Principles For Successful Web Apps by Fred Wilson

1. Speed - more than a feature, mainstream users tend to be least forgiving, slower apps grow slower.

2. Instant Utility - service has to be useful straight away, without lots of length configuration or importing data, use tricks to add utility (crawl web for initial population), example: Google Video took weeks to encode video...YouTube made it available ~immediately.

3. Voice - Attitude/personality from software/application. Example: Twitter 'Fail Whale' creates a "voice".

4. Less is More - example: Facebook at launch had a tiny amount of features versus now. Del.icio.us was limited but powerful... "one little thing...get a lot of utility..."

5. Programmable - Allow other people to add value to your application. Read/Write APIs. Lets developers add data/utility and "energy".

6. Personal - User's own data / their personality establishes emotional connection between user and app. Makes them "invested" in the product.

7. RESTful - ?misuse of the term. All accessible resources in application have a clean URL where it can be accessed. Example: Twitter URLs easily understood from just the URL. ("https://twitter.com/#!/fredwilson/lists)

8. Discoverable - How do people find your app? Take advantage of search (SEO) and social media (virality) and build apps from the ground up to BE viral and optimized for search.

9. Clean - Application has focus per page and functionality on each page is limited. Lots of space, big fonts. Don't let the user get it wrong. Example: Tumblr login ("http://www.tumblr.com/login) - ie. nobody won't know what to do.

10. Playful - Help users have fun and incentives for the user to behave in ways you want. Example: Weight Watchers has a game dynamic with setting goals and achieving weight loss / LinkedIn & Facebook & Twitter with friend/follower counts / FourSquare badges and mayorship.