It's easy to call something innovative. People do it all the time. They relaunch their site to include a +1 feature over a competitor and all the sudden they're hailing their product as innovate and new. Really, innovative implies something that hasn't been done before, and should imply something that pretty much makes the alternatives feel obsolete in comparison.

Google released AdSense, a truly innovative way to create an effective advertising network. It, and the ensuing copy cats, took over the advertising world and made publishing online for profit approachable by even the smallest, most obscure people. YouTube, as simple as it may be, made online video accessible and launched an entire genre of copy cats. Friendster, even if it was kind of lame and lacked a sense of purpose, kick started a million social networks. Blogger brought blogging to the masses.

Tough economic times seems to bring out the next generation of innovation. After playing with AppStore and some of the Apple dev tools for the iPhone, we may very well see a slew of truly innovative out of the box thinking come out of the mobile landscape. The stuff that's out there right now is fairly tame, nothing has really blown me away, but no doubt it's coming. It's probably waiting for approval on appstore this very moment. We'll see.

In thinking in terms of the "new web", are there other examples of things that are truly innovative, or are we building better and better variations of existing themes? Any thoughts on real world applications for mobile? I saw some stuff on crowd sourcing traffic data. That may not reach a critical mass, but that's a killer line of thinking in terms of applications.

It's funny. As technologists, we're supposed to be privacy nuts. That's part of our stereotype, our schtick. We know just how vulnerable our personal data is and it scares the bejesus out of us.

But our actions certainly don't back that up. At least, not mine. I use the latest websites in my daily routine, I blog, I use twitter, flickr and just about everything else publicly. I stopped creating accounts under aliases and prefer to speak openly as "Alex Rudloff" most every where online. My reasons are fairly straight forward (anonymity brings out the worst in people), but yet there's a certain element of creepiness associated to things like facebook's beacon. I don't blog about specifics when it comes to business or work encounters or what I've been searching for on Google or buying on Amazon. Not only is it often in poor taste, in this day of profiling, I guess it's just the notion that there are certain history books best bought with cash, ya know? Privacy has become this strange, mixed up concept. We're really sensitive in some ways, but completely not in others.

I started thinking recently about the amount of data I've given about my life and my habits. I think the tides started to turn with Google making larger and larger headway into our lives. GMail was the specific catalyst, but only because its the most obvious privacy related thing. Long before GMail, Google could track our every move on the web via search and AdSense widgets on what seems like a majority of sites.

We expect things on the web to be free. At the same time, we know that very little in the world is actually free, it's just monetarily free. A web company's goal is to create something that is so valuable to you that you are willing to overlook certain questionable things, like scanning emails for relevant ads (initially seen as super creepy). I checked out GMail though, and decided that I really liked it. The ads became less important. In fact, they almost became kind of neat. Gavin and I will bounce company ideas off each other via e-mail sometimes, and on more than one occasional, Google has displayed an advertisement for a company doing the same thing that we didn't know existed. Lazy man's research.

Ultimately, I've traded an element of my privacy in exchange for a service that I find great worth in. It's not a free service, I'm just not paying for it with my wallet. My privacy is the currency.

Facebook has increasingly shown an unwillingness to put user concerns first in their thinking. They'll release something incredibly invasive and then apologize when their community freaks out. We all know how that works, the whole "it's better to apologize than ask permission" thing. All Zuck has to do is smile pretty, apologize, and scale the feature back a tiny little bit and people calm down and move on. It happened with news feed, it's happening with beacon -- but those are just the two things people noticed. What else is facebook doing with our data? Should we care, or is facebook worth the cost?

Beacon had me so freaked out that I walked through what would happen if I simply removed my account (my natural, gut reaction). The fact is, I'd lose contact with a lot of people instantly. There's no easy way for me to take my data out and apply it somewhere else. There is no friend export and there isn't anywhere suitable for me to go. I'm paying the currency because I find worth in facebook the same way I find worth in my cable company. I want the cable, I just don't want it from them. Unfortunately, I have little choice (for now).

How many people who signed up for Mint.com, a site where you add all of your financial accounts in exchange for advice on how/where to save money, are still finding value in it? Would anyone feel comfortable letting others (say, a social community) see their search terms if it meant a better search experience? Or do we just trust google with that information?

I guess the question is, at what point does something cost too much when it comes to privacy? Who are we comfortable paying with privacy, and what level of trust defines that?

I'm not sure what my answers are yet, but I'm curious to hear other folks' thoughts.

A couple posts ago, I reiterated the cliche that ideas are a dime a dozen. There's more to that statement than simply "there are a lot of ideas," which is true, of course. There is also the fact that whatever idea you've had, there is a huge chance that someone else has had similar thoughts already. Ideas, themselves, are rarely 100% unique (hence the importance of implementation, execution, survival and luck.)

