I run a bookmarking site, which is an ecological niche in the world of lists.
The pattern I've seen over the years is that a bookmarking site will arise, based on some fairly specific idea of what managing bookmarks should look like. As it catches on, the owners will discover that people have distinct and curious ways they like to manage their bookmarks. In an effort to grow the site, they will add features that try to please these different constituencies, and eventually end up with a kind of insipid and aggressively social product that no longer appeals to the initial audience, and resembles a lot of other sites.
At that point people move on to something else, and the cycle begins again. Sites that break out of it (like Instapaper or Pinterest) seem to succeed by picking a very specific vision of bookmarking and sticking to it.
I think of this as "abstraction syndrome", where you are tempted at every step to build a more abstract version of the product because of the diversity of uses people put it to. But that very process makes the project generic, boring, and less useful than the original niche idea.
I believe a similar dynamic explains why no one has "solved lists". It's like "solving social" or "solving writing". The details are where the fun is.
Excel is also the Mother of all list-making apps. From Spolsky (May 2000):
> When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn't even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles everything.
I drew a line in the sand some months ago, and it was we will not turn our product into a spreadsheet.
But when customers need certain capabilities, sometimes the "obvious" solution looks exactly like a spreadsheet, since we deal with sets of related, domain-specific lists.
Those are always product-breaking, lazy-minded solutions that in the long run won't serve the customer well and generate mountains of technical and UX debt. Like a "miscellaneous" category for UI actions, they indicate a shortage of insight and imagination.
One of the favorite lists of all time -- in terms of both contemporary utility and in simplicity, is the MacRumors buyers guide: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Maybe it was slapped together in a cumbersome way, but I can't imagine it having to be anything more complicated than 3 lists (or spreadsheets), if you're relatively anal about normalization: One for the list of products, one for the list of updates per product, and one for the list of of articles per product (which could be auto-generated via a tagging mechanism).
Not only is it something that is useful to me almost on a monthly basis...it underscores how greatly lists can augment the limits of human memory. I mean, seriously, just a few years ago, Apple had just a handful of product lines, and even then I couldn't tell you roughly how many months it had been since the last iPod or iPhone release, nevermind how much that time period is compared to the average release cycle per product. And yet by tying those public and easily-gatherable facts together makes something incredibly useful. I'm surprised no one has seemed to have done it for Android...though to keep your sanity, you'd have to restrict it to the main manufacturers and lines (Nexus, Galaxy, Note, HTC One, etc).
What I meant was that it may have started out as cumbersome (i.e. someone's Word document)...but hopefully by now they've moved it to a spreadsheet-like format. Given that Macrumors is a well-established site, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't baked into their CMS as some kind of module...though it really could be done as a set of spreadsheets (or YAML) and then as a static site.
How long would it take to research every iPod-era-and-onwards Mac product line -- including dates of refreshes/announcements? I bet no more than a day...especially if you just start from the Wikipedia page, which needs some cleaning up of taxonomy, but is pretty good (and relatively machine-parseable):
There is definitely some editorial decision making that needs to be done about how to best classify things. But the Apple product line is pretty small, so the number of decisions -- e.g. should "iPod classic" and "iPod touch" be separate "families"/product-lines -- is relatively small.
After you have a list/spreadsheet of product-lines and dates...then it's not hard to write a script that calculates the number of days between each subsequent release...which gets you much of the main utility of the Macrumors' guide: days since last release, and average days per cycle.
(it'd actually be kind of cool to see this done with the major programming languages...)
* Eater: they have a "Top 38 restaurants" list for each city they cover [1]
* Wirecutter: most WC posts aren't lists but rather "X is the best product in category Y" but many have runner-up products. They also have a lot of cool gift-giving lists [2]
* Producthunt collections: I'm not completely sold on PH as a whole, but their collections feature is pretty cool. I have a few I use as bookmarks more than anything. [3]
* Business Insider: they have a "10 things in X you need to know today" ... it's not perfect but a nice way to get the news while I'm waiting in line at the coffee shop [4]
* Trello: IMO its the best personal, flexible list making tool
Odd: Pinterest seems to me like the breakout published list platform. No one said lists have to be words only: a Pinterest board is just a list with pictures.
