The next Web revolution

The Web celebrates its 10th anniversary and it's still a pain to use -- clunky, slow and unresponsive. But thanks to creative small companies like Chicago's 37 Signals, the Web is finally becoming as fun and flexible as your favorite software.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: Technology & Business, World Wide Web, Farhad Manjoo

Aug. 10, 2005 | Odes to the World Wide Web inevitably burst with superlatives. The Web is the biggest, the fastest, the most addictive thing ever. The Web will revolutionize this, supplant that. The Web will set you up on the best date you ever had and the sex will be out of this world. Just now, as we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the day the letters "WWW" hit the big time -- Netscape went public on NASDAQ on Aug. 9, 1995 -- the superlatives are flying particularly fast. In the August issue of Wired, founding editor Kevin Kelly predicts that 3,000 years from now, people will regard the development of the Web as a pivotal moment in human history, as important as the advent of American democracy and the world's major religions. "This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet," he writes.

Boosters like Kelly are no doubt on to something; taking the long view, the Web may well alter the course of history. But let's cast a frank eye on the present day's surf report, shall we? The Web at age 10 is a pain. Precious little online works as well as it should. Compared to the speed of desktop software -- such as your e-mail program, or iTunes -- using many Web sites, even the biggest and most popular, is like swimming through mud. Think about the features you take for granted in iTunes: buttons that respond as soon as you click them (not five seconds later), a search bar that begins to work at the instant you type, playlists that can be rearranged by dragging and dropping. Almost nothing online works as naturally; you wouldn't even dream of managing your music with a Web tool. On the Web, to attempt anything complex -- even to write a blog post -- is to flirt with disaster, or at least annoyance.

Yet I aim not to gripe, but to offer hope. In recent weeks, I've been talking to many clever people who are using creative programming techniques to build a better World Wide Web. The online experience they envision is more responsive than the Web we use today, and it's more useful and fun, too. On this better Web, you can drag and drop items to rearrange them, see a search box fill up while you type a query, and prompt an action as soon as you press a button. The model works, in other words, as intuitively as the best software in our lives. You've likely seen bits of it already. These new techniques power Gmail, Google's fine Web e-mail system, allow you to drag maps in Google Maps, annotate pictures in Flickr, and use your mouse to reorder your movie queue in Netflix.

In addition to better software, I discovered something else about the new Web: Creativity is back. The idea that the Web is a giant get-rich-quick vehicle no longer pervades the business. Instead, recalling the mid-1990s, a host of truly talented people are looking at the Web as a canvas for their creativity. And there's one small company that's emblematic of this effort to build better applications, and, indeed, is pioneering an entire business philosophy designed to make the Web great. The firm is called 37 Signals, and if you've never heard of it, don't worry. You're likely to start using its software any day now.

37 Signals is named after the number of radio waves we've received from space that scientists consider potential signals of intelligent life. Its creators build the kind of applications you didn't know you needed until you use them for the first time, at which point you wonder how you ever did without. Last year the company created Basecamp, a Web-based project-management tool unlike any project-management tool before it. If you've got a many-person task to do -- any big project, from redecorating your house to redesigning your home page, planning your wedding to planning your wake -- Basecamp gives all participants a central spot on the Web in which to plan and discuss the endeavor. The software has been adopted by hundreds of advertising firms, law firms, Web designers and book publishers.

More recently, 37 Signals launched Backpack, a program that does just what its name suggests -- it gives users an easy, casual storage location on the Web, a place to scratch down important notes, draw up to-do lists, and store important files organized around specific tasks (say, all the stuff you need for a business trip). The Wall Street Journal has praised Backpack as the best tool of its kind, and perhaps more important, bloggers have been jumping for joy over it. Lifehacker, a blog that offers tips to help keep your life in order, calls the software "a perfect online replacement (or supplement) to that fancy notebook you've been scribbling in."

Basecamp and Backpack represent the future of software on the Web not just because they're elegant, easy-to-use programs that will likely make your life better. The two applications are also interesting because they were created in a novel way, using a new programming model that allowed 37 Signals to build each program very quickly, and with very few people. Indeed, this method of creating applications -- doing it fast and on a tight budget -- might well be called 37 Signal's animating philosophy, its central mission.

"We have this big thing about embracing constraints," says Jason Fried, the company's founder. "When you have constraints -- less time, less money -- people care about every dollar they spend. Customers ask us, 'How does Basecamp compare with other project-management tools?' We say it does less. Our products do less, and that's why they're successful. People don't want bloated products, and constraints force us to keep our products small, and to keep them valuable."

Next page: How 37 Signals' less-is-more philosophy led to its breakthroughs