Via Metafilter I came across a Tumblr called “The Internet Wishlist”. As usual, I find great and not so great things to consider about this.
To be fair, there’s part of me that loves this. I have a few ideas I’d love to come to fruition, including one I submitted via email about event aggregation. And I have no shortage of interface tweaks I’d like to see happen on major sites like LinkedIn, Meetup, and a slew of services I use on a daily basis. While there’s no perfect UI, there’s still plenty to be done to fix many of the sites we use, let alone the software and features that need to be built to improve those products.
However, I always wonder where the apparatus to match the people with the need with the people with the desire to build the app is, and what this says about how we build products and services. In the Metafilter thread, codacorolla has an excellent synopsis of what a parking app creation would look like and how difficult it would be – but maybe there are folks who’ve hacked at the Google Maps API… and other people who’ve done a nice UI for it. Heck, there may even be people in local governments who would help with this type of thing (see the whole Gov. 2.0 movement). To me, the key issue is how to get collaborative knowledge and resource sharing to get these separate people and resources together – kind of a matchmaking service for app creation and citizen activism. That’s not a killer app, but boy, it would surely help with giving people what they need past the ‘I have an idea’ section, and surely would help some great ideas actually get built.
Something happened in the match making arena around the Crisis Commons initiatives – the idea of ‘I have/I need’ is a great metaphor for sharing resources. Also interesting to see stuff like the OpenIDEO crowdsharing initiative – more for the idea generation per se than the matchmaking. Again, my main concern is that ideas and the people who build on them are ships passing in the night. There are so many fantastic ideas out there, but until we facilitate better ways of matching those with the ideas with the people who can help build them, I fear we’re not really making big enough strides in building good software, good products and good societies. This isn’t to say that companies shouldn’t listen to their end users, customers, partners or the ecosystem around their products – if anything, listening is one of the most important things we can do as a society to help ensure we create the best products the first go around.
My concern is that the list of Pony Requests where we want an app or a feature that will do ‘x’ can turn us into a world that Andrew Keen and others have warned us about – perhaps a version of the Cult of the Amateur. We all turn into a Product Manager creating features in isolation – design tweaks in the UI rather than a cohesive, holistic product that’s worked out the business and technical requirements as well as the user requirements. Is the issue the lack of well designed features? Is it that good ideas don’t get built? Is it that the ideas and the people with them don’t get to meet the folks who need to hear and build upon those ideas? Now that hive mind idea and knowledge sharing takes off with sites like Quora, on some level perhaps the resources people need do get transferred to the needed recipient. I worry, however, that what we’re doing is adding more voices to the conversation and the conversation itself is getting muddied. In that muddy situation, it’s hard to create the solutions and share the right knowledge to the people who need it if the crowd is riding the ponies in a mad race to win the Pony Request Race. When you’re a kid, you do want a pony; when you’re an adult, you realize that pony needs feeding, cleaning and taking care of. It’s fine to want the pony after all the years, but to not realize that that pony requires an infrastructure to maintain it is foolish.
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