Retiring The Theory of Stuff; But First, A Corollary
It's time to put the Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It's had a good life. It's appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me).
When I tell people I'm going to talk about my theory, a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping passes through the room, coupled with a prolonged sigh from an audience who've just resigned themselves to a slow painful death over the coming minutes. Luckily things perk up when my introductory slide of Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory appears but even so, it's time to quit whilst you're ahead.
But before I do ...
One of the great thing's about O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference is the vast number of people you meet who just fizz with ideas and intelligence in this somewhat nebulous space that we call location, place or geo. One such person is Sally Applin; she owns the domain sally.com so that's got her off to a good start. After Where 2.0 she pointed me to her own theory that voyeurism and narcissism sell software.
People like to look at themselves and at other people. If they can do it at the same time–then the application will succeed! Look at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Skype–basically any software that allows for both looking at others and self viewing, self reading, self posting etc…will sell. We’re on the chimp ladder. We like to compare ourselves and compete.
If you generalise software out to the slightly more generic terms ofservice or product; you'll see that Sally's theory complements the Theory of Stuff quite nicely and even provides an exemplar of those businesses and ventures that prove the theory.
This is especially interesting when you look at the success (to date at least) of ventures in the social space, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. What else are these is not an online way of saying "look at me, here I am, this is what I'm doing" and in doing so generating a vast sea of highly localised and personalised data into the bargain?
Photo Credits: wili_hybrid on Flickr.
