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Most important line in the article, IMO: "But hopefully he’s taken to heart the real reason Blippy didn’t work: Sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a p

Most important line in the article, IMO: "But hopefully he’s taken to heart the real reason Blippy didn’t work: Sharing purchases with friends doesn’t solve a problem." If you don't solve a real problem people have, you will fail. People may not know they have the problem, but they must have it. If you can't articulate the pain, it's time to pivot.

smanek 15y ago
What pain did Twitter address? I can come up with broad, hand-wavy justifications. But those justifications apply just as well to Blippy.
- whiskers 15y ago
  It allowed people to update their social status pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction.
  - smanek 15y ago
    I'm not convinced that is more of a pain point than: "It allowed people to share their recent purchases pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction"
- derefr 15y ago
  As far as I can tell, Twitter was built on the idea that (some) people want to get advertised to by the brands (corporate or personal) they admire. Until Twitter came along, the "best" way to do this was basically through giving over your email address and waiting who-knows-how-long for a who-knows-how-lengthy newsletter, and hoping they don't sell your contact information to spammers in the meantime. Twitter enforces brevity, which encourages timely little facts rather than big, polished PR-jobs, and it's a pull-based, rather than push-based model, meaning that you can always unsubscribe from anyone whose channel becomes more noisy than signally. Twitter boomed primarily because its target early-adopters were precisely the kind of people who already had lots of followers to advertise to (celebrities, reporters/bloggers, "personalities", etc.), and who wanted a more streamlined, more informal, lower-expectation medium to push out their little updates. Twitter was such a channel, but although they were on it, their users weren't—so, since they were all of the getting-the-word-out bent, the next thing they all (simultaneously) got the word out about was Twitter itself. If not for this clever bit of social engineering, Twitter would never have become the "thing that comes after Facebook in 90% of sentences about social media."
  - catshirt 15y ago
    "As far as I can tell, Twitter was built on the idea that (some) people want to get advertised to by the brands (corporate or personal) they admire." i'm not sure i believe that this is the idea that spawned twitter.
    - derefr 15y ago
      By "Twitter was built on use-case X", I meant "Twitter built up most of its early user-base by doing X, and became popular because of X", not "Twitter was conceived in hopes that it would work for X."
- daimyoyo 15y ago
  Twitter indulges people's need to feel like they're being heard. Giving people a voice is a very powerful tool.
- scrrr 15y ago
  Perhaps eight or ten years ago I had a Polish girlfriend and visited her in Poland and lived with her friends for a bit. I noticed how they mainly used the Internet. They had an ICQ-like polish IM (GaduGadu) running and they ONLY changed the status messages on that thing to inform people what they were doing. I found it amusing at that time. Later I saw Twitter, and it was very similar. So yes ,it does solve a problem: Broadcast short pieces of information to friends without having to start a conversation. At least I think that was the original idea.
- simonw 15y ago
  "What pain did Twitter address?" It allowed people to keep up to date with people and services they cared about in a format that they could quickly consume.
- adrianwaj 15y ago
  Wanting to send group emails to people, but not wanting to burden their privacy, and trying to get more friends in the process: getting social proof. Also, tying it in with escaping the rss reader eco system: news pushed to you. Also, making web publishing simple: self-expression for plebs.
extension 15y ago
The purpose of innovation is only to relieve pain? Seems rather bleak. And if we don't know that we have the problem, how are we supposed to find out besides speculating and experimenting? I'm sure Blippy thought they were improving people's lives somehow. They just guessed wrong. It happens.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  Without knowing anything about what has really gone on a Blippy, I would question whether they asked anybody else if Blippy was improving their lives. I wouldn't say the only purpose of innovation is to relieve pain (even if I did just say it ;). Rather, humans are motivated by fairly basic things, and reducing pain and increasing pleasure are pretty much at the top (details come in defining those terms). If you can't identify what is going to motivate people to use your product, you are in trouble. When I posted the parent comment, I thought about pulling out the reference to Blippy, because they may have done everything right and just had craptastic luck.
  - extension 15y ago
    I'm just trying to figure out how the "solve a problem" principle should be interpreted when evaluating an unrealized idea. It doesn't mean "solve a known problem" because people aren't aware of their problems and are notoriously bad at predicting whether they will like new things. And the "problem" doesn't have to be a bad thing that exists, it can just be something good that we are missing out on because it doesn't yet exist. And we know that many great things are created by people just to scratch their own itch. So it boils down to "make something that you think might be fun or useful to others or yourself", which seems entirely self-evident to me. I could understand "solve a problem" as a method for discovering ideas -- look for an obvious need and fill it. But many successful ideas, and I would say the most successful ideas, don't come from that process but from a more imaginative place. So, "it didn't solve a problem", whatever that means, is not sufficient to explain why an idea fails.
    - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
timjahn 15y ago
Well said. I never understood the point of Blippy from the beginning. Never saw what problem it was solving. Apparently nobody else did either, heh.