Pinterest boards are basically visual unordered lists with the default view of Pinterest bring focused on the items users can create lists with rather than of the particular lists on the site.
I'd propose most successful social sites are successful list-based services, although the default filtering/ordering is not by author, which seems to be the specific case that the article contemplates.
HN, for example, allows me to go see a list of things that a majority of people in my demographic think is interesting today.
Reddit, as one example of a topical social site, takes it a step further and allows users to choose their "vertical," as the author would likely state it.
I disagree. What makes a list a list (and not a group of cool shit) is that the list itself has (probably a lot) more value than the individual items. I'd argue the case that this is very rarely true of Pinterest boards, and Pinterest probably would also given the fact that it seems generally as a user you're confronted with a mashup of items from other people's boards, and not as often do you land on the board itself as a curated collection.
GitHub turned out to be a pretty decent place for collaborating on various lists.
I mean, the list of awesome lists[0] is currently the 23rd most starred GitHub project.
I'm using GitHub both as a collaborative tool for creating lists and as my own tool for creating lists (as an example, a list of books I have read / am reading / planning on reading [1]).
I'm really glad you brought up GitHub in this way. I have been using GitHub for much more than versioned code storage.
For example, I've been using it as a collaborative writing zone with a friend of mine. Our use is definitely nothing too remarkable, but as far as collaborative writing goes, it's not easy to imagine a product with more technical capabilities than git.
The real hurdle is just non-technical people being intimidated by the terminal / command prompt. I'd like to think that stigma is on its way out, but wouldn't we all?
I don't think of Trello as a "list app". It's a kanban app, which is a kind of list I suppose, but "list" is way too vague for it.
Kanban is a pretty specific case. There have actually been a number of apps attempting to do kanban boards. Trello is the only one I've tried that actually works well.
Counterpoint: I have never used Trello as a kanban board, with predefined column names, left-to-right motion, and strict WIP limits.
I have a board for my house, with columns for "buy/sell", "maintenance", "check later".
I have a board for my family, with a column representing an upcoming milestone/event/party, and cards representing tasks my wife and I still have to complete.
Our company uses a top-level Company Report board, with each column representing a company goal, and each card representing an in-progress project.
I've also seen boards represent options and possibilities - "everyone add a to the column of the conference(s) you want to attend this year" - then the card becomes the locus of planning for that person's conference travel and so forth. My family did this earlier this year when searching for a home to buy - each card was a house, and the columns approximately represented neighborhoods.
I don't think Trello is kanban-specific. Yes, it does kanban very well, but I know of many different types of people that use trello in completely different ways (and they've never heard of kanban).
I remember being excited about lists way back when Path was path.io and apparently a tool for creating and sharing lists (http://readwrite.com/2010/02/15/first_peek_at_pathio_the_ste...). I was really disappointed when it turned out to be yet another social network, and no one has really seemed to crack this space yet (maybe Trello, or Workflowy?).
For me Google Keep is by far the best list management tool out there- it solves the singular use case very well.
For the network use case, I think there are "levels" to it- some of which Keep solves.
For my wife and I, we share lists for groceries, errands, restaurants to try, etc.
Keep is absolutely fantastic for sharing with only a few people.
I think there may be a level at which point Keep wouldn't handle a lot of people- though I'm not sure exactly what the level would be- but I haven't really tried it beyond a handful (4-6) people.
The second type of list this article mentions, social lists so to speak, is definitely valuable to users and probably isn't receiving the specific attention it deserves. Foursquare as a "public itinerary" for a trip through select art galleries in NYC is a great example. Informal, public education could also be orchestrated with these "social lists"; reading material / exercises listed out in a syllabus and shared among interested parties.
Something that I think is pretty silly is the novelization of the fact that there are not many "single user list apps" that have transcended themselves and become "social / public list apps". I think that's because a whole heck of a lot of people will write lists on platforms which are not list-centric, ie: a physical notepad, text messages / emails sent to yourself, nodepad smartphone apps, or even just notes written on your freaking forearm in sharpie!...
