I love how the web as we know it is much like a living organism that we are able to watch evolve at a breakneck pace. It has been particularly interesting to see how services and products have been in a tug-of-war over what shifts are trendy to be doing, and what adds the most value for the end user.
As far as I can tell, here is how the web has evolved so far…
Existence/Content
As the web was just coming about into the consumer space, the most important thing was just getting something out there. We had no real way of cataloging great content and cool new websites which made domain squatting overly profitable given the amount of time effort required to snatch them up. If you wanted to buy t-shirts online, you would simply try typing in tshirts.com and hope for a reputable vendor. These were truly the days of the wild west online where pretty much anything was kosher and there was limited to no oversight. These were for all intensive purposes the dark ages of the internet.
Organization/Services
As more and more content based (read: informational/brochure) websites cropped up, we started to see the need for finding this content and thus search engines were born. Search hasn’t really changed all that much since inception, but we all know that Google was a game changer with their Page Rank system to help bring order to the chaos. We also started to see more and more transactional/e-commerce based websites pop-up and sites that offered package services for end users to try and make their lives better.
Sharing/Quality
When information became even more overbearing for consumers, social sharing services like Delicious, Facebook and now Twitter have sprung up for friends and new connections to share the best content across the web with. This has worked well at driving traffic beyond the tried and true e-mail, forward, repeat method of sharing information. It has helped bring “social proof” to particularly good articles, and sites like Digg.com funneled new and interesting stories into social graphs that would have otherwise never seen the content.
Design/Interface
But now we are seeing a much more subtle but equally important shift in what will make new products interesting and much more useful for us. We have entered the Age of Design for web services. What I mean by this is that web services now have to make something beautiful, instead of just something that “works”. The introduction of the new Twitter.com after yesterday’s announcement is living proof that in order to more useful, you have to be more usable. It seems simply in logic and in theory, but creating a truly gorgeous user interface is paramount to a web services success in today’s marketplace. Being attractive to the eye, and folding in rich media to the user experience also allows impressive split testing to understand the usage pattern of your users.
So while winners just ship products, how are you making the usability layer of your web services gorgeous? Additionally are you actually separating the functionality teams from the design teams? Functionality should be handled by your engineering minds, and graphical designers should be handling the interface layer. Make something usable, make something great.
Think you need a business plan to have a successful website/web service? The statistics would actually indicate otherwise, as the most successful websites were from people who were able to ship a product out of the door for an audience to start using and then iterate upon.
“Winners Ship”
This is what I keep hearing like a broken record from people who know what it takes to make it work online. Are you worried about having all the features your clients might ever want? You are going about it completely wrong, what you should be doing is focusing on key features that work – and work really well. Beyond adding clutter and delaying your launch, feature bloat can actually detract from whatever primary pain point your service is supposed to alleviate.
Pick the top 3 or so features that are core to your service working and make sure that the value of each feature is incredibly clear so that a user has no doubts at all as to WHY your service exists in the first place. If a customer can’t quickly identify the value in your service then all is lost anyway.
Link > Plan
So if you axe the business plan and try to not over think your new service, how are you supposed to go out and try to acquire funding for your start-up? Y Combinator jokingly says that they value a company by “adding 500k in value for each engineer and subtracting 250k for each MBA” because investors today want to see progress on an idea, not just a bunch of words around how good an idea might be. So what do investors care about these days instead of just a business plan? A link to a (mostly) working product that has a little bit of traction in the marketplace. The cost barrier to entry for a new web service has been lowered to much that investors need to see this level of success before investing because they have the luxury of being more picky.
Twitter has been telling developers for months to stop “filling holes” in their product and start innovating. Pretty big words coming from a company who is now reaping the benefits of 3rd party development efforts and plagued by downtime.
There is an interesting difference between filling holes and innovation is often the application of the product or service. For instance, the very public issues with the iPhone 4 (which I now own) are ‘magically’ solved by the Apple produced bumper case. The fact that the product solves an issue that shouldn’t even be there in the first place rubs me the wrong way.
Build, Build, Build
In contrast though, there are some real opportunities in similar market categories. For instance I have a burning desire to buy a case for the iPhone 4 that is equipped with a threaded hole compatible with tripod stands.
I also know that I can’t be the only one who has this need because the picture quality on the new handset is equal to a flip cam and mid-level point and shoot camera. So why is there no product on the market? Time & Demand.
Time after a product launch is logical, and eventually goes away. But what about demand? I mentioned that there must be some level of demand for this based on quality, audience and usage. However gauging actual demand for a product is a daunting task and products that don’t fill holes cone with an added level of risk.
So is your product or service filling holes or innovating? If it’s filling holes, how can you more clearly define your value proposition?
By the I wrote this entire post on my new iPhone 