smanek 15y ago

What pain did Twitter address? I can come up with broad, hand-wavy justifications. But those justifications apply just as well to Blippy.

whiskers 15y ago
It allowed people to update their social status pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction.
- smanek 15y ago
  I'm not convinced that is more of a pain point than: "It allowed people to share their recent purchases pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction"
derefr 15y ago
As far as I can tell, Twitter was built on the idea that (some) people want to get advertised to by the brands (corporate or personal) they admire. Until Twitter came along, the "best" way to do this was basically through giving over your email address and waiting who-knows-how-long for a who-knows-how-lengthy newsletter, and hoping they don't sell your contact information to spammers in the meantime. Twitter enforces brevity, which encourages timely little facts rather than big, polished PR-jobs, and it's a pull-based, rather than push-based model, meaning that you can always unsubscribe from anyone whose channel becomes more noisy than signally. Twitter boomed primarily because its target early-adopters were precisely the kind of people who already had lots of followers to advertise to (celebrities, reporters/bloggers, "personalities", etc.), and who wanted a more streamlined, more informal, lower-expectation medium to push out their little updates. Twitter was such a channel, but although they were on it, their users weren't—so, since they were all of the getting-the-word-out bent, the next thing they all (simultaneously) got the word out about was Twitter itself. If not for this clever bit of social engineering, Twitter would never have become the "thing that comes after Facebook in 90% of sentences about social media."
- catshirt 15y ago
  "As far as I can tell, Twitter was built on the idea that (some) people want to get advertised to by the brands (corporate or personal) they admire." i'm not sure i believe that this is the idea that spawned twitter.
  - derefr 15y ago
    By "Twitter was built on use-case X", I meant "Twitter built up most of its early user-base by doing X, and became popular because of X", not "Twitter was conceived in hopes that it would work for X."
daimyoyo 15y ago
Twitter indulges people's need to feel like they're being heard. Giving people a voice is a very powerful tool.
scrrr 15y ago
Perhaps eight or ten years ago I had a Polish girlfriend and visited her in Poland and lived with her friends for a bit. I noticed how they mainly used the Internet. They had an ICQ-like polish IM (GaduGadu) running and they ONLY changed the status messages on that thing to inform people what they were doing. I found it amusing at that time. Later I saw Twitter, and it was very similar. So yes ,it does solve a problem: Broadcast short pieces of information to friends without having to start a conversation. At least I think that was the original idea.
simonw 15y ago
"What pain did Twitter address?" It allowed people to keep up to date with people and services they cared about in a format that they could quickly consume.
adrianwaj 15y ago
Wanting to send group emails to people, but not wanting to burden their privacy, and trying to get more friends in the process: getting social proof. Also, tying it in with escaping the rss reader eco system: news pushed to you. Also, making web publishing simple: self-expression for plebs.

extension 15y ago

The purpose of innovation is only to relieve pain? Seems rather bleak. And if we don't know that we have the problem, how are we supposed to find out besides speculating and experimenting? I'm sure Blippy thought they were improving people's lives somehow. They just guessed wrong. It happens.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
Without knowing anything about what has really gone on a Blippy, I would question whether they asked anybody else if Blippy was improving their lives. I wouldn't say the only purpose of innovation is to relieve pain (even if I did just say it ;). Rather, humans are motivated by fairly basic things, and reducing pain and increasing pleasure are pretty much at the top (details come in defining those terms). If you can't identify what is going to motivate people to use your product, you are in trouble. When I posted the parent comment, I thought about pulling out the reference to Blippy, because they may have done everything right and just had craptastic luck.
- extension 15y ago
  I'm just trying to figure out how the "solve a problem" principle should be interpreted when evaluating an unrealized idea. It doesn't mean "solve a known problem" because people aren't aware of their problems and are notoriously bad at predicting whether they will like new things. And the "problem" doesn't have to be a bad thing that exists, it can just be something good that we are missing out on because it doesn't yet exist. And we know that many great things are created by people just to scratch their own itch. So it boils down to "make something that you think might be fun or useful to others or yourself", which seems entirely self-evident to me. I could understand "solve a problem" as a method for discovering ideas -- look for an obvious need and fill it. But many successful ideas, and I would say the most successful ideas, don't come from that process but from a more imaginative place. So, "it didn't solve a problem", whatever that means, is not sufficient to explain why an idea fails.
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago

timjahn 15y ago

Well said. I never understood the point of Blippy from the beginning. Never saw what problem it was solving. Apparently nobody else did either, heh.