I’ve heard minecraft's success 'explained' in so many ways, from luck to marketing genius to niche appeal. Watching notch code, I think it's due more to a very competent, hardworking guy putting in an unbelievable number of hours. He just gets it done.
I still don't get the appeal of Minecraft, but clearly its creator understands the cause => effect flow of hard work, experience, and generally getting things done.
All these social networks. It’s getting out of hand. I’m not going to analyze here, I’m simply going to attempt a listing and categorization (of social things that I have personally heard of).
This is a living document. It will never be as extensive as Crunchbase or Wikipedia’s List of Social Networking Sites.
This post started out as a bit of a mental rant in response to my confusion over what to do with all of these social network invites I get. What really matters in a social network or application? I’m building one, so I better figure it out. Here is a small piece of that:
| Messaging | General | Location | Idea | Photo | News/Magazines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beluga | Glassboard | Forecast | Percolate | ||
| Foursquare | Bagcheck | Flickr | |||
| Google+ | Listgeeks | Color |
Beluga is one of those new “group messaging” apps/platforms. Bought by Facebook, now basically relaunched as Facebook Messenger. Feels like “group SMS.” Sounds useful, but it hasn’t found its way into my life even once yet. Guess I don’t hang out with enough groups.
Glassboard was just released to the public a few hours ago as I write this. Its premise – to let you share photos, videos, etc. to private groups – is boring, but Sepia Labs seems to believe that they offer the missing link of private+social.
Facebook is one you already know.
Google+ is another one you already know. To me, it’s a large-scale version of a product (group of products?) trying to bridge the privacy+social chasm. I actually find that social and privacy don’t really mix all that well.
Diaspora is a Facebook clone, only distributed (who wants the hell of server management for a social network?), and possibly more “private.” I think people will flock to this like they did to Google Wave.
Forecast “is a fun and simple way for friends to share where they’re going.” It’s like Foursquare but with “planning ahead” baked in?
Foursquare lets me check-in to real-world places or weird “events” (Snowpocalypse, Heatwavepocalypse, Please-stop-this-pocalypse) and share this knowledge with my friends. I heard it was great for finding the most popular SXSW parties in 2009 and visualizing your life and for keeping track of where you’ve been for archival purposes, like I like to do when traveling.
Percolate figures out what “people” (aka twitter follows and google reader subscriptions) are “talking about” (aka things that more than one “person” links to) and sends you a list of those things in a nice email digest format at intervals of your choosing.
Bagcheck hosts lists of gear/software/stuff that you share and compare with other people. Great execution of a limited scope project. Jerks got acquired (acq-hired?) by Twitter, so who knows where the service will go from here. They would have been (will be?) a competitor to a start-up I’m a part of, and I wish they’d have stuck it out. Lots of great ideas in there for improving “list-making” and “list-sharing,” so I’m going to miss them, even if I found the market for their service as extremely narrow and low-usefulness.
Listgeeks is a “socially-oriented platform for creating, sharing and comparing lists of things.” If I’m not mistaken, English is not the first language of this site’s developers, but wow, where is the soul of this site? Making simple text lists is super easy. Everything else? Not so much. Weird attempts at social engineering and analysis going on here.
Instagram is a photo-sharing network. Sounds boring, yeah? Well these guys are huge, and even your curmudgeonly narrator likes them. They have two products: an iPhone app and an API. And so far, their iPhone app is the only thing that’s really caught on. All it does is let you post, view, and like photos. The photos can be easily adjusted with retro-ish filters and then auto-shared to your Twitter or Facebook account. In my opinion, it was all those weird http://instagr.am/ urls in my Twitter stream that got my attention and convinced me to download their app and jump on the bandwagon.
Flickr was one of the proto-social networks. Like Instagram, they’re a photo-sharing network, but it almost seems like they stumbled into the wonders of “social” rather than targeting it as a major business goal. The word “social” appears nowhere in their about page. I would say that they succeeded because they were a great tool before they were a great network. They began taking money directly from users in exchange for more storage and features early on, unlike most social startups. That’s probably helped them last as long as they have. They’re not being sunsetted like del.icio.us… at least not yet.
Color. Awesome name, awesome domain name, completely indecipherable use case. The over-hyping (fueled mostly by the news of their massive funding dollars received before they had released a product) certainly didn’t help, but even the aesthetically-pleasing design didn’t do much to explain their product. Flopped. Visionary founders leaving. Where will this company/product go next?
Flipboard was named Apple’s iPad App of the Year in 2010 for their social news magazine that pulls in links from your social networks (and selected RSS feeds and magazines which partner with Flipboard) to provide you with a customized magazine full of news and photos you presumably care about.
via nytimes.com“You know pretty quickly, and in a very public way, whether a product is successful or not,” said Mr. Hilwa.
Similar to opening week at the movies, early reviews on the Web panning a new tablet or phone can be disastrous for its makers.
This New York Times piece makes the case for its title conclusion. My question is: does this also apply to software releases?
Does Techcrunch have the same sort of promoting power with web startups that Pitchfork has with music? How does software get that elusive traction that gives them the initial userbase needed to succeed in the long-term? How much harder is it to pivot a hardware venture versus a software venture, and is there a chance for smaller startups to enter the hardware game? Fusion Garage's JooJoo tablet didn’t have that early success. We’ll see how their recently-released “Grid” systems sell.
– Rahul Bijlani, via rahulbijlani.comA revolutionary thought! The point of my life was to enjoy it to its potential, with goals to set the direction in which I was headed.
This was my new definition of the game.
And it meant it was impossible to run out of time, because every day was a brand new opportunity to play and win.
The point being — you're not wasting your time if you're doing what makes you happy. Rahul used to worry about the goalposts always moving, making success just a new starting point for another, more impossible, farther goal which implies success.
It's often tough for me, but I've found that the best way to be happy is to look at all experiences as valuable, even your "failures".
