The Application Trend

I’ve often heard that in web development “Content is king”. Well right now there is a power struggle on the go, and content is loosing ground.

Content was king ten years ago, today Application is king.

Software developers have always known that application is more valuable than content, but the rest of us have been unable to provide application. Industries outside of software development rely on content to stay ahead of the pack; but there is a subtle shift happening.

Users are saturated with content, there is content everywhere and it is being produced at staggering rates. We all have our methods to get at the good stuff and ignore the trash content but what we are hungry for is application. We have application on our hand held devices, on our laptops, in out cars and we expecting application in the websites that we use.

As an example try a little exercise: do a search for the same book on Amazon’s and on Borders’ websites. I can guarantee you within 2 clicks you will have 20 or more applications at your fingertips on the Amazon’s online store compared to the same search on Borders.

Why? Because Borders gambled on the ‘in-store’ experience compared with the ‘on-line’ experience, and lost. Borders settled for online content to drive people to stores. Amazon wrote the book on online buying application, reviews, reviews of reviews, one-click sales, similar products, ‘also bought’, and a host of others.

Websites like Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc are not content providers at all, they are Web Applications.

Google is not just a big content provider; Google is not a content company at all and neither is Wikipedia, Facebook or Twitter. They are content applications; and as the web user develops a greater taste for application so Google will change their algorithms to rank application higher and higher, Twitter an Facebook will manipulate their application to better deliver both the social content and the social applications.

Well what does this mean for you and me. The good news is that application is becoming more accessible for web developers. Open source and content managed systems are now standard fare for websites. What is required is for website creators to answer a fundamental question: “What do they want their website to do for their clients?”

The answer could be an online store, a social site, a game or subtle game dynamics, an interactive calendar or comment module, a subscription, info or video feed, online and editable spreadsheet, calculator, CRM integration, the list goes on and on.

If you can imagine a web application it is almost certain that someone has already written it and it’s available somewhere, written in PHP, really cheaply or free.

I’m not suggesting that application will one day replace content, they are very different animals, and both are required for a successful website. But we are on the verge of the application age for web development; and in this age application, not content, is king.

Your turn now

Is content loosing ground over web applications?

This post was written by Alan Jones, who also creates the Pixel Comic Strips on Pixel77. Alan is working in the IT world and he is the owner of Access Digital, a website about web design, social media, logos and branding. You can reach him via his website or you can find him on Facebook.