Dan Blank: Publishing, Innovation & the Web

Trends to Conquer the Online World

Sep 28th, 2006 by Dan Blank

Some interesting insights from the recent Future of Web Apps Conference 2006. AU Interactive gives there recap from the conference titled “10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website.” Included on the list are:

Make the website easy to use. Then make it easier.
Obsess about your copy and how you communicate to your visitors.
The future is not in owning data. Expose every axis of your data for people to mash up.
Test, test, test.
Release features early and often.
Passion for what you are doing and creating is paramount.
Don’t reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.
Anticipate growth and plan for problems ahead of time.
Pay attention to new formats and tools on the Web.
Be smart about your use of user generated content.

Allen from CenterNetworks gives some more in depth coverage of the conference, including notes on each speaker. It still gets me, every time I read the backstory of Digg.com:

Held interviews for many companies and Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Friendster combined together to come up with the idea for Digg
$2,000 to start, using a developer on elance for $10/hr.
Open source architecture
Basic design
$99 a month hosting

Now, compare that to their current stats:

Tom Coates from Yahoo! presented about Social Change on the Web. He reviewed the three aspects of social value:

An individual contributed should get value from their contribution (individual motives)
These contributions should provide value to their peers as well(social value)
The organization that hosts the service should derive aggregate value and be able to expose this back to the users (business value)

Carl Sjogreen from Google reviewed the Google Calendar project, and shared two insights that show why Google’s products are usually very well targeted: a focus on customer needs. During production, his team:

There is much more information in these recaps, along with another recap from Jeremiah: Day 1 and Day 2.