Content is Key

Earlier this weekend, I took time to redo my website. The old site was primarily flash, didn't have a whole lot of information about me and was on the whole pretty useless. In looking over it and figuring out the layout, it got me thinking about what sorts of things a website, or any consumable really, needs to succeed. So this week there won't be any code or quick tutorials on data structures, just some of my thoughts on products and the web, what has staying power and what does not. For right now, I'm primarily going to talk about digital and print based media because these are the things I'm most familiar with, but I think these principles can be applied to almost anything that people buy.

In my mind, there are three basic parts to selling a product, whether it's a website, software, a movie or a book. There are the content, the presentation, and the spread. The content of the product relates to what purpose the product tends to serve. For a website, it's the information on the site, in a movie or book it's the plot. The presentation or delivery is how the content is presented, essentially the atmosphere of the product. It's the reason you might pay more for a meal at a fancy restaurant than a cheaper one even though the taste of the food is comparable. Finally there's the spread, how people first hear about your product or service. This could be the result of advertisements or a marketing campaign, but it also could be through word of mouth or recommendations.

Obviously the best products and services do all three of these very well. For instance, Apple manages to design a phone that is technologically years ahead of the competition. It's user interface and packaging are easy to use and stylish and even on the fourth iteration of almost the same exact product, huge crowds still show up at the launch. Someone over there knows what they are doing. However, though these three factors can be combined to create a dynamite product or service, I'd like to make the case that only content with some very minimal spread can create a very successful site or product, often outweighing the delivery entirely. It's part of a trend that we've seen time and time again in technology, and I think it demonstrates which way the world is trending as it becomes more information and data centric.

A tale of two games
I'll start with an example from old RTS gaming: Starcraft versus Total Annihilation. While I'm sure that most of you have heard of Starcraft, TA is generally less well known. Per its Wikipedia article and my own experiences playing the game, Total Annihilation was the first 3D RTS game made available, the graphics were cutting edge at the time and it featured two distinct player types similar to Starcraft's separate civilizations. The end result was two very similar games, on the one hand there was Starcraft, a strictly 2D game with three distinct but equally balanced races. On the other, there was Total Annihilation which had an impressive 3D set of units and terrain. It outmatched Starcraft in presentation and graphic display.

So what happened? TA was named the game of the year in 1997 and managed to beat Starcraft to release by six months. Yet Starcraft continues to enjoy a significantly more massive following over its flashier counterpart. Starcraft was BIG, people still have competitions the world over with this game. In the end Starcraft's mechanics made it the better game, despite it's graphical disadvantage. Gameplay was extremely balanced, contained a compelling campaign, and shipped with a fully-featured map editor that allowed players to define their own game types. These core features of the game gave it staying power, which is really the defining characteristic of a product with solid content. In the end the presentation doesn't matter when the core storyline or mechanics are flawed.

However, it's important to note that I'm not saying that a product without good content can't be successful. For example, the film Avatar was wildly successful and broke all sorts of box office records. I'll concede that it had some pretty amazing scenery, and having a 3D movie was a pretty interesting new medium that I think James Cameron explored well. However, how many people do you think will remember Avatar as one of the great movies in the future? I'm wagering that it will fade out in ten years or so. Avatar didn't have the unusual plot twists or interesting storyline that define any sort of great movie. It skimped on content by essentially reusing someone else's story, following cliche after cliche. While it's entertaining, I'd argue that it doesn't have the ability to stand the test of time.

Well, what about twitter?
Ah yes.... what about twitter? How can a service that limits postings to 140 characters possibly be successful with such limited content? That was my whole case right, that the content is the key to a service's longevity and depth.

Well, it's an interesting point, but here is I think there is a fundamental difference with twitter. While an individual user's content might be very limited by the 140 character limit, Twitter's aggregate content is very strong and provides a lot of a value. Think about it, if I told you that you could sign up for a special service just to get random messages I'd send out from time to time, would you do it? Even if you are my best friend and I updated it daily? Heck no, you don't care that I switched from mint toothpaste to cinnamon! But what if many of your friends, news sources and businesses did to give you a realtime flow of information? Now THAT is some powerful information.

And if you look at Twitter's evolution over time, you can see that they have realized this too. Twitter started out as something whose presentation made it interesting: "Tweets, those sound fun!" But over time they've started consolidating their data. Messages are now tagged and directed at different users, giving a high level view of "what's happening now." They recently added the ability to add location data to give tweets more local context and allow better search. Imagine if you're on the street and see some sort of event going on, you can just flip to twitter and search nearby tweets to discover it's the yearly kumquat festival.

But what I think makes Twitter such a powerful platform goes back to their power in the aggregate over the individual. How many tweets can you recall off the top of your head that were posted more than a week ago? I'm guessing it's not too many, simply because you can't fit that much into 140 characters. Tweets are rarely memorable, more often a link to something else or an ongoing conversation. Thus the individual user doesn't really have a lot of pull for interesting ideas and content on twitter. Instead the platform provides the content, and I think twitter knows it.

What does this mean for me?
Well, I mentioned that this whole idea about what makes a site successful initially came from redesigning my website. I started thinking about some of the people who I admire, whose blogs I read and ideas I consider. I came to the startling realization that all of them use very similar formats that showcase the site content above anything else. A few of them are simply blogs such as this one, while others are just some simply formatted html. These are online sites I read all the time, and they spread via reddit, slashdot, and other word of mouth sites. Despite the age of some of the articles, they get linked to again and again for the simple reason that their content is interesting and insightful.

So during all that time when I was trying to figure out how to design my site with a new iteration, I was just avoiding the root problem through design: that I had little important to say. I could try and put up some interesting flash animations or amusing bits about myself, but in the end no design can disguise the fact that the site has little content. I think it's a pretty valuable lesson that's pretty fundamental to any online business.

However, it's clear sites can make the transition too with a little work and a focused goal. Twitter originally focused on the presentation, making an interesting medium to use, but by playing smart with their information they have turned into the web's realtime search system. Facebook has been undergoing a similar process, they started with a clan interface and used their data to feed their site. Sure, most users gripe about how the presentation changes all the time, but these changes are pretty insignificant compared to the power of Facebook Connect and the Pages data consolidation. Facebook has set themselves up to give a more personalized web and search experience than perhaps even Google. One thing's for sure, it's an interesting time as we see who will be victorious in the fight for the web and I think it will be won by the power of data.