What features to choose?

Image via CrunchBase, source unknownWhen building a website, it can be a real dilemma in choosing the right features. Which features that are essential? Which features are your users going to go crazy for? What exists, and what doesn't? There is a fine balance between being too basic and being to complicated. And the problem is this balance changes on a user-by-user basis.

So how do you satisfy the tech geek and the internet challenged at the same time? Well, for one solution look to the social networks. They have a core set of essential features, plus a set of applications, sometimes developed by third parties, which compliment this core. This means that not only can customers choose the features they want, but they can also build their own features and share them with their friends.

However, my favourite self-service feature list doesn't come from a social network. It comes from Google. Google labs is really cool. Labs are feature sets which support their other products. Go into the labs section of gmail and you will find many fun features to add to your gmail email browser. These range from the useful (and potentially cruttering) like the ability to see your calendar in gmail, to the crazy (and potentially pointless) like the ability to perform a compulsory Maths quiz after 1am to stop those disasterous drunk emails.

Social applications have an advantage over software add-ons because they are viral. More often than not, you don't need to look for a social feature, it looks for you via a superpoke or something visible on your friends profile. However, the drunk email tool for gmail isn't quite aseasy to find. Searching for features is surprisingly difficult. Where can you type in "I want a solution to sending drunk emails" and how confident can you be in finding the answer.

We can envision the semantic web providing a solution to this feature search problem. This kind of search power is likely to boost innovation as well (what other things will arise from the previous search?).

For now, I will say good job so far Google, I like your labs. But I wish I'd known about them sooner!