I’m not one to believe that we’re in a Bubble 2.0 or anything like that (aren’t we always bubbular?), but here are a few ideas about why some of the web apps out there fail.

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
   Following up on my Del.icio.us Lesson post, this is a critical reason why web apps fail. Many apps focus on being the new social killer-app when, in general, people don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing, and will only use software that benefits them personally at every step. You could call this selfishness or laziness, but I would call it optimization. For example, we simply don’t have time to tag things for tagging sake. Instead, we might tag things if we think that it will help us in the future, but adding tags to an app does not a solution make.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
   This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
   So much focus is on aggregation right now that it is easy to overlook the happiness of users. Many services, such as Technorati Tags or Google Sitemaps, exist solely to make the aggregators happy, and not the user themselves. They sell themselves on incentives that sound like what a movie agent might say to an aspiring actor: “We’ll make you famous, kid. You’ll get found!”. First of all, this is all talk directed at the developer, who is not the user. That’s a huge tip-off right there. Second of all, if the aggregators had their way everyone would be using these formats, which simply dilutes the value for everyone else and only serves to lock the site into some weird relationship with the aggregator. This is not how it should be. That’s why I stopped using those two services ages ago. Instead, focus on adding features that make the user happy, and when that happens everyone else can be happy, too.
4. They sell it the wrong way.
   Web apps are not about Ajax, tags, Web 2.0, SOA, REST, or any other technology. Why do so many startups and web pundits focus on these terms when talking about a product? To get a better frame of reference, talk about how your app empowers users to improve their life. Think about how the long-term successful companies sell their stuff. They relate it to some bigger idea. So, for example, Nike has always embraced the hero archetype. They might talk about how great their foam arch is, but that’s always secondary to how buying their shoes makes you a hero. Their commercials are often amateur runners out running in the rain. How cool is that? Way cooler than double-density shock foam. A good example of this in web apps is the messaging from 37signals. They’re not selling software, they’re selling rebellion.
5. Not in it for the long haul.
   If you build it, they will not come. There is too much competition right now, so another wiki-type application isn’t going to set the world on fire. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard about web apps that became successful only after they adapted to their user base over time (short periods of time, but over time nonetheless). Their initial effort didn’t work, or was too similar to another one, but they were in it for the long haul and they adapted to what their users wanted. Flickr is a great example of this. Flickr started out as a game called Game Neverending. That didn’t work, but their second attempt did. Many web app makers would never make it to the point of seeing the light (or admitting the failure).
6. They show too much of what’s going on, and get gamed.
   One of the big promises of aggregating the wisdom of crowds is building systems that use the input from huge user populations to come up with value. However, as people get used to how the wisdom is aggregated, they figure out how it all works, and the more public the mechanism for aggregation, the easier it is to figure out. That’s why gaming is such an issue with Digg. The voting on Digg is public, so you can see which items have the most votes before you submit your vote yourself. This goes against one of the principles of the Wisdom of Crowds, which states that in order to successfully harness it, each member of the crowd needs to be making an independent vote.
7. They don’t have an underlying business strategy of improving people’s lives.
   Most business strategy is about making money. However, this is a short term goal. If you focus only on ways to make money, then you’ll make decisions that in the short term seem good for the balance sheet but in the long term actually work against it. Take the case of LLBean. Where everyone else is trying to get away from call centers and move all of their customer interaction to a web site, LLBean actually allows you to talk to a human being almost instantaneously. Their phone number is easily found on their web site/app. This probably does cost them a lot more than if they had some contact forms or an instant chat room, but it sure does make it quick and easy to give them money. My sister worked at LLBean for a time, and I was always impressed by the way that they empowered her to handle customers. It probably cost them money in the short term, but people remember when you make their lives easier, not harder. Many companies, unfortunately, see the Web as a way to reduce direct communication with customers, when in reality it should cause an increase in communication if you’re successful.

Update: 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

While Del.icio.us rose to prominence, much was made of the ability to aggregate the tags that the service’s user population created. The resulting framework, called a folksonomy, promised to redefine web navigation. If users could tag their own bookmarks and navigate to them through a direct tag-based interface, then there was really no need for an overarching, expert-developed taxonomy. In addition, if Del.icio.us could aggregate the bookmarks over all users, they could come up with a folksonomy for everybody, based on how the total population actually valued and referred to the content.

