Communicating Non-Verbally Through Signals on The Internet

Well, the inspiration for this website comes from a very old book of Watergate fame, namely, All The President's Men written by Bob Woodward. Bob has claimed in this book that he communicated with Deep Throat by placing a flowerpot with a red flag on the balcony of his apartment.

This non-verbal method of communication is almost as old as the humans on this earth. However, I'm not aware that there is any website or utility on the Internet that supports such a non-verbal method of communication or signaling. The benefit of such signaling is that that most of such signals are meaningless to everyone except the recepient. Therefore, such private signals don't have to be protected with a password.

There are several ways of building such an Internet utility that can help people communicate through signals. One of the ways is to overlay Google maps with signals or signal objects. Easy enough! The users will have the option of selecting a latitude/longitude combination, an address, intersection or a landmark. Once they have found the appropriate location on the map, users will be able to drag and drop a signal object on that location. This could be a flowerpot, a teddy bear, a message in a bottle, a book, etc. The database will record the latitude/longitude combination as well as the parameters of the object that is placed on that location. There is no need to protect the object with a password. Whoever sees it can either ignore it or delete it. If they delete it, hard luck for the recepient. This is what happens in the real world too. But earth is big enough for anyone to find out a suitable location to drop the signals so that they will be hidden from the prying eyes for some time until the recepient reaches the location to find the signal.

In fact, you can further enhance such a website to mimic the real world. In a real world, if I leave a book at a busy intersection, it will disappear in a pretty short time. Most likely someone will pick it up to either give it to security, read it or throw it in a trash. At a deserted location, the book will last as long as the time taken by the elements of nature to decompose it. That brings us to the concept of life of each signal object. You can write your program to allow the signal objects to disappear after some time depending upon the nature of the object and the location where that object was placed.

One more method is to overlay an Internet URL with a signal/message. Therefore, people will reach this website and enter a URL to retrive the signal placed on top of that URL by someone. Internet is full of billions of URLs, so this will give people a pretty good way of hiding a signal without using a password.

The more important question is how you will make money from such a website. What will be your competitive advantage? First of all competitive advantage will come from network effect. The more people use it, the more people will be likely to use it. Your advantage will be your ownership of the database of locations and signals. You should be able to replace Google maps with maps from Bing. That will give you a leg up your suppliers. Your website focus should be as much as possible on non-verbal communication. This will allow you to create your distinctly unique identity that will drive your business advantage. The topic of money is closely related to the topic of competitive advantage. Unless you have a uniquely defined sustainable marketable identity, you will not be able to make much money from such a website. Once you have that, you can make money, for instance, by delivering thousands of Teddy Bears from Target to the homes of people. This would be a secret signal to them that a discount awaits them at a near by Target store. The problem with this approach is that everyone and their dogs build an Internet business model based on earning revenue from advertisements.

To tell you the truth, advertisement dollars are very hard to get and they disappear quickly if results in terms of increased sales are not produced. Subscriber dollars are also hard to get but generally subscribers dollars are easier to retain as long as subscribers are satisfied. Internet users hate registration. Therefore, adding registration on a such a website that deals with non-verbal, secret signals is likely to be counterproductive. Looks like we are reaching the limits of our imagination on how to monetize this idea. Yes, we are. Secret signals could be URL objects that will lead to some surprise downloads, etc. But it is doubtful that you will ever earn subscriber revenue from such a website. Dollars will have to flow in from businesses and for that you will have to further improve this concept from a marketing/sales point of view.