5 Ways To Make Me Laugh At Your Web 2.0 Company
Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 by MR
In this fast-paced and synergistic world, buzzwords get the play. Non-technical people start companies and press ridiculous deadlines to their engineers, Web 1.0 burnouts start new companies that are just rehashes of the idea they couldn’t make work in 1999, and the technology you use is more important than the value you provide. Hell, VCs are getting sick of their clients making it big, so they’re starting half-assed “Web 2.0″ companies of their own which are off the map 1 month after beta.
In all this craziness I have to wonder what some people are thinking. I can’t tell you how many ugly designs and worthless “applications” I’ve seen come across my browser pixels the past 5 months, but what I can divulge is the precise 5-step plan for making me laugh at you and your company. Here we go:
- 1. Tout your technologies like you know WTF they are.
This one is for all the CEOs who can’t touch type, you know who you are. I can’t tell you how embarrassingly funny it is to read blog entries or About pages where technological terms are thrown around and mushed up like cow shit in a tornado. Oh, so you use Ruby on Rails and Ajax? Sweet! Who developed the RoR framework? Is it a framework or a programming language? What’s Ajax used for, slidey effects? Nope, guess again. Go take this quiz and see how well you do, and while you’re at it, stop telling your engineers when your beta release date is before you have the specs worked out, because you’re an idiot and they’re quitting next week.
- 2. Have no shame in pitching your company.
I propose a new drinking game: every time you see somebody slide a sidearmed company pitch into a Techcrunch comment, you must take a shot. It usually sounds like, “Wow that’s a great idea, in fact, we’ve been working on LINK HERE for a few months and it incorporates that functionality, and more!” Just today I’ve seen some examples, but I won’t link to you because they’re too blatant. Okay, I lied.
- 3. Your market only includes people who Flickr and del.icio.us all day.
Here’s a no-brainer that so many people can’t seem to wrap their medulas around — the concept that people like you and I (geeks, tech industry folk) are a spawning field of gilded flowers ready to be plucked, a veritable platinum watch of a market segment. If your goal as a company is to only attract the technorati and Valley cognescenti then I’d love to see your projections of a break even point. People who immediately signup for your beta web app or read about your company via Techcrunch RSS on their Blackberry makeup approximately 0.0005% of the U.S. population as a whole, so stop kidding yourself. You can literally sneeze and have 10,000 people from the Valley signup for a beta invite, but they’re the easiest group to snag. Try landing another million people out there if you’re touting technologies instead of provided value, and once you’re done with that I’ve got some online-ordered dog food to sell ya.
- 4. Comments are off on your blog.
What’s the point of having a company weblog if comments are turned off? Blogs are great for two-way communication, so stop using them as press release regurgitators. If you want user feedback then be ready to accept it, for good or for bad.
- 5. Spend money on advertising instead of design.
As a designer and also as a human being forced to look at the design of your company’s site or web app, do me a favor and please make sure it doesn’t look like shit. It doesn’t have to be fancy and sleek, just make it usable and clean and I promise I won’t blog about your company. Don’t launch with this.
Now that you know which 5 things to avoid, here’s 1 thing you should actually do: provide value. Provide me added value in my everyday life, make something easier/faster/better. Don’t hope that I use your fluff simply because I like added fluff in my life because it doesn’t work like that. Solve an actual problem, don’t create a solution without anything out there to solve.
Reader Comments
20 Responses to “5 Ways To Make Me Laugh At Your Web 2.0 Company”
Thanks for the refreshing post. Some of this web2.0 stuff is looking like dotcom2.0. Sure, the first wave of sites and services were great, but after a while we’re going to start sifting through more and more garbage me-too sites.
June 28th, 2006 at 2:19 am
Thank you for making a point of bringing the element of REALITY 2.0 into the world everybody else calls 2.0. Jargon, buzzwords, comments, blogs, buzz, hype, networking, and whatever else you want to call it all have the same problem. No matter what you create these days, whether it’s diamonds or gold, if it doesn’t solve pains then it’s worth nothing. Thanks for laying it out and I appreciate the idea of bringing everybody back to the real world of business.
June 28th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Much more pernicious than full-fledged companies are the computer consultants that capitalize on peoples’ ignorance of Open Source offerings and lock people into their little proprietary open source rewrites (e.g. php to asp). These are probably more common and definitely more hidden. Lack of transparency being at the heart of their business plan. A good argument for open source , open standards intermediaries/consultants/evangelists.
June 28th, 2006 at 2:47 am
Mike,
You were the one guy who commented on the Peopleaggregator review via TechCrunch that cut through the crap. That TechCrunch review read like buzzword laden garbage and I had the same reaction as you. I then clicked on your name to find your blog. This post above, which was probably inspired by the exact same reaction I had to the TechCrunch article was right on the money.
Bravo my friend - I think I’ll have to read your blog more often - I like how you think.
June 28th, 2006 at 3:11 am
Hey! I think that example you cited for #5 mushed all those Photoshop a Web 2.0 “look” tips into a single website… Only, it doesn’t actually look like they cared to follow through all the steps? I guess the beta deadline was just around the corner?