One of the hardest problems in web design is to speak the user’s language. With folksonomies and tagging, the web site could be designed with, and evolved by, the user’s own words. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the vast majority of excited technologists (including me) forgot the original reason why people use and enjoy Del.icio.us. I call this reason the Del.icio.us Lesson, and I first posted about it last December in Learning more about Structured Blogging. Since then, that post has become the most referenced post on Bokardo. This post is an attempt to further illustrate the Del.icio.us Lesson.

Personal Value Precedes Network Value

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

As people use Del.icio.us more, and in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later. Tagging isn’t even the primary function of Del.icio.us. Most of the tagging done on Del.icio.us is done secondarily, and for personal use.

The social value of tags on Del.icio.us is only a happy side-effect. Even though most of the ink spilled about Del.icio.us is about the social value, it’s really not the reason why people use it.

Similar to Google aggregating links that were originally created for taking readers from one document to another, Del.icio.us can aggregate tags in order to find out how people value content. If 1,000 people save and tag the same bookmark, for example, that’s a good sign that they find value in it. But to think that people tag so that this information can be aggregated is to give people a trait of altruism they just don’t possess.

Blinded by the Aggregation Light

Unfortunately, the ability to aggregate has blinded many software developers to think that tags are a cure-all to the success of their software. Tags have almost become a requisite feature in new software. I’ve received many emails in which developers try to sell me on the merits of their brand-new software based mostly on the ability of potential users to tag things, as if users inherently enjoy tagging things as a matter of course. Real people, in contrast, tag for their own benefit. And they surely won’t tag if the incentive to do so isn’t clear.

Aggregation, in general, is probably more effective as a second-order feature of software. If we create features just to aggregate them, without providing users with tangible value first, then people simply won’t use the features. My guess is that aggregation technologies which prove most useful will be ones that are added to some activity that users have already started doing without the promise of any aggregation benefits.

Why Del.icio.us Tags aren’t like Meta Keywords

Shortly after Yahoo bought Flickr, Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Watch, was dubiously skeptical of tags. He compared them with the meta keyword tag, observing that meta keyword tags have failed miserably on the Web and aren’t recognized by major search engines. He was certainly right: meta keyword tags aren’t useful anymore.

However, Del.icio.us tags aren’t like meta keyword tags because of the Del.icio.us Lesson. Meta keyword tags provide no personal value whatsoever. All of their value is social. They’re for aggregation engines to find and tell other people about. In other words, they’re for getting attention only. Del.icio.us tags, on the other hand, provide personal value each time someone uses them to recall a bookmark.

Danny was right to be skeptical, though. Some tagging initiatives don’t seem to provide much personal value at all. On sites like Amazon and Technorati, who have their own versions of tags, it is not clear what personal value users are getting. On Amazon, we already have multiple wish lists for items we want to remember. On Technorati, the tags seem like a pure-play for aggregation benefit without any real benefits for users. Dave Sifry’s suggestion that “Many bloggers use this (Technorati’s) tagging capability to help get their content found by people who are searching for a particular topic” sounds an awful lot like the value promised by meta keywords. Going further, the Del.icio.us Lesson might help us parse Dave’s statistics, especially this one: 47% of blog posts have tags or categories associated with them. If the Del.icio.us Lesson is predictive, it would suggest that nearly all of that 47% would be categories that users are applying for their personal value on their blog, rather than tags applied for attention only. Any way to separate out those numbers, Dave?

Working toward Valuable Services

The level of innovation and discussion in and around tagging is phenomenal. There is increasing talk about tagging in intranets, there is Rashmi Sinha’s great piece on why tags are easier than categories, and there is even a Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006 this month. Tagging, it seems, has hit the big time. Everybody wants to know how and why tags work, and the best working example is the site that started it all: Del.icio.us.

Philipp Keller (who will be speaking about tags at WWW2006) in a post about how to spread the word on tagging, asks “is the tagging revolution stuck?“. This is a common question these days, as the number of services trying to leverage tagging skyrockets.

I say no, tagging isn’t stuck. Just don’t try and make it the primary thing to do. Instead, make sure personal value preceeds network value. Then you’ll have plenty to aggregate.

Additional Reading:

• Rashmi Sinha A social analysis of tagging (or how tagging transforms the solitary browsing experience into a social one)
• Dan Bricklin Systems without guilt where every contribution is appreciated
• Joshua Schachter Tagging Session at Carson Summit
• Dave Winer The utter futility of geekness
• Shelley Powers Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Cafe
• Delicious Stats

So why does Robert Scoble call it “THE PLACE to come to every day” and Richard MacManus call it the “brilliant new blog news service”?

