Go Outside. (Or, “5 People Who Get It”)
Demetri Martin once said (and still says), “I want to make a jigsaw puzzle with 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says: Go outside.
As designers and developers, we spend way too much time on the internet. We get inspiration from the internet, we get ideas from the internet, we learn from the internet, then we take all of that and stick it back on the internet with a new twist.
Which creates a problem.
What about the normal people?
Web 2.0 has been around for quite a while now, and as far as I can tell the only people that care about it are people who work on the web. The vast majority of the world, the normal public, don’t know and don’t care.
And why should they?
The vast majority of Web 2.0 sites and applications aren’t for them. Del.icio.us is great if you have a million bookmarks, but most people don’t. Digg is great if you love reading articles than bashing whoever wrote them, but most people don’t have that kind of time.
A few, however, have reached the general public and greatly benefited from it: MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, and Newsvine. Scrivs already mentioned these 5 as part of his Top 10 Web 2.0 Winners, but I’d like to take a closer look at what made them winners and how they reach for a further audience than a bunch of geeks.
5 People Who “Get It.”
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MySpace — Yes, the code is the very opposite of poetry. Yes, the design makes you want to pull your eyes out. But, you can’t ignore over 100 million accounts.
So what’s the appeal? It sure isn’t nice design+AJAX, as many 2.0 startups would like to think.
They were able to target a specific human desire: People want to connect with friends and network with people. Its success has absolutely nothing to do with script.aculo.us effects, AJAX, or Ruby on Rails. Would a better use of technology improve MySpace? You bet. But that’s not why people use it.
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Flickr — On the completely opposite side of the technology spectrum, we have Flickr. Beautiful interface, extensive use of AJAX, and friendly copyrighting. But unless you’re reading the API documentations, they never mention this.
What they do mention is how you can use their service to share your photos with friends, how you can easily organize your photos for future use, how you can show off your favorite shots to the rest of the world, and how you can find and network with other photographers. That’s what draws people.
Does technology help this? Of course. But ideas like these don’t just come from staring at a computer screen all day throwing code together, they come from thinking about people and what they need.
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YouTube — Recently partnering with NBC, CBS, and having been all over the news due to the lonelygirl15 videos, YouTube has obviously hit mainstream.
What exactly did they do?
For one, they took something that’s already popular offline–TV–and put it on the web in a way that’s accessible to normal people. They allowed people to upload and share their own films in ways that normally would not be possible and created an environment that allows people to explore new comedians, artists, or even watch the latest Pepsi commercial.
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WordPress.com — WordPress.com would seem like it simply took something already common on the web (blogging) and fixed it up a little bit. And in a way, they did.
What makes it better then?
They took the power of something that can be fairly complicated to a non-developer (blogging) and gave it to normal people. In 3 easy steps, anybody can be published online.
Three steps! And honestly, who doesn’t want to be published?
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Newsvine — Newsvine is still fairly new, but I think Mike hit the nail on the head with this one. Actually, I think he explains why Newsvine “gets it” better than I can, so I’ll just quote him on it:
But the fact of the matter is that getting 200,000 early adopter tech-saavy, tag-saavy people using the site on a daily basis is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is improving the overall news-consuming and news-producing experience for your mom, your dad, and the hundreds of millions of people in the world who think sites like USAToday.com are the best they can hope for. When you spent a lot of time on blogs, in your RSS reader, or on popular tech sites like Slashdot, you forget how large of a percentage of the world is not half as tech saavy as you.
….
A large mission of Newsvine is to make terms like “RSS” and “OPML” disappear while allowing their benefits to to remain. By “disappear”, I don’t mean “go away”. We have plenty of feeds on the Vine. What I mean is, you should be able to get the functionality of RSS without necessarily being exposed to it.
In Closing…
To reach the masses, we need to think like the masses.
If you find yourself writing press releases that include words like “Web 2.0,” “social networking,” or “AJAX,” you’d better stop and think about whether you actually have anything worth writing a press release about.
Go outside, interact with real people, and never, under any circumstances, buy a 40,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. 
Free People Search PeekYou is the smartest way to find people online
Good post!!!!!
I must say I have really got enthused about ajax and racked my brain trying to find a place to use it, you know, 90% of what it does people don’t care about.
Its still deep in geek territory and may take years to reach the popular fringes…
Your lightbox isn’t sitting well with your crazy flash-fontastic-paragraph headers. If you’re interested, here’s the fix:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/printthread.php?t=158317
Great article by the way!
@abcd: Thanks. I think when AJAX is used correctly, people will appreciate it, they just don’t know what it is that they’re appreciating.
@Teej: Yeah, I was actually going to fix it last night but ran out of time.
Teej: Go outside and play
All mediums have their loyal hardcore and fickle mainstream. Your assumption is everyone wants to reach the masses.
Should we get rid of indie film or music because it doesn’t appeal to the mainstream?
Theres always been alot of rubbish out there but alot of gems too. At the end of the day it should always be about your intended audience and nothing more.
The masses are rarely on the bleeding edge and someone has to explore the frontier.
@itsnotyouitsme: That’s not my assuption at all. I use many of the for-geek services myself, and have even worked on a few (I do write on this blog, do I not? :)).
But in the long run, if the web is going to really go anywhere and if Web 2.0 is going to stick around, somebody’s gotta start thinking about the billions upon billions of people who don’t know what AJAX is.
There are many thinking about the masses (read: thinking about the money to be made by thinking about the masses).
The more legal appeals of the Internet have always been around communication and social interaction from email to instant messaging to blogging. That said giving people what they want isn’t simple; most people don’t have the faintest idea of what they want until they see it/lose it.
I too believe there is alot of navel gazing but my point is that its not limited to just this medium and it is often this inward focus that can produce the interesting and inspired, especially when compared to money-oriented-focus-group exploitation.
If you are trying to do something mainstream then yes get out there and make sure you know your audience and what you are doing, don’t just trust other internet idols because heads are up arses.
For the rest of you.. continue gazing.
I’ve rambled on.. needed coffee.
What I am trying to say is that simply aiming at the mainstream or expanding influences doesn’t mean things will getting any better. The Internet has always had a greater proportion of rubbish to good; all that would happen is the type of rubbish would change not the amount.
The Mass appeal is not the best judge of anything, otherwise we’d all surely believe CSI was the pinnacle of Television.
Great post! I Think i know what you mean :), AJAX is really a bombed word, we shouldn’t be care of it.
If it a good site/design, we shouldn’t think about AJAX like it is the site.
AJAX is just a way to accomplish our mission in site programming/design.
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