Features, I’ve recently come to realize, can be obstacles. Problems. The more powerful an application is, the more specialized it is, and thus with increased power its intended audience shrinks, and ironically, it becomes more, not less, vulnerable to competition.
Specialization, traditionally, is a good thing. But, as Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist argue in their Netocracy, those who overspecialize will not do very well in the age of the Internet. Want to succeed? Be influential in as many important networks as possible, they argue.
Even in this fast moving age specialization can be ok if you’re a person, but what if you’re a service, catering to thousands or millions of people? Sure, if the conditions around you don’t change much, you can satisfy the needs of a certain group very well, but if you exist in a fluid, everchanging medium such as the Internet, where everything shrinks and expands and overlaps all the time, the power that you offer might work against you in the end.
From this notion a new paradigm has arisen. Less is more. Simplicity is power. Create a solid foundation, and let others build a thousand different houses, each catering to a different need, and you’ll never go out of fashion. Simplicity is the key that unlocks the web. Bear with me.
The Twitter DilemmaI, as many other authors, have bashed my head against the wall thinking: how is it possible that Twitter remains popular despite their frequent technical problems and the fact that there are other similar services out there which offer more? It is an unprecedented situation: normally, a service with solid competition which has the advantage of not having technical difficulties that prevent their user base from using the service (whether or not Twitter’s competition is better with this regard is debatable, but based on current data anything seems to be more reliable than Twitter) would have been dead and buried ages ago. Twitter, however, endures. Why?
The answer is simple: Twitter belongs to a
new breed of services, perhaps accidentally discovered, that win by doing less, not more. It’s a foundation upon which hundreds of new applications were built, yet, in itself, it is little more than an API for a simple
one-to-many short message broadcast system. I, myself, have thrown my hands up in frustration and tried to find an alternative I can stick with - Pownce, Plurk, and countless others. Unfortunately, it seems, all these services are
too good to be a viable alternative.
Unlocking The Web
How can this be? The web, most experts agree, is a platform - a platform for any service that has to do with information of any kind. Unfortunately for developers, as far as platforms go, it’s a very undefined one; there is no universal API for the Internet. Furthermore, the damn thing changes all the time. Web portals were once huge; now they seem clumsy and cluttered, because many new applications have created more elegant ways to start your online day. If you want to develop an application for the Internet, you must first find a way to channel and organize the information that’ll flow through; if you jump on the wrong train here in the very beginning, your application might be doomed.
Some smart developers have thus began to understand that it’s better to build a very simple service that caters to a very basic need, and slap an API on top, than to try and create a specific, complex service that does a lot right from the start. The first type of service, if executed well, has shown to be very resilient: once it breaks the initial attention barrier, competing against it is practically impossible.
By catering to a basic need, creating a service that satisfies it in a simple way and opening it up through an API, you’ve unlocked, or perhaps deciphered, a small part of the web as a platform. You’ve created a mini platform which everyone is going to use because it’s, simply put, good enough. As long as people have a need to send short messages to other people from wherever they are, Twitter is going to be a highly sought for commodity. Unless someone else makes it even more simple.
Less Is MoreAdd a couple of features to Twitter and it’s Wordpress. Why is a Wordpress minus a couple of features so popular? You have to stop thinking in the traditional way and adopt the new “less is more” philosophy to understand that.
By far the most popular application that thrives from being simpler than its competitors is Google Search. Remember the way search engines looked before Google?
Yahoo, with its unbelievably crowded homepage at the time of Google’s advent was probably the worst offender, but
Lycos and others were no better. Google Search was very, very good at what it did, and that’s the reason it became so popular, but even beyond the inner workings of its algorithm it was very difficult to compete with it because the site consisted of almost nothing, sans a text form, a logo and some text. How do you top that? Apparently, no one has come up with the answer to that one, yet.
Another such application is FriendFeed. Having come to the game of lifestream aggregators late, it swept everyone off their feet and competitors like
Profilactic and
Second Brain have received very little press ever since. This is because, again, it does very little: it takes data from your various social profiles, creates a stream out of it and lets users comment and “like” single items. In fact, it’s eerily similar to Twitter, and now - just like in Twitter’s case - applications that bring new functionality to FriendFeed, like
NoiseRiver, have started to appear. Would FriendFeed have done better if they provided this exact functionality from the start? I’m
betting no, and here’s why.
Distribution Vs. Complexity
Once upon a time, if you wanted to create a successful application, one of the keys to success was to
offer a lot of features your competitors don’t have. Adobe’s Photoshop is one such application. If you need to edit some photos, it’s the best, period, because it has every tool you could possibly need.
But this is the disconnected world we’re talking about. On the web, things change. It’s not only important what you can do; you also want to be able to do it from wherever you want; you want to plug in into other services, you want to work together with other people. Furthermore - and this goes even more for mobile applications and services - on the Internet, complexity is looked down upon. People don’t want big applications that can do everything; they want simple, widgety applications that cater to a specific service.
Partly, this is because complexity makes web applications slow and clumsy. Partly, it is because the attention span of an average Internet user has shortened, and partly, it is because his willingness to learn the nuts and bolts of a complex application has diminished. Most importantly, it is because the Internet constantly changes and it’s really hard to build something big and complex on such shaky grounds.
Is it thus smart to create a lot of small apps, each aimed at a different niche? It’s definitely a sound approach. But I think an even better one is to find the lowest common denominator, an underlying basic need that connects all these various niches, cater to that, open it up and let mashups do the rest. This way, people can choose exactly which features they want to use, and your application becomes a fluid, modular service that can be as simple or as complex as the use wants it to be.
The Magic Formula
Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.
It sounds simple, but it’s not; determining a basic human need, like the need to share photos or the need to communicate with short text messages is a hit and miss affair. A service like FriendFeed could not have existed 15 years ago; explaining it to someone 30 years ago would sound like science fiction. Yet, today, the need to aggregate all your social networking data in one place seems to be a very important need for many humans. Will it ever be a
basic human need, like the need to communicate? I can see the naysayers shake their heads in disgust, but it’s hard to predict what the future will bring. Aggregation and organization of data might play a very big part in our lives really soon.
The other part of the equation is equally elusive. How much is too much? Would Twitter be as successful as it is if it had looked more like
Twhirl from the very beginning? Who knows. But I believe now that in many cases it is better to reduce the number of features to a minimum, open the application up via an API, and let the community build on what you have started. This synergy will make your application far more valuable than it would be if it had all these extra features itself.
The few that manage to get this formula right will build mini platforms upon which everything else on the web will be built. By unlocking little parts of the web they will each cater to a different need, and as long as that need is shared by a large number of people, it will be impossible to compete against them. And I’m sure that’s a position everyone wants to be in.
[All images courtesy of
sxc.hu]
Source: Mashable
Here’s the really interesting part though: the web sites where Cavalcade will be shown are being selected by Google’s existing contextual algorithms. That means that Google will be able to display the show only to those likely to be interested – in Cavalcade’s case “typically young men” according to the Times. 
