Webolio: My own views on the web

Tens if not hundreds of web services appear on the net every given day. Some of them do get the attention they deserve, yet a lot of them don’t. Now every service is different and causes of failure vary accordingly of course. Having tested many of today’s web2.0 services, I can confidently say that most of these services don’t fail because of a lack of functionality, but mainly because they fail to respect a set of basic guidelines that are often overlooked:

. A solid “raison d’etre”: the most obvious, yet the most important. Is there a market for your service? Does it solve at least one problem right and better than other services? Did you talk about your web service to friends and acquaintances with the same problem? Did they show vivid interest in your idea? Your online service really has to have a strong basic reason to exist.

. Easy (or no) registration. I think this is a fairly well understood practice nowadays, but there are still some services out there that ask you for your birth date and phone #. Yeah, yeah, sure you have to know your audience, but that’s something that can happen when you have reached the 100,000 user mark, and when your service has become so viral that people are willing to sacrifice a few minutes to have their account/page. Better yet, you can always organize surveys in exchange for some incentive when you need that data. And believe me that will dramatically reduce the bias of your data, since those users will be much less prone to entering fake information. If anything, users should be able to use your service without registering.

. Easy use cases: You have, on average, about 20 to 30 seconds to capture user’s attention. Most users will get bored (and probably never come back again) if they aren’t impressed in that short amount of time. Moreover, if they’re using another similar service, they would at least want the same level of simplicity and a more user-friendly environment. Not functionality, but user friendliness. Extra functionality is good but that’s currency you will use to build user loyalty, which by definition comes with time. Bottom line, you have a very short amount of time to make a good impression and it has to be Good! You don’t have a second chance. Keep things simple and you’ll be amazed by the results.

. “Light” home pages / landing pages: don’t overload the initial page that a potential user will first use on your site; although bandwidth nowadays is not a problem for most internet users and hosting is cheaper than ever, still it is always a plus if your page loads quickly.

. Professional web interface: brand your pages well. Everything on the web has to do with design and layout, therefore, a visually pleasing interface is a must. That should not go against simplicity and loading speed though. Hire the right designer(s) to get this piece done if you don’t have the right skills. This is an area where you cannot afford to be cheap.

. Nicely trap all errors: In case your service is still beta and a bug appears in your application, graciously let the user know that an unexpected error occurred and that the development team will promptly look into it. Surprisingly enough, experience taught me that even the most average users have an idea of what a bug is and are forgiving in this respect. They will try again later provided they are treated with respect. And by respect, I mean they are not shown some cryptic message that even developers would have a hard time deciphering. Also make sure all these errors are properly logged and sent to the development team ASAP.

. Release gradually: Gradually unveiling your product to the outside world guarantees that you solve problems that may arise on a smaller scale, and also refine your product as you go with users’ feedback in mind. First you start with a private beta, where you use a handful of users to test your product (these are people you generally know fairly well- some of them might be members of your the team) . You use their feedback to get your product a bit more robust, then you release a public beta and test your product on a larger scale. Once you reach the right level of confidence about your product and add some of the requested features that your design team has overlooked, you can release it the public. This approach will almost never fail unless your product has really no reason to exist.

I did come across it a couple of times before, but I never thought I was ever gonna need it this bad until last night;  I was quietly working on this project of mine which has a CORBA component. Being an absolute beginner in the field (though I did some RMI in the past ..far past) I kept on jumping from one page to the other looking for a solution to my headaches..memory management in corba sure is not a piece of cake. Anyways, short of solution and after a couple of posts to some forums that yielded no answers, I could not wait anymore and decided to get this book on CORBA and C++ which is considered by many as The book for serious corba programmers. Then I stumbled upon Safari…for $39.99 a month, you get access to the entire O’Reilly collection of books for geeks

I eventually managed to solve my problem quicker than I initially expected. Book navigation is a breeze, plus you get relevant suggestions to other chapters in related books as you page through the book.

I might have waited a couple more days for someone to get back to me on those forums, or just continued playing around with keywords on google hoping that I find a post by someone who has had a similar problem AND who has solved it AND published the solution..but that would have been a drag.

Though not a big fan of reading stuff online, I think this kind of service complemented with a good search service like that of google book search has a bright future.

Bottom line, not everything is on line…  I definitely think making books available on line is something extremely useful, now the biz model around it is yet to be tuned. 40 bucks /month is still a lot of money, I think.

Happy to see that plum is opening soon to public. (At least that’s what’s said on their home page). That’s one service I’m really looking forward to using. I’ve pre-signed up for an account about 6 months ago, but I’m still waiting for that reminder to tell me the service is out… I gotta say the long wait sort of discouraged me from checking back every week or two like I used to do before. You know when you get all hyped up for something, then the interest wines down as the wait lingers and lingers… I guess I’m not the only one feeling that way, check out alexa’s statistics [ http://www.alexaholic.com/plum.com ] to see that the number of hits has been dropping quite strongly in the past few months..

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this delay will affect in any shape or form the popularity of the service, or how well it’ll do soon after the public launch… I’m no marketing or web trends guru… all I’m saying is that a lot of potential users might not even look back on Plum again (even after being reminded)… and all the pre-marketing effort (a demo conference presentation, a techcrunch article…) haven’t quite achieved the expected results.

Plum, for those who never heard of it before, was introduced last year at the demo conference, it’s an online social bookmarking service that lets you bookmark, share all your files and finds (not only URLs). Even stuff on your desktop might be shared, merged in a blog, sent to friends, etc… One of the cool features I like about it is the easiness with which you can drag and drop from your desktop to your plum account.. 

Well, as of this writing, I still haven’t seen tested Plum. But I’m definitely going to…when it’s launched… Only not with the same eagerness.

Did it ever occur to anyone, how the guy behind tinyURL might make a living out of his service. The idea is cool, the service’s been around for quite some time now (though I have only heard about it about a year ago), but could there possibly be a way to monetize the service besides the ads that I believe are only viewed by first timers. The service gets apparently a lot of hits according to alexa.

On a different note, I think having a short URL without a hint on where it might redirect you is a little un-neat and sort of diminishes the user friendliness of urls… Instead I easily see TinyURL suggesting relevant keywords instead of a random string…these keywords could also bear the name of the website …

As a future improvement, TinyURL could also give away some sort of plugin to be installed on the web server the url orginates from (for those who might be interested in offering the service to their users). The plugin would allow users to copy a meaningful short form of the URL directly on that web server. Having the domain name sort of puts the URL in a context at least…

 Just a rambling of course!