Below Belief

See VentureBlog for a fascinating discussion on the Internet and the “death of the 80/20 rule”.
It’s an idea which is gathering momentum as people everywhere realise that since the Internet reduces transaction and sales costs to virtually nothing that profitable business can be done on the long-tail. In blogging terms, 1 million sites with a 1,000 users is far bigger (and more profitable) than 100 sites with a million users. It’s happening already in all markets: Amazon makes all of its profit selling titles outside of the top-selling 100,000 titles. It has no competition there but great reach.
The internet is great for “disintermediation” – reducing the costs for a large number of small players; eBay being the prime example – allowing millions of people to trade to an audience they could never achieve alone.
That’s where we’re all going. Individuals and niche markets. The company I work for is going there too. Sooner than we think.

Simon told me recently about a couple of sites I wasn’t aware of which are doing something rather impressive and quite timely. They are trying to open up our democratic processes using the power of the internet – forcing, in some cases, MPs to recognise that in our connected society its possible to have a more open, transparent democracy.
Fax Your MP is a service which takes democracy to the MPs. Set up because some MPs wouldn’t accept emails and, this being patently ridiculous, a bunch of volounteers have created a service which will send faxes to them instead from an email you type on the site.
TheyWorkForYou is a tool which allows searching, viewing and commenting on the archives produced from the House Of Commons. It also provides performance data on every MP in the country – for example how many votes they attend and how often they toe the party line in direct votes. What a great idea.
Perhaps these will enable us to be slightly less apathetic about politics?

Google amazes me everyday. Below Belief is nothing more than a tiny backwater on our planet-wide internet of tens of billions of pages and yet, Google came by yesterday, reliable as ever, cached my pages again and indexed my latest updates. It’ll probably come back in a few days and check again.
I build web technology for a living and I am still astounded every time I witness Google’s efficiency, scale and scope. How is there enough time in the day for even the most well organised of crawlers to reach just my pages regularly – once it’s done all the other more important sites on the internet. That it got this far down it’s list of sites to check is awe-inspiring. Do most people understand how this all works? How many people actually recognise the brilliance in what it has achieved?
Knowing the problems that IT can generate and suffer from sometimes, it is great to be inspired by people at Google who have designed a system so resilient to failure, so reliable, so efficient that all us consumers have to remember is that it just works.
“It just works” characterises a very special elite group of services and products which feel like they are shaping this new internet economy. They present such low “barriers to entry” that their take up by the mass market is virtually assured. They are generally free or very cheap to use, they are uncomplicated, quick to get started, easy to use, instinctive and have obvious and compelling benefits.
Google is long in the tooth now, but other products which give me the same feeling right now are:
MovableType – which makes this blog so easy to manage and just does everything I want of it, immediately and without hassle. It can be made to do other stuff it was never designed to do, quickly and simply too.
Flickr – a well thought out and well executed photo depository and management tool
ProfiMail – a recent recommendation from Simon, it’s just this very day revolutionised my mobile emailing
Apple and their beautiful iPod – which has changed for good the way I listen to music and revived a tired music collection and my weariness of it
“It just works” is the philosophy and the rarest of attributes which we should strive to achieve in every service we build.