{"id":1304,"date":"2008-04-16T09:49:25","date_gmt":"2008-04-16T15:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/04\/16\/getting-love-and-attention-for-your-whizbang-20-application-fast-frequent-features\/"},"modified":"2008-04-16T09:49:25","modified_gmt":"2008-04-16T15:49:25","slug":"getting-love-and-attention-for-your-whizbang-20-application-fast-frequent-features","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2008\/04\/16\/getting-love-and-attention-for-your-whizbang-20-application-fast-frequent-features\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting "Love" (and Attention) for Your Whizbang 2.0 Application – Fast, Frequent Features"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month, Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart asked why Adobe Share doesn’t get as much attention as other document sharing services<\/a>. Without picking on all the gory details of Share itself, the main way I see Whizbang 2.0 services getting attention is by frequently integrating with out Whizbang 2.0 services. By integration I mean simply the simplest, easiest thing you can think of (or complex if you want, but the bar is low), and by frequently, I mean monthly, if not 2 or 3 times a month.<\/p>\n

Any online service like this should be more of a highway (fast and connected) instead of a cul-de-sac<\/a> that barely connects to the rest of the web.<\/p>\n

What is Share?<\/h2>\n

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Adobe Share is exactly what it sounds like: a way to share documents and other “objects.” It’s a Flex based application and has things like “limit who can see my stuff,” embedding Flash widgets to look at the documents (as above), and converting documents to PDF. More detail here<\/a> and elsewhere<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you.”<\/h2>\n

From what I can tell, Share breaks the rule of thumb of integrating early, integrating often. You can get a URL or widget embed out of it, but you can’t, for example, tell it “go synchronize documents between here and Google Docs.” I have no idea if Google Docs makes that possible, but, whatever, if I start thinking too much like that I’ll fall into being a developer instead of a user.<\/p>\n

Or, what if I wanted to share a document to Twitter? There’s no “post to Twitter” link. Can I post to a blog from within Share? Is there a Facebook widget? To get slightly less consumer web, more enterprise: what about synching with SharePoint or a wiki? Or Buzzword even? How about a plugin for MS-Word that lets me save to Share?<\/p>\n

Don’t get me wrong here, I actually like Share, a lot<\/i>. The first time I saw it, my first thought was that RedMonk could use it for our long “under construction PDF library. We have a “stack” of old, and some new, PDFs that we don’t really collect in one place too well. I’m a big fan of PDFs for this kind of thing, and I love the PDF reading you can do in Share.<\/p>\n

When Switching Costs Are Zero, Don’t Let ‘Em Turn that Dial<\/h2>\n

The larger point is that in a SaaS world, the old release schedules of, well, taking a long time, don’t really work out too well. You want to put out new releases, even only for one feature, all the time<\/i>. Otherwise, as Ryan notes, you find that people forget about you, and maintaining that continuous trickle of attention is vital for SaaS applications.<\/p>\n

More so than packaged, installed software, there’s virtually no switching cost in a SaaS world. There’s moving data, sure, but for the most part, that’s nullified as a concern by a few things: the data in question is of low value enough that it doesn’t need to be moved, the data can be easily imported and exported (as with most address books), or, you simply don’t need<\/i> to migrate the data (you can keep serving up videos at YouTube if you switch to blip.tv).<\/p>\n

The primary way to stave this off is to keep adding new features – again, even minor, “meaningless” ones – to keep your users attention. Most importantly, as new, exciting services come along, integrating closely with those services helps keep users around as well. This is especially true if you’re a platform like Share.<\/p>\n

Accelerating Share<\/h2>\n

So, what are some things Share could do? Here’s some featurettes:<\/p>\n