Netocracy was a term invented by the editorial board of the American technology magazine Wired in the early 1990s. A play on the words internet and aristocracy, netocracy refers to a perceived global upper-class that bases its power on a technological advantage and networking skills, in comparison to what is portrayed as a bourgeoisie of a gradually diminishing importance.
This link has been bookmarked by 48 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Jun 2008, by Terry Jones.
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30 Oct 08
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15 Oct 08
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Features, I’ve recently come to realize, can be obstacles. Problems. The more powerful an application is, the more specialized it is, and thus with increased power its intended audience shrinks, and ironically, it becomes more, not less, vulnerable to competition.
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Add Sticky NoteSpecialization, traditionally, is a good thing. But, as Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist argue in their Netocracy, those who overspecialize will not do very well in the age of the Internet. Want to succeed? Be influential in as many important networks as possible, they argue.
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Even in this fast moving age specialization can be ok if you’re a person, but what if you’re a service, catering to thousands or millions of people? Sure, if the conditions around you don’t change much, you can satisfy the needs of a certain group very well, but if you exist in a fluid, everchanging medium such as the Internet, where everything shrinks and expands and overlaps all the time, the power that you offer might work against you in the end.
From this notion a new paradigm has arisen. Less is more. Simplicity is power. Create a solid foundation, and let others build a thousand different houses, each catering to a different need, and you’ll never go out of fashion. Simplicity is the key that unlocks the web. Bear with me.
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The Twitter Dilemma
I, as many other authors, have bashed my head against the wall thinking: how is it possible that Twitter remains popular despite their frequent technical problems and the fact that there are other similar services out there which offer more? It is an unprecedented situation: normally, a service with solid competition which has the advantage of not having technical difficulties that prevent their user base from using the service (whether or not Twitter’s competition is better with this regard is debatable, but based on current data anything seems to be more reliable than Twitter) would have been dead and buried ages ago. Twitter, however, endures. Why?
The answer is simple: Twitter belongs to a new breed of services, perhaps accidentally discovered, that win by doing less, not more. It’s a foundation upon which hundreds of new applications were built, yet, in itself, it is little more than an API for a simple one-to-many short message broadcast system. I, myself, have thrown my hands up in frustration and tried to find an alternative I can stick with - Pownce, Plurk, and countless others. Unfortunately, it seems, all these services are too good to be a viable alternative.
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How can this be? The web, most experts agree, is a platform - a platform for any service that has to do with information of any kind. Unfortunately for developers, as far as platforms go, it’s a very undefined one; there is no universal API for the Internet. Furthermore, the damn thing changes all the time. Web portals were once huge; now they seem clumsy and cluttered, because many new applications have created more elegant ways to start your online day. If you want to develop an application for the Internet, you must first find a way to channel and organize the information that’ll flow through; if you jump on the wrong train here in the very beginning, your application might be doomed.
Some smart developers have thus began to understand that it’s better to build a very simple service that caters to a very basic need, and slap an API on top, than to try and create a specific, complex service that does a lot right from the start. The first type of service, if executed well, has shown to be very resilient: once it breaks the initial attention barrier, competing against it is practically impossible.
By catering to a basic need, creating a service that satisfies it in a simple way and opening it up through an API, you’ve unlocked, or perhaps deciphered, a small part of the web as a platform. You’ve created a mini platform which everyone is going to use because it’s, simply put, good enough. As long as people have a need to send short messages to other people from wherever they are, Twitter is going to be a highly sought for commodity. Unless someone else makes it even more simple.
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Less Is More
Add a couple of features to Twitter and it’s Wordpress. Why is a Wordpress minus a couple of features so popular? You have to stop thinking in the traditional way and adopt the new “less is more” philosophy to understand that.
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By far the most popular application that thrives from being simpler than its competitors is Google Search. Remember the way search engines looked before Google? Yahoo, with its unbelievably crowded homepage at the time of Google’s advent was probably the worst offender, but Lycos and others were no better. Google Search was very, very good at what it did, and that’s the reason it became so popular, but even beyond the inner workings of its algorithm it was very difficult to compete with it because the site consisted of almost nothing, sans a text form, a logo and some text. How do you top that? Apparently, no one has come up with the answer to that one, yet.
