I love waking up in the morning these days. Sometimes I wake up before my alarm goes off. I used to eat huge breakfasts, now I have a quick bowl of cereal. Watching CNN news highlights (okay, cartoons) is no longer a fixture on my morning routine either. These days I sometimes even leave the house with mismatched socks.
The shakeup in my morning routine is all because I can't wait to get to work. I've been working on the visual side of a product for a relatively young start up company. Besides just enjoying the projects I've worked on, I'm happy being involved in the tech world.
Although some people I know are completely bewildered by technology and the internet, I couldn't be more excited about it's rapid evolution. The rate at which new technology, new ideas, concepts, apps, websites, services are springing up is amazing. Everyday I stumble across someone or something amazing. Everyday I'm discovering something new and ingenious. Regardless of whether we're in a bubble right now or not, it's a really exciting time.
There are so many cool products these days. A quick glance at my iPhone and I see: an app that recognizes songs if I hum them; an app that tells me how close the nearest slice of pizza is; and even an app that makes all my friends look obese. And those are really just the tip of the app iceberg, much less the tech world as a whole. The creativity just gets more inspiring with a quick browse of Dribbble, Wired, Think Quarterly, or any tech news or design inspiration website. In fact, just browsing the web can sometimes lead to awesome discoveries.
Many of the 200,000 and counting apps on the App Store are incredibly inventive and fun, simultaneously their greatest strength and weakness. Ideas and concepts in most apps have the potential to push boundaries, regardless of their popularity or long term value.
On the other hand, so many of these apps are simple novelties, nothing more than short term distractions. Being able to recreate T-Pain songs with my own voice really doesn't provide much value to my life, nor does it inspire any potentially world changing ideas.
Nonetheless, every app has its place. I feel like each app is part of a massive, ongoing experiment beyond just what technology is capable of. Although most of the thousands of apps are developed independently, each one that succeeds and each one that fails helps determine where the digital world is heading. What do people need and want, enjoy and understand?
The rapidly changing digital world might be in part because of the amount of apps, and other digital products, that come and go. Right now I feel as though nothing is stable or fixed. No piece of hardware or software I'm using right now will be the same in a week, a month, or a year from now. Whether it's made obsolete by a better idea or it simply becomes stale, things will change.
While the actual products might not last, what will last are the fundamental ideas behind each product. Ideas that truly help people live better. Ideas about communication, sharing, managing life and mundane but essential tasks. Ideas that empower and enhance will survive, although maybe not necessarily in their original form. The original idea or concept may have evolved or spawned something else entirely.
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At the beginning of this year Facebook was reported to have over 750 million users. That's nearly 10 percent of earth's total population. Without a shadow of a doubt, Facebook has been the best execution of social networking the world has ever seen. It's ubiquity is undeniable. It's changed the way people communicate and manage their social lives.
Right now it might be hard to imagine, but I believe given the rate of change in the tech world that even Facebook will not last forever. Whether a decline begins in a two months or in two years, I think it will come at some point. Even with it's global dominance and the extraordinary talent behind it, I don't think it can out run the natural evolution of human needs and wants indefinitely. We've already seen many social networks come and go.
Facebook has built an excellent product around a concept that has existed and evolved for years, in turn reshaping that concept for the future. Whether Facebook continues to thrive or not doesn't matter, what is important is how it has redefined the way technology connects people. Facebook has shown us what people want to use and what people are capable of understanding. As ubiquitous as it is, it's still part of the giant experiment that is the digital world.
Watching ideas and technology evolve is fascinating. Being part of it, playing with it, experimenting with it, talking about it. That's why I love getting up
in the morning.
Update: There's a good discussion at Quora called "Why is so much of Silicon Valley obsessed with small ideas that don't solve a problem." There's a bunch of really interesting opinions on the types of problems Silicon Valley companies focus on. When I wrote this article I kept pondering about the trivial nature of so many apps. See what people are saying.