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Awkwardly unspellable names, really good ideas

Fred Oliveira on December 7, 2005

That’s how Lee Gomes addresses the fact that some services on the Web 2.0 space have the worst names ever. Well, that’s a given fact, but that’s not why we’re here (maybe names should be the topic of a future post). We’re here because in the same article he features Techcrunch and Memeorandum.

Techcrunch, that I’ve done work on and that Mike’s leading superbly, has grown into something really intense and is (in my opinion) possibly the top blog on the “Web 2.0″. Memeorandum is, and I’ve said this many many times, a great website powered by a great technology (even though it does need a proper layout).

Where am I going with this post? To the point that the small ideas, the niche, is what you should covet for. Techcrunch only profiles companies in the 2.0 space, and it works (extremely well). Memeorandum “only” grabs the top news from blogs into a consise webpage, and it works (extremely well too). Simplicity is the key to their success. The simple idea and the passion to make it perfect made the two websites what they are today, and will continue to drive them in the future.

What’s your simple idea? Less is more. Sometimes, many times, it’s way more.


Comments on this post

Sean O'Hagan

Simple idea: in-page bookmarking by highlighting a sentence in web page. Keep track of your long readings from any browser using dogear (http://www.eigology.com/dogear sign up for an alpha account).

Frank Gruber

Isn’t “Less Is More” a book by Jason Jennings? Nonetheless, I could not agree with you more. Simplicity seems to be a key to success these days. Less noise, more signal.

Easton Ellsworth

I recently discovered Writely, an online content creation tool that just about replaces big, expensive hard drive-dwellers like Microsoft Word. It’s certainly a “less is more” product - well, service - for me. Writely has changed the way I manage my school, work and personal documents. And it’s not too hard to spell. Don’t worry, no one paid me to say this :).

Petr Vlk

Is that acceptable to not agree here?

My opinion is, that simple niche ideas is great way to start, polishing your simple thing to perfection is good way to keep spinning, listening to users, bugfixing.

But the listening part is actually tricky one - users are gonna be requesting more features, additional stuff which would make their experience better, easier, something that would make them want to use your simple service more. And there it is - your simple idea will snowball in massive, complex thing, that’s hard to describe with three words, and you’re facing a fact that it’s no longer quite intuitive, it has more and more flaws in workflow logic, usability issues, etc.

So, i personaly think, having a simple idea is good way to start something, but would recommend to think about the complex future of your project from the very begining. Start with a notepad, but have plan how to integrate calendar and to-do list later. Or is it actually better to have good complex idea, and just start by implementing it in pieces? I’d say the later.

Something to say?