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.
You may or may not have heard that Twitter is rolling out their own official “Tweet” button for content sites, among others, to use for their audience to publish their content into the Twitter stream. A move like this from Twitter is important because it directly effects the many companies that publish Retweet type buttons to blogs etc in order to track and aggregate trending articles across a variety of niches. TweetMeme, arguably the largest of these aggregators isn’t being completely left out in the cold though since Twitter has paid to use some of TweetMeme’s backend code to facilitate this new feature.
Brand or Platform?
The most interesting part of this new product to me however, is figuring out whether or not this product is more about platform or brand control. The investors in Twitter have been saying for over a year that Twitter application developers need to “stop filling holes”. By that they are referring to the innovation coming out of many developer hot beds to fix the obvious gaps within the Twitter ecosystem. While you might think Twitter would appreciate all this innovation from its development community that made Twitter so popular to start with, but in fact Twitter has been gradually tearing apart the development community in order to deliver an end to end experience that consumers love.
This is in part motivated by control influences, but I feel that this is a big play by Twitter to control their brand across the web. If you have been noticing or not, Twitter has been implementing a refreshed sense of design across every product within their portfolio to deliver a clean and simple experience regardless of what platform you are using. This new button is no different in that the design, delivery and aggregration is now all under the control of Twitter itself instead of a 3rd party.
What are your thoughts? Do you think Twitter is being fair with gradually consuming each outlet of their data to control the user experience, or should 3rd parties be encouraged to compete against Twitter itself to add features and usability?
We all know that the notion of a brand is enticing, and that people are willing to pay more for a Coke simply because it says “Coke” on the side and not just a random house brand. We also know that when Coke brings out a new product, if we liked the original we are much more likely to try the new product.. emotionally we are tempted to dive head first into products, services, locations etc we wouldn’t have otherwise because of how a brand makes us feel.
What does a brand mean when it is a person though? Does a celebrity have brand value that is nearly instantaneous? The answer is HELL YES they do. For an example look at the Twitter account started by LeBron James.. in a short 2 hour period after sending his first tweet that simply announced he was on Twitter.. he has a staggering 127,225 followers (and counting!!). So what is this brand equity worth? Well if you read this article you might believe that each follower is worth $6.19; and that value multiplied by his follower base adds up to nearly $800,000 in only 2 HOURS.
According to Ad Age, each person who ‘Likes’ a Facebook page is worth $3.60/year which is probably pretty fair if you were comparing the cost of traditional media to the reach of social media. If you think that this size of audience simply can’t be worth this much money, keep in mind that Jeremy Schoemaker (@shoemoney) had roughly 90k followers and PROFITED $50k in about 7 months time on Twitter.. the value is real and so are the paychecks.
How are you building your brand and finding your audience? It is likely worth much more than you think right now.
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 
Yesterday I talked about the number of “moving parts” that a business may have can be a huge turn off to investors. So what exactly does it mean to have a lot of moving parts in your business? Well to put it simply, moving parts can be related to a chain; this is because each “part” of your business that is required in order to create revenue or work, then each chance you have for less than expected results to occur. When this happens, much like a chain the weakest link can be your undoing and ultimately lead to business failure.
Business is a lot like logical reasoning, the most simplistic answer is usually the right one so do your best to create simplistic value that everyone can understand. For example, instead of trying to be “The new Digg + Yahoo – Flickr with Facebook Intergration” just try to do one simple thing, but do it EXTREMELY well. Examples of this streamlined business example could be things such as Groupon. This start-up company does one thing (creates group initiated coupons), but does it so well that is essentially printing money for its investors that is has snatched up a staggering 1.35 BILLION dollar valuation only months after launch. It is now on a war path to acquire other businesses and disrupt the entire coupon market.
Keep in mind that Twitter recently received a 1 Billion dollar valuation after being in business since 2006, and while the idea behind Twitter is simple, the revenue model is still being defined. Given that, a key to success for a simple business is a model where only a few functions take place, but they make sense financially for everyone involved. If you were to list all the features of your tech related start-up, how long would that feature list be? 10? 20? 50? History has shown us that business with less than 10, and closer to 5 are the ones who have the highest chances to succeed.
