Monday, May 18, 2009

Just tell me - what do you do? Some applications can answer, some can't.

If you're an application developer, and you can't capture the essence of your application via a short statement, then you have problems.

For example, if you log out of Twitter, you'll see this:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Now this statement has been ridiculed ad nauseum, and it's been pointed out that Twitter can do more, but it clearly encapsulates what Twitter can do for you. Let's see what FriendFeed says:

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.

Again, in my view, this is an excellent description of what FriendFeed can do for you.

I do not use SharePoint, but I wanted to get a very quick overview of what SharePoint could do for me. I started here:

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

Technically this is a wonderful statement, since it states a benefit (improve organizational effectiveness) and talks, on a high level, about features. But it's still a little argh for me - and I like this kind of business process junk.

So I went here.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a new server program that is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Your organization can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes.

OK, this was a little better for me, but I'm a bit of a process geek. I'm not sure how a normal person would react to it.
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