Lists are an interesting topic though, and when you think about it, an enormous portion of the internet really only functions as a list delivery system. Lists of popular links (Reddit, hackernews), lists of friend's pictures (Instagram), lists of friend's life updates (Facebook, Twitter et.al), lists of categorized media (Pintrest, Tumblr), lists of queried results (google, duckduckgo, search et.al)...
But I gotta say that lists as an integral motif of IT is a really cool concept.
It really depends on your definition of "list." I would actually argue that the entire Internet is made up of lists, but there are a few things that change the way we see them:
* Cadence (how often the lists changes)
* Content type (what got on the list and how did it get there)
* Sort (how the content is sorted)
If we wander back into the earlier Internet, Yahoo was arguably the dominant player. And what was Yahoo? A list of links divided up by category.
Google came along and won the game because it's better in the world than anyone else at sorting lists of webpages. It's so good that it can actually sort them without having anyone ever see them or read them, and that allows them to scale to a level Yahoo couldn't even dream of, with better results all the while. Google is the best, technology-enabled list-making service in the world.
Now the way most people use Facebook is to see a list of all the stuff their friends have posted about. Originally it was ordered solely by time, but now they have a little more data about what you like to click on and what/who you're interested in, and help you out a bit.
Twitter is a list of what certain people and organizations you follow are publishing right now.
HackerNews and Reddit and ProductHunt are lists of the best X as decided by the community, with a gravity (or 24-hour session) added so the older stuff falls down over time, keeping them fresh.
Pinterest, although not a list in the sense that it's a vertical ascending/descending list (unless you're on a mobile device), is in actuality a list of all the products and photos your friends are gathering into their various collections.
The purpose of Yelp and Foursquare is largely to give me a list of places I should go to based on the information provided by my friends or the crowd.
In other words, the reason you're not seeing lists is because you're thinking of "lists" as a two-dimensional object; something in which someone comes in and compiles a list of X and others consume it. In reality this is happening in several ways, there's just often a lot more nuance and color than someone coming through to create their own collection.
At the end of the day, a list is just a data sort. The Internet is made of lists. The interesting thing, at least in my opinion, is how you accumulate that data and how you sort it. If you define "list-making" as the accumulation and sorting of data, almost every big tech company I can think of is in the list-making business.
As someone entering this space, this is an interesting topic, and there are some good ideas and discussions to be had in this thread.
One thing I've noticed, is that some lists are better served via different mediums than others; this might be the difference of putting something into apple Notes versus apple Todos. Sometimes you just need a list for reference, and other times you need each to represent something actionable.
Other times, the lists are directly associated with a service provider: amazon wishlists or netflix watchlist (note both have 'list' in their name) and are both geared towards furthering your investment in their platform. They aren't a core aspect of their business plan, but they are helpful to users.
Lists have also been around for quite a while! a chapter could be said to be a list of pages (if you consider a list a collection and a collection a list); and the index is certainly a list of chapters.
Came here to say this... but actually, when I think about it, I use it much less than I could/should. It gets confusing after a while: you can't find the lists you have, and start making the same list over and over again (in my case, things to pack when going out on a photo trip).
It would help to be able to attach metadata to items, and especially to have the app record the date of each item, and then be able to sort all items by date (regardless of depth, etc.)
workflowy.com is a great product. I wish there'd be more development on it though. It seems to me the product has become stale and the devs just sit back and collect revenue.
Thinking about this more, the problem isn't that list apps are an underserved market, but rather that they're an overserved market. Making a list app is easy - so easy that "make a list app" is the glorified "Hello world" used to demonstrate real-world code for lots of Javascript frameworks and other language libraries.
Successful examples are vertical, not horizontal. The obvious ones mentioned here are Trello and Pinterest, neither of which are "list apps" in the standard sense. Other ones coming to mind are Buzzfeed-style click-bait, of the "Here are 17 stupid things! Number 4 will shock you!" variety - but those aren't so much lists as bait technique.
