Surfacing the Awesome

At its best, the internet is about Surfacing the Awesome.

  • Google finds your treasure in the sea of noise.
  • Twitter helps you make friends you’d never otherwise meet, who post valuable links you wouldn’t otherwise see.
  • Wikipedia surfaces, shapes, and enables the sharing of our collective knowledge. Good social software works like an artificial reef. Good stuff sticks to it, and everybody wins.
  • StackOverflow surfaces the knowledge and idle brain power of the world’s programmers.

Flickr, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, blogs… I could go on, but you get the idea.

There are few key things the best web services have in common, subtle things that make them great at surfacing the awesome:

  1. They honor the link. Links are the fundamental building blocks of the web. Good web services link out generously, and they also provide discoverable, rot-resistant links inwards.
  2. They don’t try to hoard traffic or attention. This was one of Google’s big insights. Sending users away to the value with zero friction fosters trust and repeat business.
  3. They create more value than they capture. Google captures plenty of value, billions of dollars a quarter in fact, but they still generate far more value than they capture.
  4. They provide value first and capture value later. StackOverflow gives the goods up front and for free. You don’t have to contribute, or even create an account, but if you do contribute, good things happen. You might make friends. You might build a reputation as a solid coder, surfacing your code portfolio that would otherwise be buried in a code repository at your day job. StackOverflow benefits from the audience they’ve created with ads and conferences, but only after they’ve provided the world with value first.
  5. They’re serendipity engines. Sure you can rely on these services to give you what you ask for, but they’re also fuzzy enough that good unexpected things happen too. You might make a new lifelong friend you’d never have met otherwise, or you might discover a band that changes your life.
  6. I’m sure there are other ways that awesomeness is surfaced; can you think of any I’ve missed?

This “Surfacing the Awesome” idea has been on my mind for a while, feels good to get it out there.

Also, I needed this post to exist so I can link to it when I write about the Bizarro services that try to capture the awesome instead of surfacing it.