What makes a good web application?
I have seen many newbie web applications makers, including myself in the past ;), that believe their idea for a new web application is good just because it will have a “smart use” of new technologies like AJAX once was.
But the sad truth is that technical capabilities will never be, just by themselves, the base for a new del.icio.us or Basecamp.
What you must look for instead, is to create value for your users. Period.
This is nothing new. You can pick any book on business or entrepreneurship and that’s one of the first things it will say. Unfortunately a lot of amateur web applications are created by programmers alone, or people who don’t have any kind of internet business experience, that appreciate a lot more technical wizardry over real usefulness because technology delights them. Don’t get me wrong: I love technology, but I know that it’s a mean, not an end.
To have a chance of creating a valuable web application you first have to know exactly what is valuable in a web application. I made this question to myself before and I want to share with you what I got:
Good web apps…
- make money for their users.
- are 10x better while being 10x cheaper
- are useful from the first day without needing 1M of other users
- solve a problem that is not solved, or not solved satisfactorily nor entirely, by competitors
- make their user’s life/job easier
As you saw, it has nothing to do with technical capabilities. It’s about what can the user get out from it :).
So if you want to create a web application you must be obsessed with giving value to your future users from day 0. Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us creator, was obsessed with providing something that was useful for his users even when there were no other users, and thanks to that he was able to turn his web app into a business that was acquired by Yahoo for several millions of dollars. Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to make a good search engine absolutely centered on providing the best search results instead of being a portal with search, news and gossip, and now they are the billionaires founders of Google. As you can see they fulfilled at least 4 points of the list so it will be worth the effort and time trying to do it in your future web app ;).
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