Function Before Features and Fame
by
on May 17, 2008,
In case you are living in a cave this weekend, I'll tell you the "big new" in Web 2.0: Seesmic managed the coup of getting Steve Spielberg, George Lucas, and a good portion of the cast of the upcoming Indiana Jones movie to set up channels and respond to questions posed by The Guardian's Jemima Kiss. The one person you'd expect to be crowing about it would be Seesmic friend/investor/cheerleader Mike Arrington, but he's pretty ticked off about the whole thing, as Seesmic's restarts to get everyone online with this ended up taking out TechCrunch's comments at points.
Also hopping on the "get attention to get mainstream" train is new web darling Disqus, which has been touted by A-list bloggers far and wide, with (judging on the recent bitchmeme) mixed results. Disqus added functionality for users to enable Seesmic's (there's that name again) video comments in Disqus-enabled comment sections, and in an interesting (and tempting) display of what Disqus can do, Fred Wilson and Silicon Alley Insider merged their comment threads into one for two related posts.
From the looks of it, this is a great week for two start-up companies, right? Both are getting some amazing attention (I even saw a blurb about the Seesmic success on a celebrity blog) and what promises to be widespread adoption. So why am I not jumping up and down like everyone else?
Maybe because I'm currently seeing the "rousing success" of Twitter going more mainstream. A year after taking off at SXSW, Twitter has apparently done nothing to either come up with a way to monetize the service, nor fix their scaling issues that have plagued them since the moment the app took off. They've gained a large user base that grows every day, but that user base is growing more and more discontented with the frequent outages and error messages, going so far as to propose a day-long boycott in the hopes that their pleas for a more stable service will fall on the apparently deaf ears of the Twitter crew.
The situations I'm describing here are symptomatic of the general idea behind many, if not most, of Web 2.0 companies. Get the app up, get the eyes to the site, and figure out the whole money/scaling thing as you need to. Seesmic is still an invite-only alpha, which means that open access doesn't exist. Steve Spielberg could get a channel, but you may be waiting for yours for a bit until more invites are processed. That also prevents you from using that nifty Disqus functionality to leave a video comment, too, doesn't it? Curious to implement that as a feature before building out other things that users are asking for, like posting the comments directly to the blog for SEO purposes and making sure you can have your comments even if Disqus goes down. And not a single one of the companies I've listed here have divulged any evidence of being able to make money (although I do know that Seesmic is partnered with Lookery, which may be providing some revenue.
Long-term success never seems to be at the forefront of anyone's mind in this space, only the quick flash (and possibly a buy-out for an exit). All the great publicity and cool, trendy features in the world won't make up for a user base that ends up deserting you because of a lack of features or site outages.
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Michael Fidler 
Just to clarify a little bit on the statement about Disqus and the A-List Cyndy. Disqus was being talked about and slowly being adopted long before Fred Wilson’s post on it which in turn prompted the A-List influx of users and the typical gushiness that follows. I think Daniel from Disqus would be more than able to back this up.
As well I would suggest that Disqus was seeing a wider pre A-List adoption than Seesmic was so if anyone benefitted from the working together between the two services it would be Seesmic. While the attention of people like Fred and Robert sure hasn’t hurt Disqus it already had a strong core group of evangelists long before that point.
Steven, I agree that Disqus was already on the fast-track for widespread adoption, and that was why I was SO confused when they added the Seesmic functionality. Fred is an investor, so I’m going to guess that his attention was more than that of the evangelists, but the fact that a company with an app that seems to really have taken off, and not only with the early adopters, would jump on the trend wagon of Seesmic, especially when there is a bitchmeme in play about missing features that may be critical for its widespread adoption.
Hi, Daniel from Disqus here. Thanks for the mention. I just wanted to say that we choose who we work with carefully. Seesmic has been a pleasure to work with and they’re doing many things right with product and community. This implementation was not a matter of trend wagons, rather it was done because it made sense for our users.
That said, our reliability and performance is ahd will always be independent of partners.
I agree with you Cyndy. I don’t think that Disqus had to add this kind of integration at this time as there are a couple of other things that IMO came well ahead of adding something like Seesmic support. I just dislike the current assumption that a service needs the A-List pontification in order to gain traction. Disqus was a fine example of exactly the opposite but then I guess when folks like myself start evangelizing a service it doesn’t count for squat compared to a Scoble or a TechCrunch 5 line paragraph.
@Daniel Hi there! Thanks for stopping by. While I understand that you would have chosen Seesmic with some thought, and I don’t doubt that Loic can be very convincing, I think that there are a lot of other features that users have been asking for (some that I’ve seen even uninstalling Disqus because of the lack of them) that could have come before a product that is still in alpha in terms of adding 3rd party functionality. I know that one of my co-authors here installed it and removed it because of some of those issues I’ve read about, and I’m going to ask her if she wouldn’t mind popping in here to discuss the Disqus part of my article.
@Steven It gets frustrating, doesn’t it?
I think that a mention by TechCrunch gives an amazing boost to a company. In the long run, however, it’s going to be the sheer number and evangelism of the every day users that keep a company going, and they shouldn’t be overlooked.
Hi Cyndy,
I agree that we had and still have greater priorities. We haven’t neglected those. The release with Seesmic didnt do much to distract us from our focus - the software is provided by Seesmic, after all. They made it easy for us while we continued to work on the main product items.
Daniel