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songzme

This app brings to mind an excerpt for Larry Page - The untold Story:

... Up front, an executive pitched a new product that helped users find the right offline store to do their shopping.

The executive was well into his pitch when, suddenly, Page interrupted him.

“No,” Page said emphatically. “We don’t do this.”

The room grew quiet.

“We build products that leverage technology to solve huge problems for hundreds of millions of people.”

He went on. “Look at Android. Look at Gmail. Look at Google Maps. Look at Google Search. That’s what we do. We build products you can’t live without.”

“This is not it.”

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This is a typical example of survivor bias. You are overly emphasizing successful people's view as generalized truth. The fact is, these are the same leaders who also missed out boat on entire social revolution. They are not often not right but it hurts them lot less because they have already amassed huge momentum.

For hackers, makers, creators, hobbyists - I don't think you should put any artificial restrictions on what you should work on. If you think it's the most interesting thing you could be doing right now, may be its useful to you and may-may-be to your friends - go do it. Don't think about if it has good monetization or if it would be used X times a day or it would put you in the TechCrunch etc.

I wholehearted agree with you, "I don't think you should put any artificial restrictions on what you should work on"

I'm just disappointed with Facebook. They have so much resources and the ability to make such a difference but they chose to make this crap.

But, don't you think the "No, we don't do this, we build products that ...." for Zuckerberg ends with "allow hundreds of millions of people to share photos and videos". Or something like that.

Feels like there are many ways to share a photo/video and Facebook wants to make an app for each kind of way.

Also called the "toothbrush rule". Larry wouldn't allow a product that you didn't use twice a day to be developed at Google.

But Slingshot might well qualify under the toothbrush rule. Never underestimate the bounds of people's vanity.

I've never heard this before. I like this a lot.

Kinda like the Bezos "pizza rule".

...because it has the word "rule" in it? That's about the only similarity between those two concepts.

"a new product that helped users find the right offline store to do their shopping"

I'd love an app that did that. I'd love inventory search for brick-and-mortar stores. I'd love an app that let me know where a product is located in a store.

In fact, Google Maps on my phone does part of this with it's "Explore nearby" feature, which I've used more than once. Maybe the time just wasn't right for Larry Page to accept it back then.

http://redlaser.com/

http://milo.com/

Thanks for the recommendations. I actually use RedLaser and forgot Milo was still around after they were purchased by eBay. Too bad Milo doesn't seem to have an app.

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