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Another such application is FriendFeed. Having come to the game of lifestream aggregators late, it swept everyone off their feet and competitors like Profilactic and Second Brain have received very little press ever since. This is because, again, it does very little: it takes data from your various social profiles, creates a stream out of it and lets users comment and “like” single items. In fact, it’s eerily similar to Twitter, and now - just like in Twitter’s case - applications that bring new functionality to FriendFeed, like NoiseRiver, have started to appear. Would FriendFeed have done better if they provided this exact functionality from the start? I’m betting no, and here’s why.
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Distribution Vs. Complexity
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Once upon a time, if you wanted to create a successful application, one of the keys to success was to offer a lot of features your competitors don’t have. Adobe’s Photoshop is one such application. If you need to edit some photos, it’s the best, period, because it has every tool you could possibly need.
But this is the disconnected world we’re talking about. On the web, things change. It’s not only important what you can do; you also want to be able to do it from wherever you want; you want to plug in into other services, you want to work together with other people. Furthermore - and this goes even more for mobile applications and services - on the Internet, complexity is looked down upon. People don’t want big applications that can do everything; they want simple, widgety applications that cater to a specific service.
Partly, this is because complexity makes web applications slow and clumsy. Partly, it is because the attention span of an average Internet user has shortened, and partly, it is because his willingness to learn the nuts and bolts of a complex application has diminished. Most importantly, it is because the Internet constantly changes and it’s really hard to build something big and complex on such shaky grounds.
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Is it thus smart to create a lot of small apps, each aimed at a different niche? It’s definitely a sound approach. But I think an even better one is to find the lowest common denominator, an underlying basic need that connects all these various niches, cater to that, open it up and let mashups do the rest. This way, people can choose exactly which features they want to use, and your application becomes a fluid, modular service that can be as simple or as complex as the use wants it to be.
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The Magic Formula
Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.
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“how is it possible that Twitter remains popular despite their frequent technical problems and the fact that there are other similar services out there which offer more?”
A possible answer might be that if one day Scobbles or other “twitter-popular” guy/girl left Twitter it’s possible that many of us would follow him/her where he goes for various reasons. Coz in many cases you dont stay at Twitter because of its simplicity or functionality but because there are some people out there that you follow and interact.
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I’m having a tough time separating out ‘web service’ vs ‘online software’ here. This theory applies to a web service like Twitter, for sure, but not as cleanly to online software like Flickr.
What made Flickr so popular isn’t the fact that it is simple to upload photos, but that they added in a whole set of additional functions that made it possible to create all sorts of communities around the photos. If you want to make Flickr simple, you’d remove those extra features and reduce Flickr to a web service to store and display photos.
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I think with social networks, people will go to the site where their friends are at. What exactly starts the trend (say, from MySpace to Facebook), well, social media experts are getting paid a lot to try to figure that one out.
There have been a lot of historical studies that examine cultural fads/trends (and I think Twitter qualifies as one) and there are so many different factors that can influence their development–economic, social, political, technological influences as well as generational and gender factors. And sometimes, the popularity of a phenomena is simply illogical. Why did Crocs appear out of nowhere and suddenly be ubiquitous footwear for children? There probably was a business plan but sometimes it’s just the Zeitgeist, a fortuitous blend of timing and luck.
But as a person who doesn’t work in technology, I appreciated your analysis. There is a whole simplicity cultural movement that runs counter to the more consumption-driven trends.
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Excellent post. To use the cliched quote: “Lack of features can be a feature”
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There is another factor - Twitter was the first. Once enough people got in, the ’social inertia’ factor prevents them from moving to another application. That’s why Qwerty is more popular than Dvorak - and why windows is still popular than Linux.
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They survive for one simple reason… they’ve achieved a network effect. Like ebay, once formidable network effects are achieved you can $hit on your users and they won’t leave.
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I disagree with your intro paragraph, and I think it contradicts much of what you say later on. Yes, additional features can be bad, but not because they increase specialization. It’s just the opposite: having a complex web app with tons of features decreases specialization (and thus appeal).
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Looking at your examples of Twitter and Google back in the day, it seems that’s how it works.
You offer some interesting opinions on why simple applications tend to succeed, but I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that users’ “willingness to learn the nuts and bolts of a complex application has diminished.” I’m not sure that it’s diminished, but simply that we’re catering to a new crowd now. Then years ago, how many people spent multiple hours a day browsing the internet? Hardly anyone compared to the world of today — probably only your most techsavvy friends. I’d argue that these are the people who are and have always been willing to learn how to get the most out of any complex app, but that these new casual users are not. And since a social networks is only valuable when it has lots of users, it’s best to cater to these casual people as well by focusing on simplicity.
