Next Big Thing

Most of companies today are trying to figure out what is the next big thing and what the users want. They get too sucked up in the debate of what features people want with user studies, research data from Nielsons, comscore etc, focussed groups and what not. They forget users are very sophisticated these days and to predict what features they are going to like or not is very hard if not impossible to predict. So why go that way, if you have an idea and with all the strategies, market trends, and belief you have about your idea to be the next big thing than build it in a way that you create a platform which motivates people to contribute and take it to the next level.

Future is all about users, if you cannot motivate them to try it out and get connected, than it will be very hard to create the next big thing. Google did that with with their search which motivated website owners to spend so much time with their website that they created a multi billion dollar industry of SEO. Facebook did with providing the freedom to users to create their community, this is not the first time its been done, forums have been in existence from they day internet was invented but what they did was motivated people, businesses to create new tools and communication channels. Myspace did it in the same way, their have been many sites which did similar things before fortunecity, geocities but there platforms were limited and control freak, lost focus on the development in technology to motivate people to contribute.

Well I can say these platforms have changed the defination of open source, even though these new platforms are not open source but their inspiration is definetly from the open source platform by opening up their platforms with API's.