A Process for Web Application Development

A friend and I were sitting at lunch one day discussing web application development. He was talking about the models that a number of these “fresh ideas” start with, “it needs to make money”. His notion was that this is the wrong approach. His point was that you should build an application that you would want to use, and then let your users drive a number of your features. You can find his post at Offbrand Turnips. What I believe is that his fundamental idea is right.

So many new ventures fall into the trap of wanting to make money or be the next big social thing or get into advertising that they forget to produce a quality product. As my friend says, “Most of the new wave of Web 2.0 apps are just social media spinoffs waiting to be bought out rather than building apps…” What is the point of making an application that doesn’t work. Sure any press is “good” press, but what about the users that expect your product to work? Thus, the idea is that while you need to make sure that you have a sound business idea, don’t jump the gun on wanting to make a profit or blowing your cash on marketing gimmicks. Make sure that you have a good sound product first. Make sure that your application can stand on two feet before sending it off to “fight the Persians”.

So how does one, or a small team, do this? Easy. Prototype your product. Put it into a closed alpha/beta. Generate feedback. Rework the application. Expand the beta or even do an open beta. More feedback. Rework once again. Then launch. By this point you have accomplished a couple of things. You’ve delved into viral marketing, you have some branding, and you have a userbase. If people come back for your expanded beta then you have a pretty good idea that your product has something to it. If not, time to hit the whiteboard.

This is the way I look at it. We developers view software development from a couple of perspectives. There is first the waterfall school of thought and then the agile school of thought. I’m a fan of agility. Thus, I feel it’s appropriate for many parts of a company, including product launches. If you look at the steps above as sprints then you involve people in fast paced ever changing iterations where they feel that their contributions are being taken seriously. When that happens, people will stick around to see what the next chosen feature is that will be released. Your clients, aka users, will be able to tell you what they like and dislike about how you do things. And, by working in these sprints they will see results almost immediately.

So, by the end of this post my goal was to point out that monetizing your product is not the most important thing when creating a web application. Making sure it works and that it is something you’d like to use is equally, if not more, important. Without the product, you get to monetize nothing. And, paying huge advertizing campaigns can be a waste with the social media market. Thus, closed betas are likely more productive in attracting the “easly-adopter” crowd. Once you have users and some feedback you can rollout your pay-for products/features and begin to pull in some revenue.

Yahoo! Recreating the Wheel Yet Again…Or Are They?

So today I saw an article titled “Building a Social Network from Within: Yahoo!“. This interested me as it is one of the things I’m involved with on a day-to-day basis. So I started reading the article and I saw this:

“Basically, “Y!Open” will allow users to have a social profile page and integrate all Yahoo! services as well as customize the page by adding applications, thus giving users an experience similar to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. It will enable users to find and interact with each other in an easier manner.”

Why Yahoo! feels this is a good idea is beyond me. They are in essence taking parts of Facebook, MySpace, and Okurt, and combining them while then calling it something fresh and new. I understand that they have many applications and users. But social networking is not just about having applications. If you look at the top used social networking sites, the thing that sets them apart is their ease of use and ease of connection. Meaning, the user experience is top notch. The reason facebook is so popular is because you connect with friends and then you have a feed of information streaming to you about all of your friends. This provides some basic instant updates about your friends so that individuals feel as though they are staying in touch with what is going on in their friends lives. Yahoo! does not feel that they are recreating the wheel. This gem comes from one of their architects.

“There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo!, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo! more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.”

I’m hardpressed to see how this makes any difference in whether they are recreating the wheel.

The thing that comes to my mind immediately is that they are looking for any way to keep users on their site; using it longer and exposing them to more content…and by content I of course mean advertising. What I see happening from this is that Yahoo! will gain from this move. While it’s generally really bad practice to recreate the wheel and go over everything once more, have to regenerate lists of friends and put up pictures, bio information, etc., I think that Yahoo! stands to gain a good deal of popularity from this.

The reason Yahoo! stands to gain is because they already have a very large user base. They have the branding done and using the Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo! they are leveraging the press the take the mass media for a ride. Now Yahoo! has become a front runner. Not only that, but their ad reach is second only to AOL. Plus, the promise coming from Yahoo! is that they are going to redevelop the back-end and front-end code so that it works better together. To me this sounds like a big plus for the user. The user should see some speed increases and experience changes. Hopefully, Yahoo will take a hard look at it’s UI libraries and revamp the code therein. Plus it appears that they are going to look at the little developers too, but I’ll have to see this to believe it. So far Google is the only company that really does that with Facebook and MySpace being somewhere behind them.
I guess that this is really only something that time will be able to tell but I believe that Yahoo! may be able to pull something off and it could kick Google’s attempt to the curb.