Bring it to the People
I’ve been thinking about what kinds of technologies have been extremely effective in the last several years. I had also heard some things about this on a couple podcasts… I can’t remember which.
The kinds of things that do well are things that “bring it to the people”.
eBay – sell it yourself
Amazon – trusting in the recommendations of other purchasers
blogging – lee.org/blog, boingboing – indivuals and little guys as news & entertainment sources and sources of discussion.
music file sharing – people exchanging popular music freely (of course, saving money by stealing is also a factor here)
podcasting – Adam Curry Daily Source Code – individuals as audio program sources
video podcasting – Rocketboom, Michael Verde – written by individuals and little businesses
social networks – Friendster, Match.com, Tribe – people meeting people
Craigslist – The newspaper classified ad killer… written and edited by its users
wikipedia – written and edited by its users
Open source software – written and modified by its users
XML – “extensible” is in its name. It’s designed to be added to.
Direct to consumer advertising of pharmacuticals
I suppose an obvious omission is Google as a search engine. That’s the tasty school glue that holds loose collaberation together… and when Googlezon gets going, it will be all about the people again.
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So, our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to find or create the next “take it to the people” application. It doesn’t take a billion dollar company to make this happen. Actually, taking a look at all those trends above, I noticed that none of them existed 10 years ago. So, what do you say? Wanna brainstorm?