That's Cool, But...

I could easily have called this, "Feature Creep," because I like to talk about that too. Maybe after a suitable interval I'll talk about it. But rather than feature creep, today our topic will be bells and whistles.

What was wrong with Google way back when? Everyone I know migrated to Google because it was clean, fast, and simple. Those are hard things to do; just ask a designer if you don't believe me. Google was the anti-web, sort of. I'm not setting out to write a review of Google, so that sort of will have to suffice.

So now it has features. Creeping features, too, but even features which I don't consider creepy. Features which make me look at them and say, "That's cool, but why use it?"

Sometimes in creation, the first impulse is to cater to the interesting aspects of things. One makes things that look good, or that do things that no one else can do, or that combine features in new ways. It's what innovation is made of; newness.

But sometimes, you wind up with a thing which doesn't do anything useful. Certainly, it's something new, but it's form without substance, or it does something different that no one wants, or it combines two features that don't need combining. There are legions of very attractive, very new things which are cool but useless.

The Web, as a constant orgy of innovation, seems to foster more of these things than is really its fair share. The Dot Com Bubble brought us web sites that no one in their right mind would actually use, true, but now we seem to be more interested in doing things no one has ever done in a cool way. Which leads us back to my original question.

If something is cool but meaningless, I can't help but wonder whether it's necessary. I'm not saying it isn't, I'm just saying that maybe we should examine the question. Maybe cool is enough. Maybe not. But right now, it doesn't seem like anyone is asking the question at all for fear of being labeled a reactionary, or a conformist, or conservative, or whatever ugly word the Web has for people who are seemingly negative toward all innovation.

I'm not negative toward innovation. I just wonder whether creative energies aren't being directed into things which are wastes. It's not really for me to say; I'll keep using the things I use, and not using the things I don't. But bells and whistles and cool aren't enough to make me change my mind about something.