Why it’s hard to keep up with innovation

Farmville, Foursquare, Grooper – we are bombarded with the new “it” services regularly. I design internet products for a living, so it seems a no brainer that I should be on top of all of the new services, and it should be really an easy thing to do for someone like myself.

On the contrary, I find that I don’t want to let any new service into my life. I’m fine as it is, I’m super busy, why would I go out of my way to check out Foursquare? And the thing is that even if I do check it out, I frequently don’t get it.

When I checked it out a few months ago (on the web!), Foursquare seemed stupid, boring and useless. Fastforward 3 weeks ago when I finally installed Foursquare on my phone and started using it. Shockingly, I got it. It took some time of actually using it and a couple of articles about Foursquare’s advances into services for small businesses. Suddenly, I started bringing Foursquare up in conversations and advertising it to people as the next big thing.

Clearly, the pace of change is speeding up. In a recent fascinating article on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington talks about “The Third Disruptive Wave”. The highlights from the article are:

• John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm that invested in Google, Amazon, AOL, etc., calls Zynga “the fastest growing business Kleiner Perkins has ever invested in.” and “Zynga’s Farmville grew to 75 million users just a few months after launching last year, and the company went from near zero revenue a year ago to hundreds of millions of dollars today.”
• The internet is a business accelerator, but Facebook makes it possible for a business to explode.
• Groupon was able to fine tune their social growth model to expand via Facebook ads.

( http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/23/the-third-disruptive-wave-tcdisrupt/#ixzz0p0b2EdJf)

Alright, so a crazy amount of change is happening, and I have to face the question: why is it so hard to adopt and understand these new services?

I think the answer is in the fact that they cannot be understood by checking out the service website once.  Just as I had to actually USE Foursquare to “get” it, Pek Pangpaet talks about trying to “get” Farmville. He says:

“In my quest to figure out what the big deal with Farmville was, I had spent about 3 weeks playing it now. I have to admit, I didn’t get into it till a week or so ago” (http://blog.pekpongpaet.com/2010/01/02/what-makes-farmville-so-sticky-and-viral/ – great article, by the way).

For a good number of us, many of these services are not something naturally appealing. Foursquare sounded terribly boring (I dismissed it entirely when visiting the site first), Farmville is a social game (I’m not into games on Facebook or even Facebook apps, for that matter), I’m not currently interested in Groupon (even though I’ve registered), Polyvore seems a waste of time, and the list just goes on and on for me.

So it seems a decision is needed. Either I choose to stop evolving and be a late adopter, or choose to try to keep up with the change. If I choose the latter, I have to simply decide to do the following:

1. check out and sign up on these new sites. just freaking do it.

2. use them for long enough to understand the value. use them even if, initially, I couldn’t care less.

As a closing thought, I’m thinking about Jeff Bezos talk about Amazon being a customer-focused company, not a competitor focused company (he said it somewhere in this long video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nKfFHuouzA&feature=related) . This statement struck a chord with me. As we are keeping up with ever-accelerating change, keeping up with the competitors is becoming more and more pointless. Keep up with the change so that you understand what’s possible, but stay focused on your customer because that’s where real innovation can happen.