52 Bicycles

I work 12-16 hours a day, eight days a week, and as a result I have made a virtue of reducing or avoiding work whenever I can. But the work still has to get done.

So, driven by my industrious laziness, I try to come up with ways of automating the most onerous and boring tasks. Element55 was born in that spirit. Keeping track of time is complex, boring, and hard to keep the discipline. Manual timekeeping is like using the odometer to figure out your gas mileage: you need to remember to check it when you fill the tank, then check it again when you refuel. And you have to remember what it was at the beginning. And so often it’s “dang, I forgot to check it when I filled up! So I’ll look at it now, and just subtract the 20 miles I think I drove since leaving the station.” Etc etc.

My favorite mechanical appliance is the automatic dishwasher. It removes work that I don’t want to do in the kitchen. It, along with central air, is sine qua non when I am looking at apartments.

So much software - including these “web 2.0″ characters - are geared to the enthusiast who wants to invest time in something new. It is “disruptive” in a bad way (actually, in Geoff Moore’s way) - it requires high investment and change in behavior to generate value. The question is whether the value is worthwhile, and in many cases, that’s just not so clear. To avoid being disruptive, make it as simple and minimum clicks to get data in, and give immediate value back.

Mike from Blinklist asked me to comment on their service. So I am going to mercilessly use them to illustrate my point. Seems like they might have something interesting, and per a previous post, they facilitate early data entry with export from favorites and delicious (though both processes are not obvious and kind of clunky), and support later entry with bookmarklets, but I’m not sure what I’m uniquely getting out of it. The back end, reporting, discovery etc seems to be where they differentiate.

Weird mashup idea: have Blinklist (for example) just work off of delicious data. One gives Blinklist the login information necessary to poll delicious api for the bookmarks and tag data, then repurposes them for display and comparison (per the “Blinks”). That way, there are no additional bookmarks required, and they have a built-in audience in all those delicious users - who also get more value from adding more bookmarks.

Blinklist would get out of the way of the ongoing data entry (which is being done elsewhere) and give instant value to people as they sign on. Plus, by positioning as a “killer app” for delicious, they become an attractive acquisition candidate.

While I made a point earlier about data being king, application for data is also important, and I tend to think that the bookmarklet wars are going to be brutal. My prior whipping boy, Reddit, has a cool “thumbs up” “thumbs down” differentiator (twice the information with the same number of clicks) that I think gives them an edge in this department (to seal the deal, they could automatically forward/sync the link with delicious, so users can get additional value out of it, and take the front-end data collection away from delicious). But Blinklist doesn’t seem to have that kind of differentiator on the front-end, so maybe they’re stronger on the other end of the chain, per the above.

On the front-end, we need to reduce to one-click contribution to the data set. On the back-end, give me zero-click value via reporting, assisted search, friend finding, whatever, through taking advantage of the existing data sets out there.

All that said, I have high hopes for Blinklist because they have been thinking about the data import process, and my understanding of them is limited to what I saw in 15 minutes. They seem to be going to the mountain, rather than waiting for the reverse.

Stripping the business to its core and making a small-click, large value experience will add a lot of value. For laziness, not necessity, is the mother of the best inventions.

At least, it drives the best businesses based on inventions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This