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Sharing The Idea

In Startup on 20 October 2008 with Comments

Startup Ideas
Every founder is protective over his ideas, and he has every reason to be. For example, Steve Jobs will let Microsoft down for supposedly taking the GUI. Thinking of an idea is hard and many founders believe that they are the only ones working their ideas. More often than not, there is another founder thinking exactly the same thing. Naturally, I would feel the same way, but a part of me also knows that great work also come from collaboration and feedback.

One person believes in sharing the idea is Jyri Engeström, founder of Jaiku, now part of Google. When I spoke to him during Gigaom’s Mobilize conference, he told me basically got his startup off the ground by posting his idea on his blog. He shared his idea, people thought it was cool and joined. His logic was simple: it’s the execution, not the idea. If someone really wanted to copy you, it’s going to happen. Moreover, if someone was working on the same idea, it’s better to know now than to find out cluelessly after months of hard work. TechCrunch took a similar approach with its $200 laptop endeavor.

I’m not sure how comfortable I’d feel about going public with ideas from very beginning, but what the hell. In spirit of the post, I figured I’d throw out an idea I’ve been thinking about.

Meeting Strangers. Facebook is good for managing all your real life friends, but not so good at meeting new people. MySpace is more suited for it, but still awkward and not meaningful. Currently, only dating sites seem to dominate this category. However, if you think about it, we are already meeting people online, just not through any one destination sites. One example is bloggers. You think Robert Scoble got to know Dave Winer just randomly? No, they blogged about each other and then started communicating through other methods.

My vision is not to make a centralized social network, but to make a decentralized network that helps people engage in one another. I am not interested in a Robert Scoble’s profile pic, I’m interested in his online activity: his blog, his flickr, his facebook. I want to build a widget that you can plug into any site, allowing to network to any other site with that widget. It seems like Deluux might be doing something similar, and if they are, awesome. I want to be able to discover other small bloggers who are interested in tech. Or, I want to find a person who chat with about photography and DSLR’s. Almost like a discovery network. As you can see, it’s all brainstorming right now, but I would love to hear some input; don’t be all secretive.

I’d like to invite anyone interested to contact me or leave a comment. We can get a virtual team to work on it for fun.


Viewing 9 Comments

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    If I am getting your idea right, then probably http://www.everytalks.com is right the "system" which you are describing. We are working on it, and just recently launched in very "silent" beta release, as we are still trying to figure out how to do things better. I'll be more than welcome to chat with you (olexiy@everytalks.com) about it.
    As an overview, what we are doing is creating place where you can meet friends or dates :-) It's like bringing dating in social networks, and like connecting social networks for friends. It's exactly the place which does not require you to register there, do anything else, but use your existing profile and write/talk/chat/ask/.. with people according the interests you specify.
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    FriendFeed?
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    I think there is a hump between the idea and having some sort of prototype (or even pseudo-code). It's easy to throw an idea out, but it's been my experience that digging into the details is when you get the passer-bys to stop.

    For example -- there are lots of foundational blocks that you could use to achieve your goals -- mybloglog, friendfeed, plaxo, etc. Can you think of a way to leverage these networks without introducing _another_ network/profile to the mix?

    Overall I think it's a great start, but spend some time fleshing it out to give the opinionated people out there something to polarize over.
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    Yea, definitely. I didn't get too specific because frankly I don't really have an answer.

    I'm thinking of different ways to analyze people to help discovery. One way might be like PeopleRank (instead of PageRank). Look at a person's twitter's followers vs. amount of people he's following. Look at his blog and his comments. See which people are talking about the same thing you are across the same websites.
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    Cool, I like that line of thinking. I recall that someone tried
    tackling this (PeopleRank) a few years ago but the whole "river of
    news" meme wasn't out there yet. I'm also remembering a great script
    that would look at your delicious tags to see how you matched up with
    other users. It even broke it down into how ahead of the curve you
    were vis-a-vis breaking stories.

    I love disqus for the ability to capture comments in a central place
    -- seems like someone could extend this to general link sharing and
    browsing to get an idea of where the natural connections are. Hmmm....
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    sounds cool. if you ever come across those scripts again, let me know!
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    Hey Jeff,

    I actually met Jyri at Mobilize and he gave me the same advice.

    I was thinking about his advice for a while, and I'm still hesitant about giving away complete business plans. Fundamentally it comes down to a function of value added, and it seems that sharing your idea with the whole world can only hurt you if some other team decides to do the idea, or a competitor picks up the plan and releases your new features before your team can. On the flip side, I understand that at the end of the day there are going to be competitors in every field, and that after launch, everything is public and it will really just come down to execution.

    Your business model is interesting. I wonder how much people want to meet strangers on the web, and if there is some way to harness this. Perhaps you should look into those new people search engines and leverage one of their APIs to create automatic groups on various subjects with various levels of authority based on web metrics. Creating some sort of system like Friend Feed on different subjects based on scraped web information can be a pretty useful resource for someone that is trying to get into a field and wants to meet experts in the field or just simply learn from their blogs.
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    hmm interesting. yea, i think it'll be definitely useful to people find other people, not just websites. rather than looking at the keywords first, maybe we can look at it as ... i want to find someone who knows tech, who can i go to?
 

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