Ideas are easy
I struggle with motivation. Ideas are easy. I can drop them like Hansel and his sister can drop breadcrumbs. That’s why Alertbear went so well. All I had to do was keep coming up with the ideas and make sure somebody else was motivated enough to turn them into reality.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on usermesh, a different kind of social networking site that I conceived of a while ago. This isn’t the time to get into why I think it’s worthwhile producing ANOTHER one of these (in short, usermesh will actually give you something to DO), but what I’m finding is that the ideas are coming even thicker and faster now that I’m doing something productive again. I thought of a use for the allapple.com domain I’ve had kicking around for all these years, I’ve had thoughts of technology blogs, wedding websites and mechanical turks. Even the venerable Chatbear piqued my interest earlier today as I considered removing features from it rather than adding them.
What happens eventually is that somebody else has the same idea and stronger motivation. whatfilm is a site that I constantly wish was better than it was. I still keep up a list of all the films I see in the hope that I’ll sit down and write reviews of them, but it never seems to work out. The original concept of a site which recommended films based on your tastes and a few simple questions (hence the domain name) seems a million miles away. Somebody else will probably do it before long (they may already have and I just don’t know), the way Giant Bomb have finally done the Gamesplayer idea of mine from about 8 years ago.
None of this helps me of course. I may struggle with motivation, but I certainly don’t struggle for ways to heap scorn upon myself for not seeing ideas through.