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The majority will only do what’s simple, and so the bigger, better, more complex apps will never really have enough people to succeed.
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The other I’d say that turns people off about big, do-everything applications is overlap. Nobody really wants to use a service whose features they already make use of at other locations, even if this service provides some different features as well. For example, I don’t know a soul who makes regular use of Facebook chat, because everyone already uses GTalk/Chat, AIM, and other services.
With that said, features are not a bad thing: they make good services better and more powerful, and I doubt there exists someone who’d refuse to use a service because it’s better and more powerful than it otherwise could be. What’s important is being smart in implementing these features, so they don’t make your sight overly complex and turn-off casual users. Equally important is releasing the features at a gradual and easily-manageable pace. Once you have millions of users, it’s okay to pile on the features and improvements — people won’t like them to begin with, but if these features are actually worthwhile then your users will adjust. Hopefully at this point your user-based is being propelled by virtually-unstoppable viral growth, so you app is valuable enough that new users are willing to take the time to learn about your features.
Facebook is a perfect example of this style of development in action.
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There’s a question here as to cause and effect. You are postulating that developers add too many features which leads to failure. But often, the problem is that the one core feature that the product was launched with flubbed, then the developers tried to make up for that by adding on more features. Ex post, it looks like the simple systems succeed and the complicated ones fail. But often the simple ones manage to avoid getting complicated because they succeed early and the developers are smart enough to know not to mess with success. So the lesson may be a bit different: launch with something simple and if it doesn’t work, don’t lard it up; trash it and start over.
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100% in total agreement. The need for simplicity also reflects the maturity of the market (ironically). The new users are by their nature more technical, more interested in pushing the limits of the product/service. When the market becomes more mainstream, you find that the majority of users just want to use the core functionality. The introduction of whiz-bang bells and whistles just overwhelms the user and adds confusion to the interface. Two examples are… Tivo vs the the VCR/DVD controllers of the past. And the Flip videorecorder vs digital camcorders.
Because Qlubb’s market comprises the mainstream audience, we made a VERY conscious decision to take out functionality rather than add functionality. But it has not been easy; it’s too easy to fall into the feature-race trap.
But as with all markets, a big developing market will need to differentiate among the various user classes – one size does not fit all. And one of those markets will comprise the basic, mainstream user who wants simplicity.
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13 Oct 08
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with increased power its intended audience shrinks
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those who overspecialize will not do very well
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Simplicity is power
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Unless someone else makes it even more simple
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the site consisted of almost nothing
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wherever you want
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complexity makes web applications slow and clumsy
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choose exactly which features they want to use
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open the application up via an API
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20 Aug 08
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with increased power its intended audience shrinks
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those who overspecialize will not do very well
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Simplicity is power
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Unless someone else makes it even more simple
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the site consisted of almost nothing
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wherever you want
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complexity makes web applications slow and clumsy
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choose exactly which features they want to use
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open the application up via an API
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04 Aug 08
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03 Aug 08
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29 Jul 08
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25 Jul 08
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By catering to a basic need, creating a service that satisfies it in a simple way and opening it up through an API, you’ve unlocked, or perhaps deciphered, a small part of the web as a platform.
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Add a couple of features to Twitter and it’s Wordpress. Why is a Wordpress minus a couple of features so popular?
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even better one is to find the lowest common denominator, an underlying basic need that connects all these various niches, cater to that, open it up and let mashups do the rest.
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23 Jul 08
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09 Jul 08
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05 Jul 08
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michelemmartinThe Magic Formula
Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.web2.0 trends strategy socialnetworking socialmedia blogthis
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04 Jul 08
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03 Jul 08
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02 Jul 08
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Scott ConverseFeatures, I've recently come to realize, can be obstacles. Problems. The more powerful an application is, the more specialized it is, and thus with
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01 Jul 08
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30 Jun 08
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Alan Levinea new paradigm has arisen. Less is more. Simplicity is power. Create a solid foundation, and let others build a thousand different houses, each catering to a different need, and you’ll never go out of fashion. Simplicity is the key that unlocks the web.
communication design future socialnetworking trends web2.0 hznmc hz08 hzau08
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29 Jun 08
Ludwig GatzkePeople don’t want big applications that can do everything; they want simple, widgety applications that cater to a specific service.
web2.0 trends future socialmedia strategy simple simplicity usability imp
Public Stiky Notes
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