Because it is more special than it appears. Blog.memeorandum is a blog aggregator that accurately shows what topics are coursing through the blog veins at any given moment, with the latest, most popular topics at the top. For example, the new blog search engine by Google was one of the hottest topics in the past week, garnering a spot high in the list and a large headline as a result. The bigger the topic, the bigger the headline.

What makes it special is that it is much more accurate than other aggregators. Hundreds of sites aggregate blog feeds, but few are able to glean what’s most relevant. Many are able to find the most popular topics of the moment, but most can’t get rid of the unpopular topics. The ability to show only what’s new and being talked about while hiding what’s not is the advantage that tech.memeorandum has. Its a single page of highly relevant information.

It’s a challenge being taken up by many developers. Technorati has its popular page. Icerocket has “Hot Topics” listed across the top of its results pages. Bloogz has it’s ranking page. Bloglines has it most popular links page. All of these services are trying to do the same thing: show what’s going on right now.

So why are developers focusing so much on aggregating? Why are they building search engines for blogs? Well, I think it’s because we’re living in an attention economy, and so optimizing our systems to provide people with the latest interesting news becomes an obvious way to get attention. Getting people’s attention is easiest when we can already see what many are paying attention to. If the high profile bloggers are paying attention to something, then everyone else probably will, too.

The Google Approach

It’s the Google approach. Make a service (probably a free one) that everyone wants to use, and you can then create a plethora of paid-for services around it that feed off its attention. It’s the old get ‘em in the door tactic. It’s what great salespeople have done since the dawn of commerce.

And in the commerce of Web 2.0, getting someone in the door is the major driver of success. Because the competition of everything on the Web is so fierce, and everyone wants our attention in every way, we’ll be much more likely to try a service or product from someone we know rather than someone we’ve never heard of before. That’s why Google is so powerful right now. Their Search is so great that we’re more than willing to give their other services a try. Sure, a competitor might have a better blog search tool, but now that Google has one I’m pretty confident that they’ll make that one the best, too. I have no switching costs this way, and that makes my life easier.

The Real Challenge: Filtering

The real challenge, and thus a crucial skill of Web 2.0, is filtering out noise. Finding just the right algorithm to parse through hundreds or thousands of feeds and decide what topics are really worth paying attention to is not easy. It’s like being in a stadium of screaming people and trying to figure out what conversations are the most important.

Tech.memeorandum takes a slightly different approach to filtering than sites like Technorati or Bloglines. Instead of trying to index anything and everything like those two do, tech.memeorandum starts with a relatively small set of bloggers and then branches out to other blogs only if they are linked to. This is a successful attempt, I think, at keeping down the noise. If you stick with popular bloggers, then you’ll catch most of what is important. Indeed, they often define what is important!

Just like the assault of copycats on Google’s Pagerank algorithm, there will be attempts at creating systems similar to tech.memeorandum. This is a matter of course, and a main theme running through Web 2.0. When someone comes up with a good filter, others quickly figure out how to emulate it.

Looked at in a slightly different way, Tech.memeorandum is a news recommendation system. It recommends what news to read. It is very similar to the stalwarts in the old media. The most important services there were the newspapers and the nightly news, because they recommended to us what we pay attention to (note that I’m using the past tense here). It’s hard to tell if tech.memeorandum will become a stalwart in the new media, but it sure has a good filtering algorithm at the moment. It makes great recommendations of what to read.

Recommendation Systems and Web 2.0

The other day I wrote about movie recommendation systems and didn’t really tie it in to Web 2.0 like I wanted to. So let me try and sum up here:

Recommendation systems are the end goal of Web 2.0. They are how Web 2.0 will change the daily lives of “normal” people. It’s fun and exciting to talk about RSS and REST and semantic markup, but what we’re really after isn’t technology, it’s utility. What we’re really after is being able to see the greatest movies of all time, listen to the best music out there, and hear the most important news without having to wade through all the junk to get to it. It’s the getting rid of stuff that makes recommendation systems valuable.

