I see what you are saying. But to me it's uninspiring. It cannot be replicated. It's a simple tool that's overblown. There isn't a technology behind it. I just saw a piece of news saying it took their engineering and design team many months if not a year to rollout a simple design change. That's not inspiring at all. If anything this would be something I would strive hard to avoid.
Neither the technology nor the product seem to jump out of the paper... Just like toilet paper. Which is not bad but doesn't require more attention.
The other problem is around this set of ideas that grab users attention for quick bites that are essentially empty calories. I feel that these are gamified, product hacked versions that are hard to replicate but ultimately not inspiring.
I find it infuriating. It drives home how insurmountable someone else’s first mover advantage and subsequent network effects can be. I say this as someone who had great success in my niche, I’m often angry about my own success and sympathize with my competitors who failed to catch up for no reason other than that they weren’t the first to do what I did.
Today no one can turn their own micropublishing idea into a Twitter competitor, because by the time it achieves even 0.1% of Twitter’s success, Twitter will just clone its features to kill its momentum.
That’s life though. This is one of the first ‘it’s a you’ problem everyone has to get over sooner or later. Sorry, it’s sounds dismissive, but there’s really no other answer to this.
Facebook clones features or as a company has various spin offs. I thought twitter stayed pretty true to form?
Although your point stands. If you are using a cool feature to differentiate and that feature is cloneable, there is risk that one of the large players will implement it.
