Don’t Hate. Innovate.
14 March 2008 – 6:55 amYou ever get the feeling that every idea in the world has been thought of already?
It happens to me every day. My brain’s always working on the next “big idea” for us to work on. Once in a while I get that killer idea that I know could be a huge success.
It happened again to me yesterday. I had an idea for a fun website. It would also make a great Facebook app. It stuck with me all day and I had sort of mapped out how the site would work in my head. I started thinking about names for the website and came up with the perfect name. The plain two-word version of that name was taken by someone doing something completely unrelated, so I changed it up into something more fun and typed it into my browser…
DAMMIT. There it was. My idea, all finished and running on the domain that I though of.
How many times has this happened to you? How do you react to this kick in the stomach? Do you drop the idea? I think most people probably do.
I was reminded today that just because a good idea has been done already, doesn’t mean that you cannot do it better.
We all know about the TinyURL service, right? You’ve got a big long URL you want to share with someone, you put it through TinyURL and they give you a nice short url that redirects to your long one. What an awesome idea. It’s been around forever. 62 million urls shortened. Why would anyone ever try to do the same thing?
That didn’t stop URLtea from trying. They do exactly the same thing but put their own spin on it. They’ve got their own take on the exact same service. In their case, you can annotate a link with a simple plain-text description on the end. And the site is prettier. Simple right? But it’s working, because I see URLtea urls around all the time now, especially on Twitter.
And just today I’ve spotted yet a third. PeaURL. Also prettier, and they’ve innovated even further. You can opt to get a readable url. So instead of gibberish, you get a url that is somewhat memorable. Again, simple, but well done. Maybe they’ll grab a share of the market that TinyURL owns, but seems to be losing grasp of.
You’ve got a great idea that’s been done before? Don’t give up on it. Just do it better.
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11 Responses to “Don’t Hate. Innovate.”
Why come up with your own idea, when you can steal someone else’s and just change it to make it better!
By Thomas Sinfield on Mar 14, 2008
jangroz.com is open….
By BPeels on Mar 14, 2008
I know that feeling all to well. Feels like someone knocked the wind out of you.
Here’s my story: http://somedirection.com/2007/05/21/missed-opportunities-compeet/
By Kyle on Mar 14, 2008
Cool thanks. I knew about twitter, but the others seem great.
I just finished a site myself.
Between work and family, I don’t get a lot of time online and responding to people on twitter usually happens all in a few minutes.
This annoys people (including myself) to see a bunch of replies from one person all at once.
In order to minimize this, I created
TwitResponse. It’s an autoresponder for twitter.
Basically it allows me to schedule posts to show on twitter.
So I can use twitter as it’s suppose to be used and also respond to others without annoying everyone!
~Shannon
http://www.twitresponse.com
By Shannon on Mar 15, 2008
Im awash with ideas myself, and finally in a position to role out a few. Some ideas that have been done over and over can be tweaked for a slightly different market segment, or adapted to a different type of revenue stream. For example some services can be adapted to an ad rev model rather than service fees.
You don’t always need to make something better to get in the market, you just have to make it more accessible.
By Steve Winterhalter on Mar 15, 2008
By BPeels on Mar 14, 2008
I know that feeling all to well. Feels like someone knocked the wind out of you.
Here’s my story: http://somedirection.com/2007/05/21/missed-opportunities-compeet/
The story really beautifull.Thanks (:
By sohpet on Mar 15, 2008
Aw man. Happens to me from time to time, but only once with the exact same url and exact same idea - it was: http://www.chipin.com
Dammit!
(they did a pretty good job though)
By George Conlow on Mar 15, 2008
For every player there ten haters ot seems now adays.
By Greg on Mar 16, 2008
Haha. Yeah originality is hard to come by, but it is out there. The world is big, so many times we don’t even get to see some of the most innovative and epic ideas out there.
Nice post bruv.
By dave on Mar 28, 2008
Man, I didn’t even know such service exist! For every problem there should be a solution, and idea, … and along with it … money.
By Maximillian Gunther on Apr 8, 2008
From Karl Fisch’ shift happen:
We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
By Akhmad Guntar on Apr 8, 2008