Rule the World! or Acknowledging Startup Idealism and the Shift to Pragmatism

We humans love to automate stuff. It is typically not long after figuring out how to do something interesting (innovation) that we standardise the process so we can educate others (sell it), then automate that process to make life easier (costs less). From this perspective, automation is presented as an innovation dissemination mechanism. This worked great in the industrial revolution where we used machines to automate the hell out of making stuff. These days in the information age it's is all about the manipulation of information thanks to the automation of computation, and through this lens our habitat of transforming popular innovations into automation is accelerating.

I remember around 2004-2005 mashps were the popular meme. Hackers were making mashup sites, artists were mashing music (remember the Grey album), commentators were integrating them into their definitions (web as a platform), Lessig and crowd were go ape shit about copyright reform, and most importantly users were using them (well that's what every assumed). It's 3-4 years later and the innovation of mashups has been standardised (API's everyone!) and automated (e.g. pipes, mashup editor, popfly). Even scraping sites is automated! The effect? The bar is raised for mashers, mashing is easy, common, and no longer 'the thing', and there is flood of mediocre mashups out there. I would argue, the first cool mashups (using google maps, craigslist, flickr and others, I can't remember but the set of good cases was small) were not just cool because they were a new thing, they were the low hanging fruit of the mashable applications. Essentially, they were the 'good ideas', executed by creative and talented people that worked around whatever the state of things was at the time to realise their vision. The good mashups were not applications of convenience.

Other examples that come to mind are social networks and their automated construction with Ning, Wiki's and their automation with MediaWiki (and copycats), blogging, web site creation, news aggregation, so on. This effect also exists with hardware, hosting, and programming languages (so many frameworks!!!). Some automations survive because the product produced has value, many do not (I would love to see a plot of the rise and fall of programming frameworks that 'make things easier'). For example, the mashup editors, social network site builders, and wiki software will ride the popularity of the seminal instances (only a meme, myspace/facebook, wikipedia), and prey to be useful as a base component in some future useful abstraction. Once automated, the solutions produced by the process may be considered zeroth level, likely with little value other than to specialized groups. You're competitive advantage shifts to "how you use it" (the process), and there is little value in ideas alone. The process of innovation continues, where the essential useful aspects of previous innovations are retained and reformulated into something else. This (hand wavy) analysis highlights that if one has an interest in innovation that an option may be to steer clear of solution's of convenience and look for and work on: hard problems.

That's nice, but idealistic. The reality is, people are realising new and interesting ideas within "other peoples bland automated visions for products". Worse still, lots of people are doings so without any ideas at all, let alone new ideas. Case in point are the so-called script kiddies that apply automated tools for system intrusion and the array of related computer security concerns. Another cases include email spammers that have been using the same trick with minor variations for years to sell products or muster traffic, and the more recent trend of index spamming and their myriad of tricks for driving traffic to sites and collecting advertisement revenue.

The obvious misstep in what I believe is a common analysis of 'automated tools' or 'the state of current technology' by technical people (me) is that such tools can add value without being innovations evolutions or even revolutions. The value add must be assessed on the average case. Case in point is the array of open source projects with high activity with few downloads (programmers like programming), mods for computer games in the presence of standardised and automated modification (modder's like modding), and the zillions of blogs (writers like writing). The average programmer wants to scratch an itch with their open source project, not create the next MySQL, modders don't envisage becoming the next Carmack, and bloggers write for their niche without the explicit drive to become the next Scoble. Although, in these cases there may be a large sample that have this motivation (dream) to some degree (we are humans after all).

The people that create a boy scout social network on Ning aren't in it for the next big thing, they want a web environment in which to communicate with other scouts (value). The value for Ning is 185K+ similar cases, and the traffic that they drive to their web property. If the scout people in this example want to dominate the niche of scout social network sites, they need only be better relative to the other choices (I suggest that 'better' and 'choices' are hedged with 'perceived'). This applies both on this small scale, and on the biggest scale.

The lesson is that you can build a web property and rule the world, the caveat is that this struggle occur within your ecological niche. This is what it means to do what you love, or work with what you know, you must be invested. Success in this struggle is not through long jumps, although they can and do occur, instead it is through relative improvements. Relative improvements does not translate to feature bloat, although improvements can and are made through the addition of features. A mashup for example is not a long jump, API's, RSS, and scraping had been around for a while as had mashed up sites by different names, the specific popular and interesting mashups were relative improvements in that they offered a new perspective on already available although disparate information (arguably the creation of new information). The idea of mashups is a long jump as it promoted a new way of thinking about the web as a platform and resulted in the pervasive facilitation for the notion (API's everyone!).

Where to go from here? The way I see it is you can (1) use automated tools to enter an existing ecological niche, and use relative improvements to own it or (2) use whatever you can to to create an ecological niche and be the first to enter it and pick the fruit.

You know what else seems standarised and automated? Creating "web properties" and startups.