Inspiring Discovery

I really don’t want to kill all of these enterprising young people in pursuit of their holy grail of fame, fortune, pretty husbands and wives, and whatever else, but there is a very distinct lack of creativity in the new web applications that are springing up left and right all over the place.

My latest adventure, helping NASAGA put up a game wiki so that members can contribute to building a database of games, has taken me into the world of Wiki software. Some of it hosted, some you put on your own server. Some of its php and perl coded so it can run on an internet server and some is javascript so it runs locally on your home computer (I actually know what this means!) Some of it is free, some of it you pay to have it hosted (and you can’t have the software for your own host).

But, jeez guys – I mean its all minor variations on the same idea. Yes, some of it is distinctly better than others, some is more distinctly free than others. Most of it isn’t user friendly, but that’s changing. Clearly the one advancement over the past 10 years has been to shorten the development cycle so this stuff goes out in months rather than years.

But now to the Inspiring Discovery part – where is the discovery in the evolutionary process of incremental improvement? I have no idea if these are caffeine-addicted, type A personality silicon valley types that were so heavily stereotyped around the turn of the century (wow, like that phrase?)  or just average Joes and Jills going to work 9-5, but it would seem that the people really invested in this process are missing out on a very important time in their lives to explore the world. The complete absence of creativity in these designs is your primary indicator of this.

The competition, accelerated product development cycles, and first-to-market mentalities are definitely fueiling improved applications (although still much more technology-driven than demand-driven), but I can’t help but think spending my 20′s stuck in front of a PC coding for a software package that is better today but overtaken tomorrow would be a tragic loss.

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