I doubt this is a new trend and it doesn't seem very surprising. Being able to communicate "the point" of what you're doing to someone who doesn't know anything about it is a skill that is hard to acquire and hard to maintain for anyone.
It's important for all of us to stress its importance though. Anyone who wants to create something new probably have to constantly polish that skill.
> > the front page did not make it clear to me what the heck a Fizzgum is or why I should care
> This is a very depressing trend of late.
Yes, it's a maddening trend.
I have to evaluate many smaller company offerings and it has become crazy how most websites fail to communicate anything at all about what the product actually does.
Give me architectural diagrams and call sequences, high level API descriptions, etc. I want a page that will tell me what it actually does and what I, prospective user, need to very specifically do to use it or integrate with it. But no, none of that info is available 90+% of the time.
I blame it on how the website has transitioned from engineering to marketing. Way back, we'd get a website packed with information about what the product does and how to use it. Sure, it was ugly but whatever. I could spent 20 minutes reading and get a thorough understanding of how the product works.
Today websites are very pretty, smooth logos and lots of scrolling. But no info. Drives me crazy.
It's important for all of us to stress its importance though. Anyone who wants to create something new probably have to constantly polish that skill.
For Fizzygum I did find a good intro video one click from the front page though: http://fizzygum.org/docs/intro/