By K. A. Laity
The latest innovation from iTunes launched this week. Ping was supposed to revolutionize the music experience. Reviews, however, were tepid. The "social network for music" as Apple promotion called it turned out to be less social than existing networks and not integrated with them, a rather serious miscalculation. It's possible they rushed the launch to coincide with the iPod re-launch and it will improve, but for the moment, the sizzle just ain't there.
Everybody's trying to find the next big thing (remember Google's Wave and Buzz? Nah, I didn't think so), but the virtual landscape is getting littered with the bones of a whole lot of misguided attempts to be "the next _______" when that's really not what we need.
It's a business kind of outlook (and how well has that served the world lately) that seeks to dislodge a successful product by creating another version of the same with NEW and IMPROVED written across the package. It's Coke and Pepsi thinking. While slow moving organizations decide how to cope with the digital revolution that's already here, most people are just looking for fun. Think about it:
Facebook: Still the champion despite hand-wringing over privacy issues, Facebook is a secure success because it does what the people who choose to use it like: to see what everybody else is doing and share stuff that looks cool, whether it's a viral Teabonics video or your niece's wedding photos. It's instantaneous, it's multidirectional and you can jump into the water from any height and go as deep as you like.
Twitter: The Jets to Facebook's Sharks, Twitter remains the platform for people who have things to say and not much time to say it (unless they just hang out there all day long obsessively, yes some do). I'm more likely to learn news from Twitter than from anywhere else. It moves at that speed, which is why some hate it.
YouTube: The simple success of shared video (let's leave aside for the moment its shadow mate, YouPorn) has revolutionized more than our seemingly bottomless desire for pranks and cute animals. Even more than WIkipedia and Google, people use YouTube's videos to know how to do stuff or what it looks like. Moving pictures are good information.
LinkedIn: While a lot of people and companies use Facebook to promote their business interests, the truth is that LinkedIn maintains a more professional ambience. Its increased interactivity with other apps like Twitter and SlideShare has made it more nimble, too. The focus on business connection keeps the chance of embarrassing revelations by friends to a minimum (unlike Facebook), though people who link their Twitter stream to the site may want to remember that fact (yes, guilty).
The thing is we don't need replacements for any of these; they continue to morph into new functions—some successful, some not—but they're doing what people want them to do. To find the next big thing, listen to people's complaints. What don't these services do for them? What do they pine for? Look for people asking, "Is there a way to—" because what ever they're asking for is the key to the next innovation. It's in the trees, it's coming.
Here's a free tip: get women on board at the start. Barnes & Noble just realised that women were their largest customer cohort: perhaps better serving those customers wouldn't have left them in such a precarious situation. However cool developers might think something is in the abstract, if you can't get women as users in large numbers it will never achieve the monster success you aim for.
Women tend to be very busy (running businesses, caring for children, doing too much cleaning and feeling bad about their choices and derrieres). Most are not going to be impressed with abstract notions of how cool the software is (cf. the great gender divide over prog rock). Is it intuitive to use? Is the benefit of using it immediate? If not, get back to the drawing board and try again.
Image via Apple