Well, you had that great idea. Everything set up and planed nicely so you could start to build that “thingy” to blow up the already crowded Web2.0 market. But, how do you check the chances of surviving? We’ve seen great products succeed or fail and the line between both scenarios is frightening thin.

I’ll present some well known examples of success and provide you with a hint to a possible root of their success. As always in the fast-living world of the web there are a lot more factors than what I could list here, but if I may pick just one thing from every application and abstract it to an advice, these would be the ones.

Offer a new service

Collaborative project management as complete and as streamlined like Basecamp was simply not around before 37Signals launched it back in 1999. And I’m not even talking about the pricing model here!

Efficiently streaming video over the internet and presenting it with a wide spread cross-plattform plugin – and this for mere mortals? Unthinkable before YouTube launched.

Offer a better service

Photo sharing was around for some time and it even worked for a broad audience, but now everybody can use a sophisticated photo-organizer online and share their pictures with ease thanks to Flickr.

Offer a simple solution

Google definitly wasn’t the first search-engine. But they knew the importance of simplicity when searching so they kept their Homepage minimized to the famous one-line search field.

Offer simplicity to complex processes

Easying the problems a lot of people are faced with is a shure shot in delivering services. The famous $ function from the prototype library has been one of the most duplicated functionalities.

Publishing on the net has become incredibly easy but setting up the publishing engine still wasn’t for everybody as easy as desired. With the WordPress-installation taking less than 5minutes they made it a snap.

Offer sophisticated tools

Del.icio.us isn’t the prettiest site around, period. But the functionality is undenyable and they offer a great set of tools to make using it even nicer. Posting links on the site itself fades to be secondary as illustrated by the position of the “post” link on the homepage.

Maintaining a personal tumblelog can be a time consuming process but with the superb toolset of tumblr.com posting content is just one click away. Appart of the bookmarklet they provide a great API and feed implementation.

Offer open data

What good are you’re statuses if they’re closed away on a site far away from your digital home? The portability of the data and openness of the Twitter API let developers easily integrate them anywhere. We can also see some complete new applications exists on top of Twitter. See Foamee for example.

Offer your plattform

With a global player offering his plattform for developers we see a nice example of a new direction in the portability of data.

Be remarkable

I still remeber the first time I saw the nice semi-transparent black in the background, the smooth transitions between the different images and the well-known preloader.. everything looked sleek and there was only one tought in my head: gotta have this! Visit the Lightbox 2.0 site

Be desirable

The digg-rank quickly became THE measurement for news-stories. What better situation for an app than beeing the referee for such a gigantic field known as the news.

Be the missing link

As we’re all customers, we all know the problem with hotlines, contact-fields, support-tickets and what-not. The chain between provider and customer is mostly broken. Here comes in GetSatisfaction.com, makes support go social and fills in the gap.

The launch of a service or product on the internet is a complex process and I am far away from beeing an expert in this field but I wanted to take the time and collect some aspects of it by analyzing the launch of the Silverback app by Clearleft.

Talk about it

The first crucial thing you need to do for starting the needed buzz is to talk about it. If a simple blogpost or a big announcement is adequat depends on the focus and appeal of the promoted “thing”. The first time I heard of Silverback was in Andy Budds blogpost about it over at Blogography.

Spread the word

After the first curious comments on the initial message and with the help of effective teasing the word starts to spread. Leaving some things unsaid and having people guessing about the service helps definitely to build a hype around it. With the support of opinion leaders writing about it, high digg rankings are a snap. We’ve seen a fair amount of mentionings of Silverback in the blogosphere lately. See Jeff Croft or Harry Brignull write about it.

Create visual impression

Beeing remarkable is one of the most crucial things in corporate identity. Again this is field with a scope far far beyond this post so I leave it with this simple statement and continue rather documenting the superb decisions Clearleft made in the past few months

Having Jon Hicks do the Silverback artwork was a very clever decision. He created a remarkable detailed Illustration of a silverback gorilla (well, what else!). The quality of the work follows seamlessly his previous works and serves very well as the brand recognition. One point that pushes the usefulness of this cooperation to another level is Jon’s kindness in sharing his work on his own site. View the working process at hicksdesign.ch.uk. Furthermore his work gets discussed and honored on flickr for example.

The only official representation of Silverback is the signup page and again they did a great job in creating something very special. Paul Annet, frontend-designer at Clearleft, designed the page and implemented one of the lately most discussed technics aka parallax-scrolling. The layered leaves from the background create the illusion of a three dimensional space by moving with different velocities when resizing the browser-window.

Doing great work is nice but having it presented and discussed by many pushes the effect even further. Paul wrote a extremely useful and comprehensive article about this technic on Vitamin. Again, the generated traffic supports the product itself and helps build up it’s reputation – even in it’s not yet published status.

Conclusion

We’ve seen some great things happening around the launch of Silverback and as we can expect this is only the peak of the iceberg. When it comes to opening the app for the broad public we’ll certainly see more of the buzz-magic Clealeft provided so far.