At the recent Future of Web Apps conference, investor Fred Wilson gave a talk entitled 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps.  His third point, Software Is Media, compared consumer software applications to media products like magazines, movies and tv shows: they need their own personality, style and attitude:

This is one that I got a lot of questions on. My view is that software is media today. Particularly consumer software, when people use it, they approach your software in the same way they would approach media. When I say media, I’m talking about a magazine, or a newspaper or a TV show. When you think about the New York Times versus the Wall Street Journal, or you think about Vanity Fair versus Vogue, or you think about Fox News versus CNN, each of these media companies have a voice. They have an attitude, and a style, and it’s unique. It’s different.

I think software has to feel that way. Your software has to have a personality. People have to feel like they’re consuming media when they consume your software. If your software is bland, and has no attitude, something as silly as the “Fail Whale” which became a symbol of Twitter’s inability to stay up, also was a personality. People were walking around wearing “Fail Whale” shirts. It’s embarrassing for the people at Twitter, but nevertheless, it spoke to the fact that there was some attitude and media savvy behind the service and it created a voice that people connected to. That is what I mean by voice, and I think it’s terribly important in a web app.

From a 1995 article in Newsweek:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Oops. Of course, we may know more about this prediction pretty soon:

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Cleveland.com just posted the first interview with Bill Watterson since 1989.  Is the iPad the savior of the publishing industry?  Did it live  up to the hype? Who knows.  But if someone figures out how to put a Calvin and Hobbes app on this thing, there is no amount of money I wouldn’t pay.

Watch at least the first 30 seconds of this video (on YouTube).  You won’t be disappointed.

Speaking of magazines still being relevant in the age of iPhones (see previous post), SmashingMagazine.com recently had a great article on the Blogazine – create individual, unique blog posts with highly styled and designed layouts like magazine articles. I love these – and would love to see more bloggers (who also happen to be great designers) do this.

You’ve got to give them points for creativity.

With all the talk about the death of newspapers at the hands of the iPhone and Internet… I still love magazines.  We get about a dozen or more delivered to our office every month.  Big, color, glossy pictures – they are fun to casually flip through and read during lunch – and sitting on table for passersby to see – provide a little hint of creativity and inspiration.  They just need a better business model.