Originality is (Brain) Dead

Author: Jay | Posted: October 16, 2008 at 11:24 am |

16 Oct

Well, not really dead.

The patient is still still alive, but it’s on life support.

When I look around at the web, which appears to be more & more a reflection of overall western society, I see that every “new idea” brought forth is rehashed from someone else’s idea, or a “mashup” or it’s “Web 2.0″ when, in fact, it’s just the same “Web 1.0″ that’s been around since the 90s but now it’s being fully utilized. It’s just that all the web browsers have finally caught up.

Every site with any level of membership site wants to be a “social media” site. If you’re YouTube, you want to do what Facebook does. If you’re MySpace, you want to immitate Facebook. If you’re Facebook, you want to be YouTube. Everybody has to have an interconnected “friend network”. Seriously, how many “friend networks” do people really need to be on?

Everytime a friend signs on to yet another wanna-be friend network of any size or kind, we all get notices and alerts in our inbox begging us to join, too. Just pick a couple big ones and be done with it. if somethign better comes along, fine, but nothing better is coming along, it’s all just a crap shoot of immitation.

What I’ve found is that everyone and their distant cousin wants to strike it rich with the next big Web idea yet the first thing everyone does is simply copy another big successful site or model. That’s just plain stupid.

2 years ago, there were many 3 or 4 social bookmarking sites total. Now there are nearly 100. Guess what? Only 2 of those “extra” ones offer anything of differentiated value which is incrementally better than the original 3 or 4. The rest are total crap because they are pale immitations.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a communist. I’m all for as much variety in life as possible. But to all those wanna-be immitators: come up with a BETTER IDEA. If you’re going to be lazy and emulate the good ideas of others, at the very least, DO IT BETTER and DIFFERENTIATE. Even better, simply come up with a FRESH IDEA.