I’ve been scrolling slowly down the list of items mentioned by Paul Graham, a partner at the startup micro-financier outfit Y Combinator, in a piece titled “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund.” It’s an interesting write-up, and I think a whole lot of people should give it a look. Not necessarily because genius resides within. In fact, a lot of what Graham says will strike most any reader as fairly obviously wanting for the wand of progress.
There are some points raised, however, that either seem too vague or uninformative, or just plain unnecessary, to be worth a “new” attempt. Of course, I do recognize that Graham’s post is only a soft invitation for startups to submit ideas to Y Combinator. And, well, it would be pretty senseless to object to the inclinations of the firm. That’s not what I intend for here. Rather, I simply wish to parse some items that I consider superfluous and unnecessary. The kind of stuff that invokes the “been there, done that” adage, in other words. Ideas that already have solid representation on the Web, and don't require major fixes or alterations.
Photo/video sharing services are another group on YC’s agenda. Why that is is somewhat of a mystery to me. Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook are all solid examples. YC explains that “there may ultimately be 30 different subtypes of image/video sharing services, have of which remain to be discovered.” I’m not so sure about that. People like having reams of data at their fingertips. That’s part of the reason why industry’s giant have succeeded. Everyone likes a winner, right? As for serving the long tail of the Web, where photo and video users may prefer to take [img src="http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/photos.png" caption="" credit="" alt=""]their media host service’s platform and adapt it to fit conditions on personal websites, that can already be accomplished. SmugMug is a nice example of this, actually.
On entirely separate note, while Y Combinator imagines there are “better” dating sites to come, I would say the life of those networks is finite. I sure hope so, anyway. To approach the concept in a different way, dating sites will simply be replaced by your run-of-the-mill social networking services. Mobile ones, especially. To keep perpetuating this idea of specialized matchmaking through ample profile metadata and the like is simply absurd. It may work some of the time, but it doesn’t work enough of the time.
Lastly, I’d like to highlight an idea put forth by YC placed somewhere near the middle of its list of 30. This one is 16. It reads as such:
"A form of search that depends on design. Google doesn't have a lot of weaknesses. One of the biggest is that they have no sense of design. They do the next best thing, which is to keep things sparse. But if there were a kind of search that depended a lot on design, a startup might actually be able to beat Google at search....”
There are a number of things wrong with that statement. For one, Google may not seem to have any sense of design for some, but it does. It’s actually described in Paul Graham’s subsequent line. Indeed, sparseness is Google’s schtick.
That, and a super-simple color palette. Those appear to be the fundamentals for the company’s overarching design. And years and years of experience and trend setting and all other things that go into making an Internet company into a Internet giant and an Internet leader have shown that Google has largely been walking the right path. No, its engine doesn’t connote iPod-like elegance. Goodness sake, though, its primary businesses are search and advertising. How in the world do you make that visually delightful and retain a modicum of user friendliness?
An even more pressing question to ask: What makes one think that fantastic design alone is a prescription for beating Google? There’s already quite a visually attractive alternative to Google. It’s called Ask.com. Take a look. You’ll see. And it’s nowhere near #1.