Simplification.

Hi. I thought i'd start out any discussion about Features with a sober discussion about simplicity. I'm responsible for the PublicEarth website, and so if you want to talk about features you've come to the right place. I'm going to say one thing: my background was in film editing. Making movies. And it has colored the way I develop products in general.

When you're making a movie, some director has shot maybe a hundred hours of film and you need to make a 2 hour flick out of it. Most of the editing is easy: cutting out the first 95 hours. But towards the end you might have a 3 or 4 hour movie, and the hard part kicks in. What to throw out? People often think of editing as throwing out bad stuff and keeping the good stuff. The truth is that editing is about throwing out a ton of very good stuff, in order to make the remaining stuff BETTER.

One way to make something better is just to make it simple and clear. Power users often want more and more features, but the reality is that very few people will use them, and it makes a website harder for everyone. The art is adding more powerful tools, more useful things, and removing features that are not useful or as useful.

So when you suggest a new cool thing that we should add - i'd also always be interested in what odd thing you think we should remove. Both kinds of input are important. Thanks for your feedback and suggestions.