Of course, the Web as Platform doesn’t filter by itself. Simply having a bunch of content from which to draw doesn’t do that much for us other than provide an exciting opportunity. With no effort in filtering we’re left with simple aggregation blogs that copy everything, word-for-word, the wheat and the chaff. With more effort in filtering we have valuable filters like tech.memeorandum that can pinpoint the important content and hide the rest. That’s why filtering is way up high in the skillset of Web 2.0.

He answers the question: What’s the difference between a Wide Web Search and a Live Web Search?

The difference? Syndication. I wonder how long that distinction will last.

It’s not nagging me because it’s selfish. I’m not sure selfish is even the word, because it implies a choice of self over others. Instead, it’s more about tagging for personal use first, then letting systems aggregate those tags for community benefit. It’s nagging at me because I don’t know what to call it.

But I think that it is becoming more clear that this is important. Let’s take a look at three services that are supporting tagging in this way:

• Del.icio.us: people bookmark items for their own use and add optional tags. Those tags are then aggregated to show what is popular, what is seemingly related, and what is recommended.
• Flickr: people upload photos for their own use and can add optional tags. Others can tag them, too, which is interesting because it doesn’t seem like it’s for personal use…more to help describe the image for others. Flickr aggregates all this into features like clustering.
• Technorati Category Tags: people tag their own posts (by placing them into their blog software categories) for their own use. Technorati picks up on the tags and creates search results out of them. Note that this isn’t Technorati tags as embedded links, because those are not done for people’s own use.

The obvious difference between tags for your own use and tagging for other purposes is that people don’t spam themselves. If people are tagging for their own use, then the quality of the tagging tends to be higher and more accurate. In general, applying metadata (tags) for one’s own use is better than for describing it for others. Perhaps we’re just more honest with ourselves.

Jeff Jarvis has started another good conversation about tagging over at Buzzmachine. (He started another good conversation about tagging recently). He recently implementated his interpretation of “tags”, and that got him thinking about their value and purpose.

Jeff states several benefits for the use of tags, including two on search engine visibility:

• The tags should be useful in informing search (if you search for a word that happens to be a tag, you would want posts using that tag to have priority).
• I’ll bet you increase page views per visit because readers can find more on a topic that interests them.

About the same time Jeff was writing this I was writing a post comparing Del.icio.us and Technorati tagging. I pointed out that all value coming from Technorati tags comes through Technorati itself: if tags work then people find your page through one of Technorati tag pages. This is very similar to optimizing your pages for Google, except that most of the work you do optimizing for Google will help you out on other search engines, too. For example, if you write really clear page titles to help you gain pagerank in Google, you’ll also get better ranking in Yahoo!.

On the other hand, if you link to Technorati via a Technorati tag, it is doubtful that other blog search engines will support your link because they would be giving credence to a growing competitor.

Additionally, a one-sentence comment to my post caught my attention. Scott Rafer, president and CEO of Feedster (a blog search engine), tacked on to the conversation by pointing out that Technorati is effectively getting a huge SEO benefit by having people link to them for tagging purposes. So, for every Technorati tag that someone creates in their web site, they’re giving Technorati SEO benefit while lessening their own SEO benefit for other services. It appears that the initial benefit I thought I was getting from using Technorati tags wasn’t quite the benefit I thought.

Back to Jeff’s post. David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, makes Jeff happy by pointing out that Technorati is already indexing his posts by tag even though he hasn’t used Technorati tags. Apparently, Technorati indexes the categories supplied by various blog tools (it indexes my WordPress blog categories, for example). Before this comment by David, I didn’t know those were indexed. Sure enough, it’s explained right there in the tag help section. Now I wonder if other blog search engines index them.

Later, David Sifry reported on his own blog that 1/3 of all blogs indexed by Technorati were tagged. In the beginning of the post Sifry clearly includes “categories” (such as WordPress categories) in the numbers he cites, but doesn’t answer the question that immediately comes to mind, which was articulated by a commenter named Andrew, who asks: “Do you have any numbers on how much tagging is the recognition of category names as tags, and how much is ‘explicit tagging’?”. Obviously, this is an important number to know. If, say 95% of posts are using categories as opposed to tags, then that says a lot about the tagging landscape. Because of the way the post is written, though, and because David does not answer Andrew’s question, it seems like Technorati tags are growing at an amazing rate.

However, this may not be the case at all. It could be that Technorati tags are being used very little, and that categories are the primary source for the Technorati tag pages. If this is the case, there is very little incentive to use Technorati tags. And even if tags are being used as much or more than categories (highly unlikely) there is still no clear reason to continue using them instead of categories.

