by Malcolm Toogood

Created on: April 27, 2009   Last Updated: April 29, 2009

Every top business starts with a great idea, and websites are no exception. In fact these days, a website that starts as just a great idea can often develop into a top business. Prime examples of this phenomenon would be Amazon, eBay, YouTube and Facebook. The question is, could Helium make it to that stratospheric level, or perhaps more to the point, would its members want it to?

When a website begins to take-off, it is difficult for the owners to gauge which criteria best show when it will reach that tipover point from popularity as a cultural phenomenon to a self-generating global business. For a retailer, like Amazon, that criteria was probably sales turnover; for a service business, such as eBay, it may have been advertising revenue. For a social site, like YouTube, I suspect it was the day when they received an offer they couldn't refuse from another on-line business that had already gone global.

From a user's point of view, however, the nature of the site makes little difference to their experience. It is always crystal clear to any user when a website has tipped-over, because it is the point when the fun derived from visiting the site becomes inversely proportional to the tedium of actually using it. This can happen for various reasons.

Developers often lose the perspective that it was the nature or subject matter of the site that attracted all those registered users in the first place. Heaven forbid that the site could work so well straight from the box, because if it did, then they would be out of a job. So the perception is created that users only come to a site because it is constantly changing. Once their masters have swallowed that concept, then the developers have no choice but to constantly change it, and so it is the aesthetic that becomes the driving force. Form over function; change for change's sake. An example of this would be Facebook who, heavily criticised by some user groups for their September makeover in 2008, decided that, rather than simply go back to the popular old version, they would do another complete revamp barely six months later. The result was universal criticism right across the community.

In some cases the lawyers take over the asylum, and find ever more reasons why usage cannot be achieved without the need to impose increasingly bureaucratic regulations and petty rules for usage, ruthlessly policed. eBay, who are a prime example of this, recently overhauled their ground-breaking feedback system, the factor cited by many

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