The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Carsonified on Vimeo.

To simplify the article into a straight list, here it is:
1. Speed
2. Instant Utility
3. Software is Media
4. Less is More
5. Make it Programmable
6. Make it Personal
7. RESTful
8. Discoverability
9. Clean
10. Playful

Here are the things I really like from what Fred Wilson had to say: Sometimes, words or expressions are so key to getting your point across.  I’ve really been struggling with the over-use and broad nature of the term “intuitive” as in our interface is intuitive. Most companies tout this, but very few actually pull it off (Mint.com and iPhone interface are notable exceptions).  Wilson’s expression “instant utility” means that you log in and you immediately get what to do end to end – the service is instantly useful to you. It’s critical to usability.  His other 2 Golden Rules that fall in this category are “Less is More” and “Clean”. Our newest web app to launch in 6-8 weeks is following the design principles of progressive disclosure whereby the user is guided towards completing the ONE main action for that page or interface.  By utilizing progressive disclosure, it reduces the confusion and clutter from a page or task – reducing the amount of time it takes for users to do their job while improving accuracy.

Additionally, I’m a big fan of Wilson’s Rule “Make it Programmable”. Web apps of old often kept silos of information in their app and the API was not really meant to push or pull a ton of info to other web apps.  We are really putting a lot of energy into building web apps on an entire API platform so that the very premise of the web app is to have a community of other web apps built around it and for it.

Again, if you haven’t seen Fred Wilson’s full blog post, please check it out >>

That has changed. Now, brands need to make their marketing messages more interactive and more portable. YouTube popularized this with providing the code for any video for people to copy and paste onto their blog, website, Facebook or MySpace page. Doritos, NBC, HBO, and any other savvy advertiser or media company is starting to do this. For example, HBO put a widget of a disco ball countdown on its site FutureSexLove.com. When the show launched, the disco ball virtually exploded across the thousands of sites, blogs, and profile pages that downloaded the widget.