Developers, we need to push harder

Developers, we need to push harder

I’ve been coming to the realization that we’ve come to be a bit stale, and there’s really been no true innovation on the web for quite a long time now, and it seems I’m not alone there.

Sure there’s amazing things popping up all the time, and people deserve credit for it, the envelope is even being pushed to bring about new ideas and widen the “adjacent possible“, but at the end of the day most of these amazing things are rehashes of an existing idea.

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself

— Steven Johnson – from The genius of the tinkerer

Exploring and widening the adjacent possible is crucial to the growth of the web (or anything else for that matter), and arguably anything that leaps ahead of the adjacent possible will be too distruptive and bring with it too much of a learning curve for it to be able to saturate the market and get people on board, not only that but an idea too far ahead of ti’s time may face the hurdles of also having to generate its own environment or protocols.

…But that’s absolutely no reason not to go for it.

As Paul Graham put it:

This is one of those ideas that’s like an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. On one hand, entrenched protocols are impossible to replace. On the other, it seems unlikely that people in 100 years will still be living in the same email hell we do now. And if email is going to get replaced eventually, why not now

Hopefully people can prove me wrong on that and point out some truly innovative projects, however I’ve just got a feeling that we as an industry are in a bit of a lull at the moment and simply creating tweaked services, albeit great, but not truly innovative at their core.

I’ve got a strong gut feeling that there’s something missing in social media on a massive scale, something to rival Facebook in connecting and monitoring the world but on a personal level. I just can’t quite put my finger on it. Hopefully when my “remee” arrives I’ll be able to have some chats with the greatest minds of our time and they can help me figure it all out. The problem is they’ll be part of my subconscious, but hey it’s worth a go. Who knows what could be unlocked.

I’ll leave you with one more quote

Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do

— Apple Inc.

  • http://www.nigeldunn.com Nigel Dunn

    Interesting Chris, I’ve been having a very similar discussion on Facebook regarding power (solar/nuclear/etc) and also the internal combustion engine and the fact that it essentially hasn’t changed in the last 100 years.

    I also feel that the Facebook IPO was the beginning of the Social Media dotBomb. Social media hype in the last few years has been exactly like the original hype of ecommerce and the dotcom era. I hope it doesn’t fall apart, but for me personally I feel like the writing is on the wall. I hope this comment turns out to be false and I hope to be proven wrong.

    • Chris Duell

      Add the drop in price to Zynga… and it’s at least going to scare people and make it hard for new startups to get big investment in social media apps for sure.