Platform Beats the Applications
So, everybody now got hyped about Web 2.0 and plans started to take forms on what we want to do and how our new direction of services will look like.
Stop here for a second, the last thing we want to do now is to fall in the "application islands" vs. "the platforms mainland" trap, where we end up with several applications that are pretty much doing the same thing, can’t communicate together, and produce a different user's experience.
Our focus and time should be spent on building platforms to support our solid direction rather than building isolated islands of applications on the level of each product
The threat is that we are diversified and each product is on its own, while we need to unify simple procedures on treating certin element of the application to read/write from the core platforms, so we would have less work every time we "re-use" such services across the products.
Things like how we get and process the User's Generated Content (UGC) or how we display the usernames and the acompined communication tools, How we communicate with the extended features of the Single-Sign-On Service, or How we treat the high traffic content pieces and develop methods to drive it into more prime spots (featured areas, or top article of the homepage, also how we are going to collect the user's feedback, and we leverage the huge amount of usage and participation data of the same user across the products in order to deliver a unique and different experience, another area is how our mobile versions are released and how can it be found by the users of our web versions, and How all of our search-within service is extended into the platform and inherit intelligence and show smart suggestions and ranking based on user's profiles and business needs.
I can think of these few now, but I’m sure we can come up with more, and the early we set the blueprint, the less our problems in the future.