The designer may work tirelessly to create an elegant, highly-crafted auction site, but that isn’t sufficient for success when the incumbent you are competing against has strong network effects in their favor. In addition to having a great product, you need a distribution strategy that can solve your “chicken and egg” or “cold start” problem.
Good design is crucial, but it’s only one of many parts that make a product successful.
True words from Joel Hladecek about the whole “Skeuomorphic VS Flat Design” Debate.
Essentially, every user interface on Earth is ornamentally referencing and representing other unrelated materials, interfaces and elements. The only questions are: what’s it representing, and by how much?
Why Apple’s Interfaces Will Be Skeuomorphic Forever, And Why Yours Will Be Too
There was a lot of rumble when Instagram changed their licensing somewhen last year. I never used Instagram for myself, but i know that a lot of creative people left frustrated because of that. Some of them completely stopped sharing images on social networks, some where moving (back) to flickr or to 500px, which might be somewhat better in terms of licensing, but still are third party solution.
I thought there has to be a way to solve this with WordPress and searched for Apps/Plugins etc. but i couldn’t find what i was looking for. If there only was an app, kind of like Instagram or flickr, which would let us connect and share our images directly to our own WordPress Installations, instead of a third party service. It would let us build our own Photo Stream, our own Instagrams, completely self-controlled and not depending on someone else. It would be awesome.
Josh Long an Drew Wilson made a very good example of “executing” when they wrote a whole book about executing in only 8 days from idea to finish. It’s a long time ago since i read a complete book on one day and i really enjoyed it. It’s fascinating to see how something as awesome as Space Box was built in just five days and learn a little bit about the mindset of the developer behind it, Drew Wilson. I honestly didn’t expected that much of inspiration from this book and i can definitely recommend to read it.
I’ll share some thoughts i had while and after reading this book.
There are decentralized alternatives to any of the services and platforms above. Self-hosted, open source solutions. But hardly anybody uses them. They will forever rot in the forgotten world of nerd tools on SourceForge, BitBucket or GitHub. A few idealists may try to give them a chance and probably will give up sooner or later, realizing that it’s all about global adoption.
But does this really mean that a more open, decentralized approach to a social web and all these tools we use will always be doomed to fail? I don’t think so. It’s up to us. We have the chance to make a big impact on the future of the web.
I just recently played around a bit with app.net, and i loved the decentralized idea behind tent.io when i read about it. But many of those tools are too complicated and too geeky for normal users to use today.
Bastian Allgeier did a very good job in not only pointing out problems we have today but also a solution which might not be a reality in a few weeks or months, but could definitely be possible. I would love to see something like this becoming a reality. And i’m sure it will, in some form or another!