The simple solution is always the best solution. I believe that, but it’s a tough place to get to. Simple is hard. Worse yet, it doesn’t always involve some divine prophecy. Sometimes it’s educated guesswork.

The best way to do simple is trim to the barest essentials. If something isn’t necessary, lose it. If you took out too much, add it back in.

It’s good advice for Winery Web Sites, a basic tenet of extreme programming, and could be the secret to Beethoven’s Fifth

Greg Linden (who writes about his early days at Amazon, as well as other tech-oriented topics) likes Microsoft’s new Wallop startup. Among its ideas is to automagically create a social network for a user without the task of adding friends.

Sounds like a great idea to me. It fits into my second rule for social websites.

It’s a recurring theme in Simplicity Rules, as well as elsewhere, that ideas are worthless. Thomas Warfield, a successful shareware programmer, writes about the “pitches” he receives:

Every few weeks or so, I get an email from somebody with a “Big Idea”.

They have a great idea for a game and just need a programmer to write it and market it. If they tell me their idea, they say, you can develop the game and we’ll split the profits.

(Thanks to The Wheeze for emailing this to me)

Paul Graham created the company that became Yahoo! Stores. He is now an essayist and small company funder. In Ideas for Startups, he also poo-pooed ideas alone:

… startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here’s an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

With my ideas, I have been trying to do something. I bootstrap it. If I work toward a small proof of concept, it’s no longer just an idea. And it’s instantly worth more.

It’s through doing this that I realize that most of the work and the worth is in the execution, not the idea.

Jeremy Zawodny has a very frank assessment of how Yahoo! Finance lost out to the newly-released Google Finance. The saddest part is how Yahoo! could have easily made the same innovations.

Virtually all of the new/innovative/cool features in Google Finance are things we talked about YEARS ago. Many of them I’d lobbied for repeatedly. Some were even prototyped.

Who’s gonna get “credit” for all that now?

The first thing on the list of innovations is a pretty obvious one: a ticker search that doesn’t suck. That’s probably my biggest beef with Y! Finance and it’s such an obvious addition. So, why didn’t it happen?

Well, we all have these things. It may be an idea for a whole product or a feature. Ideas are just about worthless. Sometimes I’ve tried to wait for a project to be perfect. When I realized I was going down that road with onBLOCK, that’s when I knew it was time to release.

Of course, there is a downside to releasing before you’re ready. Google has seen it happen with several of their products and the first day is tainted with instability. But if what you’ve got is good–and you’re willing to listen to what people say–it will make it past any negative first impression.

This weekend, for the first time since Netscape 2, I bothered to change the background color in my Web browser. I wanted to see how a transparent image looked without a white background. Perhaps out of ancient habit, I picked the grey that used to don blank windows of first generation web browsers.

As I’ve been browsing from site to site, I’ve noticed quite a few that don’t override the browser’s default background color. Yahoo! is the only site of the big three search engines (Google and MSN being the other two) that doesn’t explicitly switch to white. Take that as you will.

Embarrassingly, I even found a few of my sites that I meant to have white backgrounds, but hadn’t actually set them. Since few people change their default background, I probably don’t have much reason to be embarrassed, but it’s amazing how we assume that what we see is what everyone sees. (There’s a lesson outside of Web design in there, if you look for it).

So, it’s worth checking out. Maybe you could choose a better color than grey. How about pink?