That's probably something to do with how we all arrive at our creative conclusions. We see different factors in play across whatever industry we're a part of and we start connecting the dots with other things that we already know. Certain things online really are kind of formulaic anyhow. Search, video, content, dating, social networking, music, classifieds -- these are all features that define an idea as "sexy" (which is largely influenced by previous success more so than interest level, I'd imagine) If some new technology comes along that makes it easier and cheaper to produce any combination of those winnable ideas, you can expect a flurry of activity in that space. The chance of a million twitter clones intensifies (okay, okay... poor example).

Part of being an entrepreneur is the emotional capacity to withstand the defeat of seeing "your" idea being developed by someone else. At least, I tell myself that, because it seems to keep happening to us ;) It seems to be a pretty relateable concept though, as almost everyone with an entrepreneurial spirit has some sort of story about the one that got away. The folks with the home runs are often the ones who swung the bat the most (BTW, Cliches are cliche for a reason. Because they kick ass.) So what's the best way to counteract it?

My thought is that you have to be able to move fast. You need the resources to take action right away. The key resource being talent. There doesn't seem to be much time available these days for learning curves. In our latest case (which I won't go into detail over, doesn't seem cool to the team that pulled it off), there was a ton of ramp up time and the fact that we have pretty active day jobs. A bad combination. We could have outsourced everything, but.. What's the learning curve like on Hindi? I say that in jest, but it's not hard to guess what the pitfalls of outsourcing may have been.

The good news is that we added a new skill set to our tool belt. The world's a better place because someone pulled the idea off. It's comfortable to know that our head is still in the right place (well, Gavin's at least. I wasn't the most passionate about it). There are other directions we can take the prototype in anyhow, and well, Emurse is kicking serious ass lately regardless ;) All in all, it ain't no thing.

If you're working on an idea that isn't first to market, and you get the wind knocked out of you by whoever is, don't let it slow you down. Analyze the situation, decide if it makes sense to compete, and if not, move to the next idea. After all, they're a dime a dozen, right? ;)

How fitting. The first comment posted to this brand spanking new blog of mine is "Hey Alex! Bring back bored.cc!" Every couple months I get an email or an IM, or now a blog comment, with that same request. It's actually pretty cool, and I totally enjoy hearing from the bored.cc crowd.

I'd love to bring back bored.cc. Starting from scratch, I could make it such a better site. Seeing things like digg.com come along and basically do the same thing in a cleaner way made me understand some of the usability issues we never got past (while making me a tad jealous in the process.. though, I mean, Kevin Rose is the man, so... it's cool.)

For those who never had the chance to play around with bored.cc, it was basically a generic digg (not just tech) but was based around this whack ass RPG metaphor instead of votes (almost in a joking fashion, but it worked).

Users would submit stories, post comments, post jokes, create polls, participate in web cam rankings, etc. etc. All the while, they'd earn experience points for their participation. Naturally, they'd move up levels every so many points. The higher the level, the more moderation power the user had over the site -- approving/rejecting stories (more like slashdot in this fashion, which is what it was modeled after), etc. The entire concept was built around the idea that I, as the admin, would never ever have to do anything. It should run itself in this weird sort of communal way.

It ran for the majority of my college career untouched (literally, coded and rarely touched again, for years... not good practice, but an interesting experiment), slowly growing in users. Never advertised and only based on word of mouth and search engine traffic, we went down with about 1000 users (at one point we had more, but lots of them were spam/crap..so.. doesn't count ;). Traffic wasn't great, but it would have been nice to throw adsense on it ;)

At the end of it all, I guess I was looking for post-college jobs and knew if someone googled me, they might not get the most flattering returns. That was probably what drove me to shut it down. I should have just removed my name from it and let it run.

Anyway, stay tuned, who knows ;)

There's a whole lot of chatter going on about whether or not it's a great time to start a company. Some of it is the fear that the market is saturated. Maybe there is a fear that there isn't enough money to fund everyone. Who knows, really, but to suggest that it's not a great time to start a company is to suggest that there are bluer skies ahead. At least in terms of saturation, there's no time like the present. Competition on the web is only going to increase from here on out.

Development is constantly getting easier, our processes are continuously maturing and the kids coming out of school right now have grown up online. Developing web applications for many of them is second nature. Having grown up wide-eyed towards their dot-com heroes of yesteryear, you can beat your ass that they're itching to get into the game. I'm not sure that the allure of working for a big company really appeals to the them. They want to start their own company and create their own gig.

Another thing to consider is the effect of applications being so cheaply produced. Someone can whip together a rails app over a holiday weekend to solve some sort of issue in their life, release it into the wild as an ad-sense supported service, and all of the sudden there is even more competition – competition that may have no major profit motive because there is no major cost.

Start-up costs are incredibly low. Development is easier. In many cases, the success of the site isn't even remotely defined by its ROI ("it took me a day to code, who cares"). These lowered barriers can only mean one thing. Abundant amounts of competition might signal a bad startup market to some, but it's not going away.

The answer isn't to avoid starting a company, it's to focus on clever ways to increase the audience. This whole mini-revival going on really only exists within our own little world. Find a way to bring your product to the masses, and even crap websites like MySpace can succeed.