Choosing Your Website Features: A checklist from hell

The industry term is "scope creep." The everyday human term is "a bunch of extra junk." Use this master list, and future predictions, to manage what you need and what will bring you value.

One of the first few questions you answer when starting a web project is what are the core features. What's our site going to do for people? The simple answer you start with usually grows into a rambling monster of: instant personal messaging, event auto-recommendations, mobile video chat, holograms and real life status pokes.

At this stage of the web game, there is in fact a suite of features that set the standard. It's hard sometimes to step back and evaluate the difference between industry baseline and creeping requests.
I thought it might be good to create a list of the top basic features; things that won't differentiate you. But the right combination, plus nailing even JUST ONE of them, just might.

This is a check list NOT to be crossed off. Your job is to choose the subset. It's the right combination of basic features, for the right people, plus of course your totally awesome new twist.

Present this list to clients and bosses carefully!

• Search
• Private Message
• Blog Posts
• Comments, Reviews
• Profile, avatar, comment wall
• Activity Feed (you and friends)
• Photos and albums
• Tagging content (contextual)
• Similar Content
• Easy signup, password retrieval
• Groups
• Voting, Up/Down
• Filtering your view (popular, friends, recent)
• Aggregating outside services
• Categorized browsing
• Private notes, contacts, data storage
• Friends/Following
• Contact Import
• SMS/email posting
• Members only area
• Forum
• Video posts and replies
• Status updates / Micro posts
• Forward and share
• Bookmarking
• Upload/storage
• Collaboration
• Wikis
• Checklist/to-do
• Events and Calendar
• RSS (push)
• Map representation of user or content
• Customizable look/layout
• Polls/survey
• Notification, digest
• Add to cart and checkout
• Embedable elsewhere widget
• Multiple languages
• Desktop/Browser tie-in

*sigh* Now try and be choosy.

Course there are some newer features, that I'm sure will be standard by 2012, when Sarah Palin runs again. Ha!

(After reading over this again, I realized I should better explain some of these.)

• Alternate discover/view mode
  (fun and interactive overviews, timelines, etc)
• Personalized recommendation, filtering
  (inferences from your settings and habits)
• Rich media meta indexing
  (cracking the audio and video meta content barrier)
• Organic data organization/clustering
  (sorting by semantic and contextual machine learning)
• Comparative aggregation tools
  (comparing large amounts of outside content)
• Mobile location check-in
  (where are you? hopefully passive listening devices)
• Location specific content
  (what and who is and was created nearby)
• Natural language interaction
  (normal text searching, applications and coding)
• Site independent conversations
  (threading and interaction across sites)
• Automatic outside social integration
  (take your identity and friends with you)
• Hovercars
  (they're already late)
• Teleportation
  (duh.)

Barring the last two, I do actually have examples. These aren't empty predictions; I'm saying these things will be standard in a few years. Their fringe now, not miracles. Here's what I mean: Vimeo toys, Digg labs, Strands, YouTube in-video linking, Google: gaudi - sets - in quotes - trends, Flickr draw searching, Pandora, MemeTracker, PowerSet, ChaCha, etc.