Great write-up btw. Isn’t it great when “Web 2.0″ companies come out of the gates sprinting only to burn out after the first corner? And by first corner, I’m referring to the first month that you stated above. Pity. So many great ideas. Ergh not. When are we going to get a Web 2.0 company to dish something different? Something that doesn’t simply build on top of another service claiming that it’s better than the three others that do the same thing?
June 28th, 2006 at 3:18 am
Wow, It really is a good source for me. While we are going toward to web 2.0 gen we have to realize these things.
I want to visit here more often.
June 28th, 2006 at 9:26 am
Hrm, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having comments off on your blog. I like how Jeremy and Andy say it best. Actually, I generally encourage my clients to disable comments until two things: a) they have gotten more used to blogging b) they are actually opening up comments with a purpose.
It should never be just assumed that you’re looking for feedback. Rather you should have the default as disabled and enable them after careful consideration. Everything done should have a logical and reasoned purpose, not just a “Hey, everybody else is doing it.” Far too much pointlessness is embraced through comment fields.
June 28th, 2006 at 9:59 am
Edward, I like this quote from Jeremy:
“But comments can add value. They are particularly useful on sites that have a narrow, focused scope. The focused nature of the subject matter ensures that visitors share a common interest — otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.”
When I mentioned company’s not opening up comments on their blogs, I feel they’re doing themselves a disservice because 1) their company is obviously about their company or their industry (focused scope), and 2) two-way communication is vital to building solid foundations of trust with your customers. I subscribe to the theory that a weblog post is half about the entry itself and half about the comments, because the readers can take the conversation in a totally new and unexpected direction which can add a lot of value to the overall experience. Yes problems with spam and trolls are real, but those can be alleviated through comment moderation so they’re not a real excuse.
Comments should be open if you’re open to what others have to say, and if you’re not, then what’s the point of using a blog.
June 28th, 2006 at 10:06 am
excellent post. success seems simple — provide distinctive value and they will come.
June 28th, 2006 at 11:34 am
yes. Peopleaggregator.com is the epitome of a web 2.0 disaster.
June 28th, 2006 at 11:47 am
the name of the game is indeed value added…
technologies matter very little without a purposes, and the purpose is to make our life simpler, more enjoyable, easier, more to the point - whatever - but to affect in a positive manner our daily interactions, in this case with information…
June 28th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
The thing that needs to be noted is that this argument generally just doesn’t allow for the possibility of no comments in the first place, if you really look at it. It’s a presumptuous, fundamentalist opinion(or theory, to use your word) for something that doesn’t have fundamentals, though if we wanted to get really nitpicky, it could be argued that blogging existed before comments.
“A blog post is half the post, half the comments” ignores the option altogether. “Readers taking the conversation…” assumes a conversation[This is straight out of Cluetrain, isn't it?]. “Blogs are great for two-way communication,” sure. They’re also great for respond-on-your-own-site communication. “If you want user feedback…” Well, you provided the “if” yourself in that one, never mind that feedback can come through many different channels. Blog comments are just a particularly(some would say overly) convenient one. Feedback != comments.
Commenting has several problems, and it’s ultimately each publisher’s choice whether to deal with them and how. Spam is just the easy to cite(and arguably fix, compared to the others).
June 28th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Here’s one more way to make ME laugh at a web 2.0 company: get really wrapped up in your marketing metaphor (probably determined by the URL you could get) and force it on your users at every turn.
For example, if your site is “Aq.uari.um” be sure to refer to your users as “Sealife,” make them click on “My Fishbowl” instead of “My Account,” and name the company blog “Fish Flakes” or “Little Plastic Castle.”
I’ve got a contract right now with a startup going down this path… I’d cut my rate in half if they would just use “My Account.”
June 28th, 2006 at 6:09 pm
One word… “You rule!”. Oops… it’s 2 words… You cannot be truer than this! In fact, i’ll add your RSS in my web site [LINK HERE] ( just kidding ;) )
June 28th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
Dude,
You don’t wanna wrap your medulla around anything… you’re cerebral cortex and/or frontal lobe maybe, but not the medulla… just sayin’.
June 28th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Nice article. But I think this happens in all sorts of fields. Just that we do not tend to focus so much on them.
July 3rd, 2006 at 3:14 am
Good stuff, as usual.
Our kind need to speak out more and stick together.
July 6th, 2006 at 9:09 am
Nice stuff, thanks for the great post.
July 7th, 2006 at 5:33 pm
Hey Mike - I just came across this post and I thought you might like this list Eric Weaver over at Brand Dialogue compiled back in June “Web 2.0 company names that hurt” - http://www.branddialogue.com/2006/06/16/names-that-hurt/. Enjoy.
July 19th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Mike: Now if we can just fix the marketing people who profit from writing crap about crap, we will be in fine shape.
August 1st, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Add Your Comment
Comments are moderated because spam's not tolerated.
