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What a stupid idea

dcurt.is

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Re: What a stupid idea

#81

Post by codyko »

greghinch wrote: post #32

Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users. I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my…

Lagging?? Vine has grown fastest out of all of the social networks you mentioned within my group of non-techie friends. All I see on my Twitter feed is Vine links. All anyone talks about in person is whether we're going to 'Vine' whatever we're doing. Maybe this is just my group of friends though (early 20s).

Will Sasso alone has over 250k followers and the app has been live for like, a little over two months now? I'd say it's growing pretty rapidly.

Re: What a stupid idea

#82

Post by pseut »

jere wrote: post #29

>I want to make an app for browsing catalogs. It's like a fashion catalog, but you can organize and share outfits Is this really a fair description of Pinterest today though? Maybe as originally described it is a dumb idea. Vine, on the other hand, is really awesome and Curtis saw it right then, but was more worried about how it would find popularity rather than whether it was a "good" idea.

That seems to be pretty much how my wife uses pinterest. Outfits and gardening.

Re: What a stupid idea

#83

Post by amalag »

joelandren wrote: post #59
bsimpson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The examples you listed died because of marketing, more than technology. Wave was essentially a social network that your friends couldn't get invites for if they wanted. It was a hugely hyped ghost-town. Wave was a tech preview because it was ungodly slow and made some questionable UX decisions (like badly reimplementing the scroll bar) - Google would have been embarrassed to call it a fully-fledged product. At the s…

Google Wave didn't die because of marketing. It died because it was sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.

It died because even techies couldn't figure it out

Re: What a stupid idea

#85

Post by mehrzad »

greghinch wrote: post #32

Ha, I still think Vine and Pinterest are stupid ideas. But, Pinterest at least has done a good job at making lazy, vapid, narcissism easy, and there's certainly demand for that. Not sure how you monetize it (is Pinterest?), but they have a lot of users. I'm not sure Vine is yet a "success". I don't see a lot of activity there yet. My (completely biased and limited) litmus test for social apps is to see how many of my…

Vine is a good idea and doesn't really infringe on your privacy so I approve of it. Pinterest is just pointless.

Re: What a stupid idea

#86

Post by RyJones »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #12

Of course, the flipside is maybe more dangerous. "Hey, this sounds like a really stupid idea... then again, I thought pinterest sounded stupid too, and look how that turned out. Ok dubious business opportunity, here's my time/money!" I'm being facetious of course, but the best deals are often the ones you don't make. The real question is how much of an impact an anomalous success story should have on the way you eval…

Got animal house made.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077975/trivia?item=tr0781514

Re: What a stupid idea

#87

Post by derefr »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #23
ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

In 1978 I thought Bill Gates trying to sell BASIC interpreters for what was 90% of the cost of the computer to run them was a pretty stupid idea :-) That said, one of my VC friends defines an Entrepreneur as someone who can take a stupid idea and make it successful. Sort of an homage to the whole idea that they can see something you cannot. These days when I'm confronted by this sort of proposal I ask the person maki…

I thought bottled water was idiotic "Who's gonna pay that for water ? ! ? Gone in six months." And phone sex lines. "1.99$ first minute, $.99 each additional minute? Please!" In six months their rates doubled. Business models can be hard to judge.

Both of those are very well-studied business models, though:

1. sell to the lonely and impulsive who are willing to trade money for attention (Also see: therapists, people who run cons on the elderly, everything else involving real interaction with a woman in the sex industry); additionally, take advantage of the sunk-cost bias to keep people after they would have otherwise "passed their limit" (Also see: casinos)

2. run advertising campaigns that separate the world into "good/beautiful/healthy/upper-class people" and "bad/ugly/disgusting/lower-class people" by which kind of products they use, then position yourself as the most convenient/eminently-consumable product in the "good people" product class. (Also see: deodorant, diamonds, hybrid cars)

Re: What a stupid idea

#88

Post by bane »

marssaxman wrote: post #78
joelandren wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Wave didn't die because of marketing. It died because it was sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow.

My problem with Wave was not that it was slow, but that it made me feel slow. I never got my head around the concept - I was never sure what it was trying to do, or why you would want to use it to do that. It felt like a tool designed by super-geniuses for other super-geniuses, something I was just too dumb to understand. I've heard many people say things like that about various computing-related technologies over th…

I thought Wave sounded amazing when it was first announced. When I finally got an invite to it, I have to admit, I was deeply underwhelmed with the user-facing implementation. It's probably the slowest, least responsive, web app I've ever used. It also felt way over engineered, with far too many unrefined ideas crammed into it.

That being said, I ended up being a big fan of it, hoping Google would eventually get around to fixing some of the obvious issues (they mostly didn't, though it did get slightly more responsive before it died).

Why was I fan? I didn't think of Wave as a thing to do, like Twitter (you tweet), or Facebook (you friend and post), or a blog (you write a journal)...there never was a way to "Wave", just like there isn't one way to "e-mail". It was just a new set of communication tools that you could assemble however you wanted.

It's no different than using e-mail to plan a party in one case or send photos to your mom in another case or applying for a job in another. E-mail is just a tool, the use-cases fall out of how you use that tool.

For some reason Wave seemed to look like a solution in search of a problem, but I ended up finding several existing things that were better solved in Wave than with the existing workflows. The most notable was organizing a group around collaboratively writing a large document. Structured correctly and the work just kind of "fell out".

The mistake with trying to use Wave was always in trying to use all of the features in Wave.

I really miss it and am very glad to see bits and pieces of the idea slowly percolating into other Google products (Drive for example).

Re: What a stupid idea

#90

Post by pfitzsimmons »

sramsay wrote: post #60

I more often experience the facepalm of watching an uncomplicated idea turn into a global sensation. It's 2005 (hardly the distant technological past), and someone gets the idea for a site where you can store and watch videos. This is not some kind of radical technological innovation. This is not something beyond the ambit of current capabilities. This is not some brazen insight into the future. This is a site. Where…

Well, to be sure the magic ingredient in Youtube's success was not the idea of uploading and watching videos. Many people were working on video sharing at that time (myself included). Youtube's secret was that the founders were already successful entrepreneurs who were well connected to VC's. Thus they had access to the capital that allowed them to lose ungodly amounts of money in the quest for growth.
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