"What Is It You Do Again?"<p>This one is always a big pet peeve of mine. Taglines need to describe what you do, not how awesome you are. I hate seeing ones like "Together. Create. Share." or whatever. I'd much prefer "Create slideshows with a group." or something similar.
I've had this theory for a while that successful consumer-to-consumer webapps (Blogs, Forums, SNSes, etc.) are almost never well-engineered.<p>I came up with it on the cuff at a MetaFilter 10th anniversary party where Matt Haughey was mocking me back for having commented online about how shittily written his site was -- I realized that I probably wouldn't be standing there drinking his beer if he were a better programmer, the site just wouldn't have taken off when it did.<p>On the one hand you have both LiveJournal and Facebook as examples of big successful apps that were technically terrific very early -- everything else I can think of never got used.<p>On the other hand you have everything else: Frontier, Movable Type, Blogger, Wordpress, Twitter, PHPbb, vBulletin, Friendster, Myspace, MediaWiki, etc. -- all heaping piles of shit code, some of which had the grace to either be completely rewritten or abandoned en-masse for the next heaping pile.<p>It's extraordinarily difficult to execute well with users socially <i>and</i> execute well on the engineering.