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Delicious.com is for normal people
Everyone who uses the Internet uses bookmarks. Anyone who uses the bookmaking features of a web browser has a massive list of unorganized sites. Show any normal person Delicious.com and watch their eyes widen. You don’t need to explain what it is, just start using it and they will ask you. Explain it and they will want it. They won’t believe that such a great service exists and nobody told them.
Delicious is for everyone. Bookmarking is something that everyone already does, it’s easy to use, and it’s immediately useful.
The reason that Delicious didn’t make it to normal people is because Yahoo never packaged it in a way that a normal person could understand. Go to Delicious.com and try to determine what’s going; it’s impossible. You would never think that Delicious is a bookmarking service for YOU. It looks like a site to find new interesting sites, an activity that is popular among geeks.
The entire product category is called Social Bookmaking. There is nothing less social than bookmarking a site for YOUR future reference. The concept doesn’t make sense to a normal person. Delicious bookmarks are public by default, which at first would be weird for a normal person. The trick is to lead with the value proposition of a personal, organized bookmaking system, available anywhere. Describing it as a social bookmarking tool leads with the one piece of Delicious that they are least likely to be comfortable with.
I have said before that the formula for creating an application for normal people is to let a technology marinate for 2 years and then dumb it down 100%. The bookmarking features of Delicious are pretty simple. In fact, they are even simpler than Google’s Bookmaking service. Now they need to dumb down how they present themselves and how to get started. Stop confusing people with a site discovery application, stop pushing the social features, and focus on creating a site with a clear value proposition: A personal, organized, online bookmaking tool so bookmarks aren’t trapped in the browser.
Could someone else swoop in with a simpler product to capture the market? Maybe, but I doubt it. You still need the installed base of geeks who have vetted the service to tell their friends about it. Despite the fact that they have dropped the ball for years now, because of their userbase, Delicious is still in the best position to bring online bookmaking to the masses.
Delicious is Yahoo’s biggest failure. I don’t know how a company full of smart people could have overlooked their most valuable acquisition. Then again, that’s the story of Yahoo. Acquiring companies and then failing to leverage them.
The semantic web is the holy grail in the search engine wars. How do you beat Google? Have thousands of people describe web pages instead of scanning keywords, put those sites into categories, and point to which is the most popular. Yahoo has this with Delicious and it should be their top priority to integrate that rich data set into search engine results. Their second priority should be to broaden the demographic of the userbase so more pages in different subject areas are tagged. I find myself using Delicious as a search engine quite often. The interface is too confusing for your average person, but the results are excellent.
I’m not saying that integration would be easy, and they did make an attempt at the beginning of the year. I’m sure there are many reasons why this is much more difficult than it seems, and a challenge that the Delicious product team has likely rammed their head into the wall to figure out. Despite this, it is the single most valuable asset that Yahoo holds that Google does not. If I were them, I would be focusing on that instead of a merger with AOL.
Twitter Isn’t for Normal People
For the Internet community, Twitter has become the standard tool to share information about our near instantaneous industry. It is the newest app that we have taken on to beta test its potential to cross-over into the mainstream.
I can comfortably ask anyone at a tech event what their Twitter name is without having to worry if they have an account. I often use this as a yardstick for adoption. When you can make a similar assumption with normal people, like you can with E-mail, Aim, and Facebook, you have a smash hit.
This is why getting normal people to adopt Twitter will be difficult:
1. “Following” is what creepy stalkers do. Normal people don’t follow, they have friends.
2. The concept of online social capital is meaningless to them. They don’t care about their online presence because nobody in their industry or social-circle cares. Their only concern is that embarrassing pictures don’t show up when they are Googled. A massive shift in perspective needs to occur before regular people start to adopt tools that can help them cultivate that online identity as opposed to hiding it. We have an incentive to raise our online social capital, which is something the mass-market doesn’t understand or care about.
3. Normal people don’t want you to know “what they’re doing”. Talk to any attractive girl and she’ll tell you about one or two guys that can’t take a hint. They don’t want that person to be able to follow them and they don’t want to tell that person what they’re doing.
4. Getting people a regular person to use Twitter literally requires force. If it wasn’t for the web-community forcing their non-tech friends to use it, I don’t think it would be growing as fast as it is. In fact, Nate Westheimer and Justine Ezarik forced me to use it at SXSW because I thought it was pointless. Honestly, I agreed because I thought Justine was cute and was shocked that an Internet app had attracted what appeared to be a normal girl to use it. (I didn’t know she was a video blogger at the time). This type of evnagilism is a testimate to the service and community that Twitter built, but it’s only a sustainable strategy for growth if it can cross-over to regular people, and not just from geek to geek.
Building Web Apps For Normal People
If your reading this blog, chances are you don’t fall under my classification of normal. You’re an Internet person, a geek, part of the web2.0 crowd; a SMALL group of tech savvy early adopters that act as the guinea pigs for the newest stuff on the Internet. I am tired of hearing about new things being built by Internet people for Internet people. Its ultimately necessary, but successfully building something for normal people is infinitely more interesting
Most web apps are built for the tech crowd because it’s easy, relatively speaking. There is a better chance that they will try it, and if they like it, there is a built in promotional infrastructure as they all rush to tell each other. If you’re part of this crowd, you probably have a sense of what they’ll like, what would be useful, what features the application needs, and how it should look. You have friends in this community so you can figure out how best to harness that social network. Your friends will use your web app and tell everyone else that they should too.
That’s not to say that creating an app for this market is easy, it’s not. However, if you are going to create a web app, this is the easiest market to create it for.
The hardest market to create something for is normal people. They don’t want it and they won’t try it. They’ll wait for a geekier friend to tell them that it’s absolutely essential, and then they’ll wait some more until everyone they know looks at them with shock when they say they don’t use it. If it’s not dead simple and immediately apparent why it will be a major benefit to them, they’ll never touch it again. Period.
The normal market is the one that matters. If your app can’t crossover, it is unlikely that it has the power to scale into a successful business.
So how do we reach normal people? This seems to be the formula:
Take a product that is massively popular with geeks, let it marinate for a year or two, and dumb it down 100%. Then you might have something that normal people will use.
If its social in nature, you better understand how normal people are social. If you’re a geek this may be a shortcoming. Normal people aren’t open, they don’t want everything about them public, and they want exclusivity within their network. Their social dynamic is fundamentally different.
A social app for normal people needs to mirror a real life social network and the interactions need to mirror real life interactions.
Who does it:
AIM is the ultimate app for normal people. The user has friends and they talk to them in real time. It’s the perfect real-life mirror, which is why it is one of the most popular web apps ever adopted by normal people.
Facebook is the obvious example. It mirrored the real life social network of colleges, and then slowly grew up with it’s crowd of early adopters. In Facebook you have friends, and friends have access to more information about you, just like in real life. One of the most popular features is the wall, which is analogous to the whiteboards that all college students have on their door.
After Gamil, I quickly run out of other examples because normal people don’t use all of the stuff we have built over the last few years. Comment if you can think of examples of web applications that normal people use.