bubble update · 2006-01-31 09:07

I keep my ear to the ground. I check out tens of new Internet and mobile services a month. I read about even more; on sites such as my current favourite, Museum of Modern Betas, and on techcrunch, that has an evangelical furvor that is becoming unsettling.

If there isn’t a bubble, then there’s certainly a get-rich-quick fever than signals something similar is about to arrive.

I’ve seen it at the conferences recently – going from poorly attended just a year or two ago, to being filled with greyhairs chasing any geek with half a website.

And, I’m starting to get bored of it. The new sites are all me-toos. We don’t need: more search engines, more photo sharing sites, more linklogs, more AJAX email apps, more blogging sites, more calendars, more widget engines, more location based business/people/friend finders, more “Flickr for ….” schticks.

If your idea is a me-too, it’s more than likely that one of the big boys is already working on something far grander that you could even imagine. Big corporations are increasingly fast followers.

Scoble has talked about ideas being important. And they are, but the devil is always in the details. It’s surprising how many sites either have a complicated elevator pitch (if you can’t explain an idea in under 20 words, it’s probably not going to work), or so many simple usability errors that never get fixed as to think that no-one on the team is even using the site.

It’s an idea, design, implementation, and most of all, luck.

There are ways of improving luck, of course. Something that’s glossed over a lot is that sites like Flickr and delicious have been going for quite a long time. In fact, both were started at a low point in the Internet cycle, when many people thought they were crazy to be trying. But it meant that, come an upturn, they were ready with really solid, well thought out, well tested sites that people actually used.

What do I wish for? The ability to read Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the Indian languages. There are just as many sites being launched in India & Asia as in the Western world, and there’s probably some gems of ideas that would translate well (as well as hundreds of direct Flickr clones). We unfortunately tend to look inwardly, at what we can at least understand, but there are many lessons we can learn from the other side of the world, and as users, designers, or investors, it’s where we need to be looking.

A ray of light from a slightly gloomy outlook (or Outlook); I’ve found a calendaring app that isn’t just trying to be the same, and has some of the functionality I think is key. It’s called spongecell, and it has conversational entry (which is up to the point of almost working), and calendar sharing, which could be made a bit easier, but it’s getting there. One particularly nice implementation detail – the RSS feed URLs (e.g. http://spongecell.com/rss/tomorrow/antimega ), which are in as plain English as you can get.

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