As someone who relatively recently began to read Tech Crunch (in June), I’ve been especially peeved by a common thread in posts: Will X be the new Y?
I’d like to apologize in advance for this post being much more broad and less deep than my recent posts. I’d like to cover a lot of ground and do some venting.
A recent example: Is Favorit a Digg killer?
I’d like to propose a simple test. It’s subjective, but it’s a way to look at web sites and the features they are based around and determine what will be around in five years.The question: Is this a product, or is this a feature?
As a technology, for instance, Google is a product. As a complex web site with tons of features, Facebook is a product.
As a web site based around one feature and one feature only, Digg is not a product. Digg is a feature.The underlying question is, how easy is it to implement this functionality into another web site? And I think, in the case of Digg, the answer is “very easy.” Couple this with their total inability to “cross the chasm,” so to speak, and you have a perfect recipe for a web site that models what could become a very popular feature… in other web sites.
Back to the TC article. To answer the question, Fav.or.it, despite a pretty clever name/domain name match and good features, is not a Digg killer. There is no, and there can never be, a Digg killer that focuses on one feature, because at any point any other major destination site could build the exact same feature and render Digg, Fav.or.it, and any similar site obsolete.
Because of this, Digg will be forced to simply make sure to shore up its base - kind of like how Fark and Slashdot know their audience and don’t really try to expand beyond simply finding more people who are just like their existing audience and making sure they’re happy.
To expand on the product/feature question, TechCrunch tends to post about new web sites that are merely cool features that have stupidly been build to look like products. One great example is a web site (won’t plug it by mentioning the name and too lazy to go back and search) that offers an avatar-building feature meant to be applied to multiple other web sites.
The problem is that avatar-building is a feature that other web sites that could use it already have… and in the rare case that they don’t or it isn’t very good, it’s fairly easy to improve it and make sure people don’t click away to a third party web site for their avatar building needs.
This also connects back to Facebook apps (yet again), and reinforces Valleywag’s constant assertion that Facebook can easily build pretty much any feature they want, so there’s no point making certain kinds of Facebook Applications that will just be undercut a week after they’re released. If you can’t monetize or sell it in the short period of time it will take for Facebook’s smart programmers and designers to copy it (provided they want to), you’re out of luck.
Did you spot the most important part of that last paragraph? It was provided they want to.
So when you’re talking with your friends/associates/partners about what to build for your next amazing Web 2.0 adventure, will you build a product, or merely a feature disguised as a product?
Aaron Nemoyten is a feature cleverly disguised as a product masquerading as a recent college grad living in Berkeley and working on a Facebook application.
