pretty easy. I open www.cricinfo.com and keep the tab live with score updates.
It was during one of these matches that I took note of an ad for www.cricketnirvana.com. The usp it claimed was quicker updates. cricinfo's 30 sec update does miss some of the action at times, but that is inconsequential as I check back only every 5-10 mins. However, given how much we are hooked onto the speed phenomenon, I definitely checked onto cricketnirvana.com. Here are a few things that I felt are the undoing of cricket nirvana.
My IE7 stores all the recently visited sites so when I type in "c" a pop down appears which shows cricinfo.com and the different pages I must have visited under the same. I select cricinfo.com and view the same. However, to visit cricketnirvana.com for one I need to type in the entire name first up which is definitely very long. Once I have done that, it did take a long time to open up. Once it did open up, it did look interesting. Then again a few more issues.
As the third ODI went underway today on a weekend, I opened up my IE7 and printed "c" there was a listing of all the cricinfo sites I had visited. I typed in "c" "r" "i" "c" "k" & what did I see? cricketnext.in.com and all the different pages I visited under the same. I then had to go all the way to "e" "t" "n" "i" and there I was at cricketnirvana.com. It sure taught me a lesson "KISS" "Keep it Simple Stupid". Why is cricinfo more successful as compared to cricketnext.in.com? A major part must be because in all browser sites as soon as we feed in "cr" it automatically pops out cricinfo after all "k" in cricket comes after "i" in cricinfo.
I believe this is one dimension that marketers need to be aware of...
