Shorter and sweeter than Cluetrain , Charlie’s compiled a list [1] that defines not just a new era in application development, but also a dynamic new way companies can relate to their customers, prospects and voyeurs.

37signals is applying these principals to book publishing ; TextDrive is applying them to hosting.

Many say that for this approach to work, you have to have a great product. That’s true, but not in the traditional way.

TextDrive has had terrible uptime—on the face of it, their product has been anything but stellar. But in big and small ways they’ve built a relationship with their customers, and we’re rooting them on this weekend in their move to new hosting facilities.

Invariably the pitch isn’t “hey, do x better with our software.” It’s more like “hey, we have this idea about how to do x better, and we’ve built some stuff around it. Help us make it great.”

TextDrive can get away with their terrible performance so far because

they’re strongly in support of a particularly hot community and they have some great ideas to improve on commodity hosting (e.g. TextPanel). Certainly not because they have fantastic uptime.

A hook in your product is a prerequisite (innovative user interfaces will get you halfway there these days). [2]

But more importantly, you have to deliver on user involvement.

In short, whether it’s software development, book publishing or hosting, the 10-steps are redefining product-customer relationships and showing us new possibilities. Customers are being enabled to become fans, to root for the folks behind the curtain and be involved in the development of the product, to see our contribution help it evolve in front of your eyes.

I’m particularly interested, for my company in how these can be applied not to the del.icio.us crowd, but to old-school Web 0.5 folks.

1 This is a summary of the whole list

1. Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you’re trying to solve.
2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product.
3. Launch. Now. Tomorrow. Every day. Don’t wait until its perfect to put it out in the open.
4. Distribute. Distribute. Distribute. Don’t force your users to play on your site in a walled garden.
5. Don’t hold users against their will. If they want to leave, let them pick up with all of the content they created while they were on your site and leave…
6. Be mindnumbingly simple.
7. Get people hooked on free.
8. Don’t waste any money on marketing. Word of mouth has never ever been easier or less expensive in the history of human communication.
9. Don’t overfund.
10. No one sucks.

2 In basecamp’s case, they had three hooks that were bigger than most, all of which appealed directly to the right “chatty class” for their product:

1. A breakthrough user interface
2. The extracting of Ruby on Rails, an elegant, innovative application framework
3. Thinking about project management as communication rather than command and control