Measuring Ficlets for Greatness and Success

To conclude my latest Ficlets series, I'll look at Ficlets.com from the point of view of two different benchmarks: the characteristics of a great Web 2.0 application, and the requirements for a Web 2.0 application to succeed in the Web marketplace.

Site "greatness" and commercial success are not identical, of course. There will be many excellent sites that never become commercially successful. But if you don't have a great application, or platform, the chances of commercial success are virtually nil.

The "Great Web 2.0 Site" Test

For evaluating how Ficlets stacks up as a "great" Web 2.0 application (or site, whichever you prefer), I'll use Fred Wilson's "10 things I've learned from using Flickr," which he posted in his "The Seminal Web 2.0 Service" post in January. The "seminal Web 2.0" service he was talking about is Flickr, which, of course, is integrated into Ficlets.

So, let's see how well Ficlets matches up with Fred's characteristics of great Web 2.0 applications. The bracketed [yes] or [no] that precede each item are my rating of whether or not ficlets exhibits that characteristic:

1. [yes] Making online content default to public instead of private creates community
2. [yes] Every web service needs to have a profile for every user
3. [yes] Users should be encouraged to comment on other user's posts
4. [yes] Tagging content is better than foldering content and the tags should be public
5. [yes] Users should be encouraged to tag their content when it is posted to the service
6. [yes] Widgets should be used to make content available off of the service
7. [no] Content on the service should be "bloggable" with one click
8. [somewhat] Engagement metrics like comments, favorites, views, can and should be used to drive discovery (the most interesting algorithm)
9. [no] Geotagging is great but we've yet to see a great interface for geotagging
10. [no] Machine tagging (autotagging) is the next big thing in web 2.0

If you look at the pattern of [yes] and [no], what you see is that Ficlets.com, which is the product of just a few months of development by a small team, already has it "right" when it comes to almost all features that involve people's interactions with the site and with each other. The items Fred would consider "missing" are primarily programming tasks that can be added to the site without interfering with or undoing the features and design that's already in place. In other words, should they choose to do so, the Ficlets development team can easily enhance the site to accomplish everything on Fred's list -- nothing already there has to be "broken" to add the new features.

The "Successful Social App" Test

Stowe Boyd was recently at AOL, where he gave an abbreviated rendition of the "Building Social Applications" workshop he'll be presenting at the Web 2.0 Expo this coming Sunday. I found Stowe's discussion very enlightening, and I'm hoping to be able to chat with him sometime soon.

Stowe defines three key criteria that a social application must have in order to be a success. Success is defined as attracting users and, eventually, income that can sustain the cost of the site's infrastructure and its development team. That is, success means both that you have a great app and your app is the foundation of a viable business.

Stowe says that this kind of success depends on "Me, Mine, and Market." Let's see how Ficlets measures up here (using the same simple [yes] / [no] rating system):

1. [yes] you need to attract a "me" to your site based on something they are passionately intererested in
2. [yes] when people get to your site, they need to find a community of people who share the same interest, and a means to easily interact with the the people
3. [no] the site needs to provide a "market" where solutions to problems related to the area of interest can be obtained

The attraction for "me" with ficlets is writing: so many people want to write, wish they could be professional writers, or perhaps they just like writing as a hobby. That ficlets is a well-constructed community site is clear. But, does ficlets provide a marketplace for solving problems related to writing? Not yet, as far as I can tell. I believe some ads may be coming.

Clearly, ficlets would be a great place for professional writer services to market their services (perhaps via a profile page in a "professional offerings" section of the site), or for selling books about writing, or books published by ficlets members (a ficlets bookstore would be a great addition, wouldn't it?).

Now, would such commercial things be intrusive? I don't think so -- because the offerings are directly related to the core area of interest that brings people to ficlets.com. Some people who are using ficlets are very serious about writing. Just as on MySpace there is a small but very important group of very serious musicians and songwriters, who use the site as part of their professional marketing strategy.

I think these commercial offerings would be welcome by users who want to become professional writers, and who want to support their ficlets peers -- because these are really "tools of the trade" offerings about something you're passionately interested in. Adding a "Professional Offerings" and a "Bookstore" tab to the site would bother almost no users, in my view.

Conclusion

Considering its relative youth, Ficlets scores very well in relation to both the Fred Wilson "Web 2.0 Greatness" and the Stowe Boyd "Successful Social App" criteria. Further development is required to take the site to the next level. Of critical significance is the site's excellent design (from both the programming and aesthetic standpoints). This means the necessary enhancements can easily be "bolted on" without adversely impacting the already-superb user community features.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media