“What will we see coming out of App Inventor? Probably lots of junk, but does that matter? In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky talks about the “stupidest possible creative act,” which he associates with LOLcats. What Clay realizes, and what Google realizes, is that the “stupidest possible creative act” is much better than no creative act at all, or limiting creativity to a small elite. A world full of LOLcats is preferable to a world full of network sitcoms. The history of creativity is filled with lots of trash; but in a weird way, the trash enables the truly great creative works to come into being. You can’t have one without the other.” —
App Inventor and the culture wars - O’Reilly Radar (via bijan)
The creation of online social entertainment is a war against television. You are not taking way 10 minutes of quality time with the kids, you are freeing someone from 10 minutes of soap operas.
This American team, in all fairness, played well above their talent level this World Cup. The 2002 squad that reached the Quarterfinals was a much more well rounded team with several players, including Kasey Keller in goal, at their peak.
This 2010 squad had virtually no back line (save Cherundolo and the injured Onyewu who wasn’t ready to return so was removed) and no front line (the 19-year old Altidore gets credit for trying but doesn’t have the poise yet). Still, they found the fight to top their group and showed amazing resolve.
More important than repeating the ‘02 run to the Quarterfinals, I think the U.S. team did something that will last forever - they cemented the cultural identity of the American squad. This is now and perhaps forevermore the team that never quits. Here’s hoping that Donavan and Dempsey (my favorite player) will still have the fitness to get in another World Cup - it’ll be even better in four years.
“I was surprised, I was surprised about games. I had a conversation with some folks at Apple at one point, and they were surprised that games was the big thing on the iPhone too. I also heard anecdotally that the people making the first PC operating systems were surprised that games were that big too. So I think people build platforms for utilitarian purposes and then get surprised that games are a killer app, so I don’t think it’s uncommon.” — Mark Zuckerberg on games… he’s come a long way in the last 24 months.
“Don’t be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that’s a good sign. That’s probably why everyone else has been overlooking the idea. The first microcomputers were dismissed as toys. And the first planes, and the first cars. At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.” —
What he said.
Paul Graham - Organic Startup Ideas
Searching for something completely different and came across this quote from Elan Musk (co-founder of PayPal) years ago:
Certainly, the idea of transferring money by entering an email address was originated by neither X nor Confinity. Billpoint (acquired by eBay in 1999) and Danny Shader’s Accept (acquired by Amazon in 1999) were both there almost a year earlier. There were also many well funded competitors along the way, such as Citigroup, who spent hundreds of millions on their c2it email payment service, including exclusive distribution deals with MSN and AOL. There was BancOne’s emoneymail, Yahoo’s PayDirect, Western Union’s BidPay, etc.
Just a thought (balancing, perhaps, some earlier posts):
What’s more important, spending your time finding the market/problem that no one is looking at or finding a competitive advantage in a big market?
There is a raging debate in video games about social gaming. The success of Farmville and other social games have many in the traditional game industry angry and upset. Tempers have flared about whether social game designers have any morals, questioning if creators have any interest in bringing joy, and whether they are trying to advance the medium at all or just fleecing players. Soren wrote a great rundown in Fear and Loathing in Farmville about how this came to a head at the Game Developers Conference a few weeks ago.
This smacks to me of a very typical debate between progressives and conservatives.
Conservatives want to perserve the status quo, feel scared that change is going to destroy the ethical underpinnings that have so carefully constructed, and tend to focus on the negative aspects of that change versus seeing it as a process. “They have no moral center!” they cry.
Progressives tend to feel that any change is better than stasis, that whatever problems exist will get worked out over time, and the current system was too broken to worry about preserving anyway. “We have found a better way,” they cry.
