10 Things That Make a Great Web App - Fred Wilson at FOWA Miami 2010

The Colony theater is completely full, with what looks to be about 250 people (perhaps more), for FOWA Miami. The event started slightly late as everyone filed into the theater. First up, Ryan Carson of Carsonified who run the event shared what to expect from the day, which was helpful especially for first-time attendees like myself.

First speaker is Michael Schneider of MobileRoadie to demo the FOWA iPhone and Android app. Allows you to share tweets, see photos, see the schedule, and see other attendees. MobileRoadie allows you to create iPhone and Android applications with content management. The Android thing was announced today.

Fred Wilson is described by Ryan Carson as one of the "smartest investors in the industry" with 15 years investing in web applications and services. He's discussing 10 things that make a great web app.

1. Speed - is the most important feature. "If you're application is slow, people won't use it." He says even more so with mainstream users than with power users.
2. Instant Utility - means that a service is instantly useful to you. If it takes a long time to set up and input data then people won't use it. You have to give people something that useful "right off the bat."
3. Voice - He believes that "software is media today" as in a magazine, newspaper or television show. Each property has a voice, attitude and style as your software should have these properties; it should have a "personality."
4. Less is more - this is especially true early on when you are starting out but you can grow the service. Do one little thing well and make it quick, easy and fast and build the platform to grow from there.
5. Programmable - make it possible for others to build on top of or connect to or add value to your application. This means API's including Read/Write API's ("if its not Read/Write, its not an API"). When people can add value to your application they can add energy and richness to it. This is "absolutely essential," especially today.
6. Personal - make your application personal for everybody, such as allowing people to change color scheme/background, add avatars, add user generated content. This can cause problems because sometimes the community thinks they "own" the application but this also means they care.
7. RESTful - this is a misuse of the term, he says, but he means that everything in the application has a "clean and comprehensible" URL. There is nothing that you can click on or look at that doesn't have its own URL and the meaning of that URL is clear. This allows the web, at large, to discover your application. LinkedIn, for example, does a bad job of this while Twitter does it well.
8. Discoverable - Your application is "a needle in a haystack" so you have to understand SEO and optimize for it. However, social media is "as important as search" today in terms of discoverability. It needs to be built from the ground up to allow it to be viral.
9. Clean - the application cannot be busy on the page - lots of space, big fonts and not too much functionality presented on one page. He used Tumblr as an example of a simple and clean interface.
10. Playful - "The ability to play in an application is really important." This means, perhaps, adding a "game dynamic" whereby you establish goals, measure yourself against those goals and reward yourself for those goals. This allows you to incentivize the kind of behavior you want in your application.

The deck for this presentation is posted at Fred's blog at avc.com. There's quite a debate going on about the 10 items he chose.