Being a click-highlight guy, I was very intrigued when I read about Awesome Highlighter.

Awesome Highlighter is a company that provides a tool that enables you to go to a website and highlight information to save for later or share with your friends.

Here’s what TechCrunch had to say about the site:

Awesome Highlighter have focused on a simple task, and executed on it very well. Some of their competitors have overly complex processes that require a lot more user involvement than a simple and familiar highlighting and note making procedure.

I feel like that statement can be applied to any most genre of websites, and can explain why the successful ones succeed, the other ones go the way of the deadpool. I’ve commented on the success of Muxtape compared to other “mixtape” sites here.

Less is … less (that doesn’t mean bad!)

Creating a simple solution to a problem generally means having less of a feature set than other websites. And contrary to conventional thought, thats a good thing. I feel this is because people like to do what they want to do with the least possible resistance. One example of this happened a couple years ago at Columbia:

CU Community vs. Facebook

A few years ago, there was a website for the Columbia community aptly named CU Community (link to founders site). CU Community was a website that aimed offer a journal feature for blogging, submit news, and allow students to showcase their artwork. You could also request people to be friends to be a part of your network.

Although the CU Community and Facebook weren’t exactly the same type of website (CU Community was more of a mini-Deviant Art for students), I feel like in many of the students eyes, they were in direct competition. It was a way to connect friends on campus.

At the time, Facebook was in its original form; a simple website where you could be connected with friends. Back then, I don’t even think they had the “Wall” application yet.

For a while, the two sites were gaining popularity on campus, but eventually Facebook won out. There are many reasons for this, but one major reason is that Facebook had a clear message of “we are a social network.” Conversely, CU Community was a place where you could upload artwork, you could blog, you could create a social network with friends, but there was no real focus. There were just too many features on the website to focus on just one.

Reading

This idea of doing one thing and doing it well has been around for a long time. The Unix community has long held that ideal. From The Art of Unix Programming:

Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

And more recently, 37signals wrote in their Getting Real book:

The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems…

This isn’t to say that adding features is bad. Of course not. But don’t add features if it doesn’t help solve the problem.