Yesterday I posted this on the FreshBooks blog:

Applications that use the web as a platform have the potential to begin an era of providing new value for their users…

All the users that profile themselves (e.g. tell us “I am a web designer”) will begin receiving useful comparative business metrics they can use to benchmark their business. For example, a web designer might like to learn:

• What is the average invoice size for web designers?
• How long does the average web designer take to get paid?
• What is the average monthly revenue of other web designers?

We’re going to tell our active users their industry average AND their own average, so they can see how they stack up….Remember when you had to pay Forrester $1200 for a report like this? It’s times like this I catch a glimpse of how our service – and services like ours – will begin to move markets.

At first blush, you might say “big deal”. Mark my words – this is a *big* deal. Computing and knowledge like this is going to disrupt markets (i.e. Forrester). Stowe gets it. Take a second and ponder the implications with other sorts of applications. Let’s say you are a lawyer using Writely, you could get metrics on editing time for various classes of documents like shareholders agreements. Using the metrics gathered you could do a better time of projecting your resource allocation (i.e. time) and you could do a better job forecasting expenses for you clients which they will appreciate…or at least you could say, “well I based my forecast on industry standards…it’s *your* fault we went five times over budget”…you get the idea.

Huge value…mark my words.