We’ve been busy at 20FourLabs. The division was created about 200 days ago to build new web applications, with a particular focus on social and mobile applications. There are around 30 major projects on the go, some of them mentioned here — of which around about 14 have been completed. Labs now consists of 34 talented web professionals, with a product manager and developer-centric focus, with key roles played by community managers.

Keep it simple

The idea behind labs was to simplify the process of building websites and web applications. Corporates tend to over-complicate things. It’s called bureaucracy. Unfortunately, whether you like it or not, it’s a necessary evil when you’re dealing with complex sites and systems of scale involving many dimensions and many people. Here, processes are important and are entirely necessary to manage scale.

But most websites don’t start off as large complex beasts, instantly with big audiences and numbers. They start off as simple projects and evolve. At the early stage, complex processes will just drag a project down, kill it’s momentum and make it expensive. So when you’re in the emergent phases of web development, a corporate culture isn’t an appropriate culture.

You need to build web applications rapidly. You need to favour results over process. You need to cut corners if you have to. And you need to get the job done. The idea here is to keep the cost of production down by keeping things simple. By keeping the cost of production low, you minimise your cost of failure. By minimising your cost of failure, you create an environment which is not risk-averse, but open to experimentation. This is what we’re trying to do at 20FourLabs.

But this is actually obvious. It’s the reason why three guys in a garage can build a web application at 1/50th of the cost and time than a corporate giant with virtually unlimited capacity. That website to emerge from the garage may not be perfect, and will most likely need rebuilding in a few years time – but it’s done the job and launched the business. We’re still getting it right at 20FourLabs and find we have to constantly fight our own instincts to over-complicate or over-manage by creating too many processes and controls.

Imminent launches

Our imminent launches include our new Afridoctor Nokia app, the new 24.com & 24.mobi, Letterdash Phase 2 and the News24 J2me app.

We’re entering Afridoctor into the Nokia Application competition. It’s a joint project between Labs, Bradley Voges and Werner Erasmus at Blueworld, the Health24.com guys and an external development company. The app came about as a result of a competition we held in labs to see who could come up with the best ideas for an app. People were divided into groups to brainstorm, and of the 15 well-thought out ideas, Afridoctor prevailed. Should we win, the prize money will be split amongst the department. Bradley has promised me a blog post explaining more about Afridoctor, to be posted here soon. Our other apps include the News24 apps for iPhone and Android — and the soon-to-be released J2ME app with a strong focus on encouraging users to be citizen photographers for the site.

The other major project is the new 24.com and 24.mobi. We’re creating a cross-platform web and mobile site that is widget based. We’re following UWA widget standards and we’re going to be aggregating everyone, including our competitors. It’s a dramatic departure from the old 24.com which was mainly an internally-focused publishing site. It’s not an iGoogle and it’s not pageFlakes, but will evolve into something quite different. We got a hot domain, we might as well use it.

The other major project is Letterdash. We’re still not happy with Letterdash, but it’s a significant improvement over its predecessor. The next phase of Letterdash sees it go social, with a more intuitive and centralised dashboard.

Projects on the go

Flirtaroo is our cross-platform dating site, monetised via premium SMS micropayments. The site is doing well and now that we have the basics in place, we’ve been able to look at some innovations and really begin to take it in a unique direction.

Other projects include mobiganic.com, a mobile CMS we’re doing together with an external partner that facilitates cross-site content and widget sharing. In collaboration with Blueworld we’re working on a Twitter aggregator, a niche social network play and a News24 air app that also aggregates your personal social network news. In collaboration with the 24.com development team, headed up by Tim Gregory, we’re revamping the publishing mobile sites, which includes an ambitious content personalisation scheme.

The Hub

The big project of course is The Hub — now being run by Stefano Sessa. It tests the idea that all websites are in fact social networks. Every website or business has a natural network around them. What most websites fail to do is capture or formalise that network efficiently. The Hub therefore is a social network around a content publishing site, designed to capture the natural networks that exist around publishing sites. It’s magic works in the comments area of most articles. The Hub plugs in here and raises the level of interaction between users. Users can follow each other, chat to each other and find out more about each other. They can also spin debates off into other areas, which we’re calling Hubs.