Less May Be More

When it comes to Web 2.0, provinding less features to a broader audience may actually be more valuable...

Less May Be More

I had the pleasure yesterday of brainstorming a bit with Stan and Todd over at Lijit. Lijit is in the business of helping you find information by leveraging the concept of inherent authority on the web. Authority is one of those things that is as complicated to determine in the real world (who do you call when you need to know about the club scene in Pensicola?) as it is in the online world (does anything Niel Robertson say about SAP or Oracle really have any credibility? – well that’s an easy one). Lijit has some pretty interesting ideas in the works and I encourage you to download their wijit (cute) now and keep a close watch on what they will be launching next year.

That set aside for a second (I have some other broader thoughts on authority coming soon) I wanted to recant a tangential but very interesting conversation we had which got me to thinking about the evolution of flash widgets. I was talking about a new web site, ZingFu, that has a little widget where you can upload a picture and underlay it behind a graphic background such as a frame or silly picture. It’s sort of the flash equivalent of going to the local fair and putting your face on the cover of a novelty newspaper. I would assume that 99% of these things end up on MySpace, Facebook, somebody’s family Christmas card, or whatever site people use to send novelty newspaper pictures of themselves to each other.

Stan rightly pointed out that we’ve been able to do this forever with Photoshop but ZingFu took a small piece of functionality, automated it and put a web based interface on it. I noted that this was like taking 0.1% of the functionality of Photoshop and making it understandable by 99.9% of the population. How many people do you think could make the following picture in Photoshop (I grabbed a friend of mine’s picture from MySpace and used ZingFu to whip the final up in about 5 seconds): 

What’s interesting is that much of what web 2.0 application are about is really just this simple concept. Let’s take a few more examples. Recently I met with Daniel Newman and Austin Gayer who started PocketFuzz. These guys take the equivalent of $1000 dollars worth of Ableton or ProTools software or the complexity of Audacity and replicate one small (but very valuable) piece of it for the end user in flash. Using PocketFuzz, you can upload any song (that you have copyright to, ahem!!) and pick out a small sample from it, hit a button, pay 2 bucks on Paypall and have it appear on your cell phone as a polyphonic ringtone. It takes less than 30 seconds and they already have license for tons of songs you’d know and love. If you don’t like the sample you get from Jamster – just make your own using their flash widget. Anyone can do it literally in under a minute. Tres cool guys!

Another example would be ClickCaster (full disclosure: I am on the board.)  ClickCaster has a web-based podcast recorder and site where anyone can set up a podcast channel. What used to take $10,000 dollars, a sound studio, some serious software and an army of web programmers to produce a site can now be done in 30 seconds with ClickCaster. These examples are everywhere, you don’t have to look far.

Taking a look at the bigger picture, it’s not just media applications that this phenomenon is happening with. Blogging is a good example. Five years ago, as Stan points out in an article similar to this one about our conversation, anyone with some HTML knowledge, some money, some hosting, and a lot of time could have built and managed a Typepad-like blog. But that was about 0.1% of the population at best. What Typepad, et al did was to take 0.1% of the functionality of custom HTML programming and make it dead easy for someone’s grandmother to start a blog. This in fact points at the inversion that is fueling the Web 2.0 application revolution: where 0.1% of the population knew how to use 99.9% of the functionality (say all the ins and out of HTML 4.01 or Photoshop or Audacity) now 99.9% of the population can use 0.1% of the functionality, especially if repackaged into an online interface.

What might this tell us about the future? Well, if we’re picking apart applications 0.1% at a time, my first guess is that we’re going to see a lot more of these .0.1% applications popping up. Most of them are two guys and a dog in some proverbial garage hoping to hit the MySpace lottery and have everyone need their thneed. Second it tells us that other formats which are the results of content reformatting (such as photo and audio editing) or content repackaging (such as video mashups, newspapers, magazines, and compilation CDs) will fall prey to this phenomenon as well. And note what is happening with boring old things like book publishing through companies like iUniverse and Blurb, or the Gawkers of the world who are chipping away at magazine packaging (albeit by force fitting a blog format into a magazine like readership.) And lastly (but never least here on Parallax), enterprise always follows consumer to some extent (see the Enterprise 2.0 debate). To some extent you can argue that the emerging Office 2.0 applications are following exactly same 0.1/99.9% premise, just slightly recast into the business applications world. The likes of Writely, Zoho, Thumbstacks, etc.. provide the basic features from MS Office for a broad population of users. While this functionality is not about abstracting the technical complexity of Photoshop or Audacity, it is about hiding the feature complexity of an application like Excel. Last time I checked, you could not do a mail merge in Writely. However, if it does not already exist, my bet is that this 0.1/99.9 trend continues and by the end of 2007 we’ll all be going to MailMergr.com for our mail merging needs.

Comments

[Ed]

Nice one. I like your abstraction, in particular the notion that enterprise follows consumer. Could the reverse also be true? Could enterprise apps and architectures, in particular storage, archiving and the like, migrate to consumers? How else to store, backup, archive, etc, etc, all those pictures of the dog and grandma and home movies of you taking a baby bath? Not to mention all the music you ripped in college and your Will Farrell DVD collection?

[Thomas Otter]

Niel,
Trackback seems not to be tracking back.
Your post got me thinking on the simplicity theme.

http://theotherthomasotter.wordpress.com/2006/12/13/simplicity-is-exactly-what/

[Niel Robertson]

Thanks for the kind words folks. I found another one today:

http://www.simpleseating.com

[Rahul Pathak]

Niel,

As always you're up to interesting stuff. Enjoy reading your blog.

Cheers,

Rahul

[Thomas Otter]

Niel
I do enjoy your posts. I wish you did more of them.