Function Before Features and Fame

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.