Additionally, in an update to his post Jeff Jarvis claims that his tags are “open” because they don’t address Technorati, and instead address his own site. This claim was disputed by Kevin Marks, another Technorati engineer. (Don’t you appreciate it when the people making the tools actually join the conversation?) Marks says that because they don’t address the Technorati tag set, which is “open” for anyone to address, they are closed. Presumably, any tag set would suffice to make them “open” in Marks’ definition of open. (As for me, I now have no idea what “open” means.)

Further confounding me was a comment left by Christina Wodtke. She suggested that the things that Jeff was calling tags were not tags at all, but were actually “keywords”. She made the smart point that they were being used in very nearly the same way that keywords have been used for years. As for tags, she likens them to graffiti, which is left by people who don’t own whatever it is they’re being applied to.

So now we return to the original question brought up at the beginning of my Del.icio.us and Technorati tag comparison post: who gets what benefit?. It really depends on who you ask…

This discussion is just the tip of the iceberg.

Think about this for a second. These companies are all testing the waters here in Web 2.0 world. They’re creating, maintaining, and optimizing their APIs for usefulness, while promoting developer adoption as fast as they can. Technorati is pushing tags, Flickr is pushing photo sharing, and Google is pushing maps. Developers, curious to know what they can create with these APIs, are making cool things such as Housingmaps.com and the Flickr tag browser.

The problem is that there has been no discussion about who can make money where. According to Boutelle, these companies don’t want you to make any money without talking to them first (which means they want some of it). This makes sense, of course, because that’s what the APIs are presumably being built for. So, anybody building remixed interaction interfaces ought to think twice about how they’re going to make money from it (if that is their intent).

Interestingly, not all companies ask for part of the pie in the same way. Amazon, for example, actually pays for developers to use their APIs by giving them referral fees for any products bought.

Another issue that Boutelle relates came from Paul Rademacher of Housingmaps. He pointed out that because remixers (those building interfaces atop of public APIs) don’t own the database, they compete on the functionality and utility of their interface only. This is a much more level playing field than if you owned the back end.

So, one lesson here is that even though these APIs are public, they’re not free, and it highlights further that a lot of business leverage in Web 2.0 is in the database, not the interface.

However, that’s not to say that for every useful interface paradigm we see, there won’t be a market there. For example, if a company comes up with the best real estate interface for Google Maps, say…Housingmaps…and they capture enough of the market before others can, they will begin to have leverage over other copycat interfaces simply because that’s what people use. Sure, they’ll pay royalties to Google, but the bigger they become the more leverage they have to negotiate with Google for future slices of the pie.

How do you know if a post is interesting or not? How do you know if people will respond to it? Comment on it? Start a conversation about it?

Simply put: I cannot tell when a post is interesting or not. I was thinking about this yesterday and I would estimate that the information that I post on my blog is about 10% of the total information that goes through my head that concerns technology. I would wager that most folks writing blogs face a similar challenge: which tidbits do I write about that could be part of an ongoing conversation?

The funny thing was that post that took me minutes to write, the pointer to Jeff’s web site, got about twice the traffic that the tagging post did. This surprised me a lot. I thought the opposite would happen. I thought Jeff’s site would see a little traffic from my pointer and that the tagging post would garner more attention. After all, I had spent a lot more time “thinking” about the tagging post than I did the other one. In fact, in conversations that I’ve had with other folks interesting in tagging the idea that I used in the tagging post has been a good conversation topic.

Shows what I know. However, there were several things that may have affected this.

Factors at play

• I posted the tagging article on a Wednesday, which usually is 4th in terms of traffic, after Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. (I posted the pointer post on Thursday).
• The pointer post included the word “Ajax”, which is very popular right now and was tagged as such by Technorati, where some of the traffic came from
• The original example Technorati tag I used on the tagging post was “technorati-tags”, which had few other posts. When I changed the tag to “technorati”, it got a brief amount of attention, but faded quickly. I presume that by that time it was too late to be seen on the tag set page on Technorati
• Maybe my writing on the pointer to Jeff’s site post was more interesting, and people responded to it better
• Maybe people don’t want to hear any contrary ideas about Technorati tagging
• Time of day is huge. If you miss the early window (East coasters initial check of the day), then you’ve lost out a bit

Over time, it will be interesting to see how each post continues to get/lose attention. I have a hunch that in the next few days things will even out better.