« Winter Break| Main | Technology Companies. We Hate You. »

Invention Worms

| | Comments (1)

Ever get a song stuck in your head that you just can't get out?

I do that all of the time -- perhaps because I played the piano so much as a kid, but perhaps it's just some kind of defect. Seems like I read somewhere that having the same song repeat over and over again in your head was a form of seizure.

Let's hope not.

There is a phrase for it, however, as it is such a common occurrence: it's called an "earworm".

Can you get the same thing when it comes to inventions?

For the last couple of years or so, I've mostly read HackerNews. It's a simple site with a simple design that basically was set up to test out a new programming language, Arc. Since the guy writing the language is a hacker, the site is dedicated to hackers and features a lot of hacker/technology news.

Although topics vary widely, mostly it's stuff interesting to people who are hackers -- who want to start their own technology business.

We get into "meta" conversations a lot. This drives some people crazy. It's not unusual for there to be a long thread on just what is on-topic or off-topic for HN? Or what is the point of downvoting? Or what is the value of karma? Or is the site the same as it was when it only had a few hundred users (instead of tens of thousands)?

What can I say? We're hackers. We love taking things apart and finding out how they work. We're never happy with just pushing a button on some site to upvote an article. We want to know what upvoting means, why do sites use it? How do you attract so many users? What's the relationship between the number of features a site has and the audience?

The list goes on and on.

So for two years or more, I've had this bug in the back of my head about setting up a news aggregation site. I have several hypotheses I would like to test out:


  • Downvoting is not needed - If people like something, they will upvote it. If it's not upvoted, it's downvoted.

  • A karma system has monetary value - If you give people a reward system, no matter how arbitrary, it begins to have value the more they use it. This value can be monetary, ie, people will pay for karma

  • Aggregation sites must be tunable - Here I want to be a little vague, but let's just say that once you grow past a thousand or so users the "tunability" of your site is critical for phenomenal growth

  • There's good material out there nobody is using - The internet is full of wannabe writers, like me. I figure maybe one out of a thousand posts I write is something a lot of people would like to see. Let's be conservative and say on average it's one out of then thousand posts for the average writer. With millions of self-written articles generated daily, that still means there is a lot of great material that nobody is reading. I think there's a huge readership in finding that content.

  • Huge growth curves not required - I should be able to set something up that might take five years to grow to profitability. I think that's fine. Web applications are so cheap that it costs more in labor dollars for me to write the site than it does to keep the site up for five years. You don't need to be Google. A cottage business would be just fine

  • Person-to-person user interaction drives stickiness - The more a site encourages people to share friendships and collaborate in their lives, the more sticky it is. So sites need to be an extension of natural social interactions, even if they're not a social site.

I've had this thing stuck in my head for years, and it's simply got to come out. So this weekend I'm starting to sketch out what I've been thinking about.

I'm under no illusions. It's a lot of hard work, there will be little or no acknowledgment, I have no contacts in the valley so it's not like I have a bunch of co-inventors to share this with every week. Giving up will always be a temptation. Odds are it will end up in the dustbin of past projects.

But it's an invention worm, and the only way to get it out of my head is to put a few hundred hours into it to see where it will go.

Who knows? Maybe we'll end up somewhere that's a lot of fun!

I can't help but wonder, though: do other people have invention worms too? Is this a common thing?

1 Comment

I've had an inventionworm for a while myself regarding a location-based social network of sorts. It's unique compared to many of the other location-based things that are already out there. It was an idea for a while, then I started building it. Now it's sort of half-built and I'm stuck again, but the idea keeps evolving and getting better.

Ideaworms are great, but bringing other great people into them is what really tends to turn them into reality. Sometimes it's hard to stay motivated on an idea that's been burning in your head so long.

It's like when the song first gets trapped, it's OK. Then at some point it becomes annoying. If it sticks around long enough without additional input, it can turn very sour, but even the slightest additional input can create something interesting.

Leave a comment

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DanielBMarkham published on March 7, 2009 3:23 PM.

Winter Break was the previous entry in this blog.

Technology Companies. We Hate You. is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Social Widgets





Share Bookmark this on Delicious

Recent Comments

  • Erik M Jacobs: I've had an inventionworm for a while myself regarding a read more

Information you might find handy
(other sites I have worked on)





Recently I created a list of books that hackers recommend to each other -- what are the books super hackers use to help guide them form their own startups and make millions? hn-books might be a site you'd like to check out.
On the low-end of the spectrum, I realized that a lot of people have problems logging into Facebook, of all things. So I created a micro-site to help folks learn how to log-in correctly, and to share various funny pictures and such that folks might like to share with their friends. It's called (appropriately enough) facebook login help