When I was attending college, I used to teach in a small computer institute in the evenings for pocket money. It was a chance to meet cool chicks as well. I taught the usual programming stuff, but I helped with basics of design programs such as Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver etc.



There was this girl, who was interested in image manipulation. She asked me to teach her Photoshop in spare time. I took it as a good opportunity to score with the girl. I did my best to teach her Photoshop, but we were getting nowhere. After few days she told since I teach programming, I was not able to teach her Image Editing Software. Finally, after some fruitless sessions, I dropped the idea of teaching her Photoshop but took a simpler program, IrfanView. I taught her to do basic things like Cropping, resizing, sharpening, rotating etc. She took just an hour to get hold of all this stuff. We both went to a movie that night, my first date with her. We saw each other for few more months before we finally broke off. I might tell you that story some other time.



The moral of the story: keep it simple. IrfanView does the basic image stuff beautifully.



Now let us apply this to Web 2.0 companies. Most of the Web 2.0 companies that launch with a sudden spike get high initial pageviews but slowly fade away to oblivion. Geeks, or early adopters, are way ahead of nonprofessionals in learning new things, getting used to new features and exploring new things. Their recommendations do count, but if a product is too technical for non-geeks, its adoption with masses will never happen. Let us analyze well-known Web 2.0 companies such as del.icio.us, flickr, YouTube, Ning and Click.Tv.



Flickr is an easy service for anyone to upload his or her pictures. Let flickr do the dirty tricks and you can easily manage, share, tag, comment on your or others’ pictures. Moreover, you only need a line of code to put your picture on your website. It is an image organizer made easy for everyone. Del.icio.us is another simple and easy tool to save, tag, and share bookmarks. Accessing your bookmarks on the go was never so easy before. YouTube did the same thing to videos what Del.icio.us did to bookmarks and Flickr did to images. All three were industry standards that geeks as well as non-geeks widely used.



Then, there is Ning, a company that promised to non-geeks that they too could build and use their own custom-made social applications. Brilliant idea, and no wonder it got a lot of hype and hence intial expectations were high. However, they were not able to deliver the goods. The tools to build mashups by Ning seemed good only to a veteran geek. Even if you learn the tough language, you cannot host it on your web site. What was worse, after doing so much effort you cannot plug in the application in your own website.



Just few days ago, we discussed a soon to be launched video hosting tool Click.Tv, similar to YouTube but more advanced, with sleek features. Click.tv allows its users to add annotations anywhere in the stream, which users can click and jump right to that part. Again, you have to teach non-geeks many things to use Click.Tv properly and have to do a lot of hard work to annotate streams of video. The result looks neat, but I have to spend a lot of time to watch a simple video. It could be fun for one or two video, but then non-geeks do not have the patience and the time. I still hope Click.Tv works, but I have my doubts.



So keep things simple and useful. Be user friendly. Create feature sets that are easy to digest for the non-geeks. Adding functinalities is cool, but confusing the already confused non geek could be fatal. This is one of the mantra for sucess for Web 2.0 companies.