In life, I generally find myself on the side of progressives, and I do here as well. That said, there is a long discipline of game design knowledge and we should be careful of throwing out the baby with the bath water. We have found metrics can make a real substantial difference in game design and its evolution, but they can’t tell you what to do, only measure what you have done. And while Farmville does seem borderline exploitative at times, I also am amazed at how quickly the industry has evolved. Just two years ago a “game” on Facebook was a Scrabble knockoff and Vampires, which was a glorified poking application. It also is interesting to hear traditionally gamers decrying social games as the perfect skinner box when traditional media has been throwing the “addicting” label on traditional games for 30 years now.
Farmville in the years to come will look like PacMac does now, something those players loved at the time but feels antiquated compared to how far social games have come since then. That kind of rapid evolution and change excites me, and is something we are happy to contribute to.
I have two relatives who have spent the better part of the last two years without health care. Both are over the age of 50, have worked hard their entire life, and are single. The first has had serious trouble getting health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The second can’t afford it because she’s been in and out of work so often and health care is so tied to employment based coverage.
I’ve been tracking this health care reform bill, but really only in an “inside baseball” kind of way - “will it pass” or “won’t it.” The actual particulars of the bill largely escape me, except to know that it is most obviously not socialized medicine, and that it also is nowhere near the bill Obama and many dems wanted when they started.
It looks like for one of my relatives her world has changed, she will now be able to get health care without the same difficulties she had just a few weeks ago. That is real, substantive change in millions of people’s lives for the better. For the other relative, there is still more to do.
The Case for the Fat Start-Up -
The blogsphere has been serving up a healthy dose of obvious for the last couple months. So it’s easy to recommend this counter-trend article from Ben Horowitz.
if you don’t work with awesome artists who can decorate your walls like this, try Blik.
Since the beginning of the web, search engines have represented the center point of a users experience with the Internet. I think (and I’m not the only one) that this long-standing trueism may no longer hold. This hasn’t happened since the web overtook AOL, Compuserve, and others, so of course there are many skeptics. But in December Facebook had more traffic than all the Google properties combined. And today the Chronicle wrote about how mainstream news sites are seeing, for the first time, more traffic coming from Facebook than Google.
Being “downstream” of Google has never been contentious - you build a web page and you need to show up on search engines because that’s how people find things on the Internet! Being “downstream” of Facebook has always carried a lot more baggage.
With Facebook, you hear comments that you would never hear about the general web. Things like, “this category is really just for late stage companies,” or the concept of “social network fatigue.” Like there is “web fatigue” or that a category on the general internet would be closed off to a new, innovative, startup. That’s ridiculous.
Of course, the tricks of the trade that worked two years ago have changed, but that is pretty much true everywhere. This was really brought home when a fellow entrepreneur mentioned the other day that Google makes it near impossible for startups to enter a category in SEO. Due to the way Google values “link-aging” and massive sites linking to each other, incumbents are at a massive advantage. In addition, thanks to the mass number of keyword arbitragers, Adwords is no longer the low-cost targetted channel it used to be.
So just for fun, let’s look at what is actually different when you build with Google (ie search) versus Facebook (ie social networks) in mind.
If you’re building your product for Google:
If you’re building your product for Facebook:
Here’s the way I see it. Lots of tactics work no matter which you are building for. You can ask for an email address on Facebook or the web. You can charge with paypal or credit cards, etc. It still boils down to whether you are building a great product people want, and that they want to pay for.
My experience in a previous startup selling consumer products at retail has made me think of any “platform” as ostensibly a channel for users. The caveat to all of this is to be careful about how reliant your are on any single channel, whether Facebook or Walmart. I’ve heard of a single Google recalibration to page-rank knocking traffic by 30% or more, and I’ve heard similar about Facebook.
But that doesn’t always mean the most open channel wins, it is often the opposite. The iPhone is much more strict than Android, yet you would likely still pick the iPhone because of the growth of that platform. And the iPhone platform is much more onerous than Facebook in most regards. If you are focusing on “growth” (and who isn’t) - Facebook can’t be beat in the current ecosystem.