The article missed the mother of all Lists that turned into billion dollar business during last dotcom boom - Yahoo! Directory. It is unfortunate that Yahoo! shut down a service with lot of potential specially in the mobile world.
Just think of possibility if you were starting with the Yahoo! Directory, making it mobile friendly, location aware, and providing users the ability to favorite, specific entry, add to the directory, comment on entries and directories.
Majority of businesses today have online presence. Starting from scratch is difficult. Getting users to build a list from scratch is difficult. Offer them a pre-built list/entries based on location and let them refine it.
I remember using this list-making site _years_ ago, but somehow stopped using it. It reminds me of the modern day Pinboard, but for actual generic lists.
I agree with you on several parts,And there have actually been some decent attempts which i regularly use [1],[2].
I find it fascinating how people use Github to maintain curated lists.
But I find list-making as an art in itself.It requires the curator to be able assimilate information in bite sized packets which are informative enough. As a rule,I feel that the size of each list item should inversely proportional to the size of the list.
Collaborated and community curated lists are a god-send.
Stack-Overflow also maintains really good lists/community articles.
But then think about the lists which are a single person's hardwork or maybe a group of people being paid to do so. A list need not necessarily be objective and can also provide the curator's views.
This can be good or bad dependent on breadth of the curators knowledge.
Lists(like really well written articles) are often the result of extensive data analysis which is why lists like those provided by WSJ and WGSN[3] are paid/exclusive services.
> As a rule,I feel that the size of each list item should inversely proportional to the size of the list.
What are you talking about? That seems completely nonsensical. if I have a list with 100 items, i'm not going to restrict each list item to two words, or two paragraphs, if the verbosity is needed. That is completely detached and separate from the role of lists. If thats how you like to do your lists that's certainly your choice, but a rule? seems a bit much.
You can obviously append extra details separately,but if someone gave you a 100 page list which contains every possible detail of every item.Then would you read it? Would you use a dictionary which contained everything etymology to usage and derivations on the same section for each and every word?
EDIT : And yes that is definitely not a rule I would enforce on someone else,but it is a 'guideline' i enforce on myself while reading/making lists
I don't understand this post at all. The reason no one has built a monopoly around lists is that they are a ridiculously cheap commodity, both for the personal and network use cases.
As is obvious from the post, Fred meant a list services that are used to publish lists for others to consume. Lists like the MacRumours' Buyer's code mentioned in the top comment. http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
There's an obvious network effect: producers and consumers, more of each makes the service better, if producers get something as a return, even if it is just silly internet karma points.
Yeah, the Apple Notes app is a perfectly sufficient app for making most lists, and it automatically syncs to all of your devices. That's just one fantastic free option.
Lists aka Collections aka Containers. There are so many manifestations of this pattern on the web that we really ought to try to standardize how one can create them, and read and write resources that are members of them.
I think the reason no one has nailed the distributed list making part is because that's basically email, which it's really hard to improve substantially on, it turns out.
Simple, general-purpose personal publishing is not really a part of the modern web in any straightforward way. There are plenty of special-purpose 'listmaking' services — but it's hard to imagine one tackling the problem in the general case because it's just not a great business. Email gets shoehorned into this usecase because it's one of the only personal publishing tool that's totally decentralized and really easy to use.
Why on earth would anyone bother paying for a list app, when there are so many ways to do it for free? The best you could do is try to write something really excellent and get bought as a replacement for one of ${GIANTCO}'s existing list products. So best case for a team is probably an acquihire, and it'd require a fair investment for scaling at zero revenue to get even that.
basecamp is a list app, and they've been very successful in the space, and have remained small and independent for over 10 years. They were also bootstrapped, and managed to scale; but they did have revenue to support that.
I think there's plenty of room for small, independent list apps in niche verticals. But the original article isn't looking for Basecamps. They're looking for a unicorn.
Friendly reminder that Foursquare still exists, from one of its early investors. :-)
But seriously, lists are useful because of their content. What a list does is condense information--an artifact of curation and maybe prioritization. So the value of the list correlates with its author.
Some lists are popular because they are curated by experts (newspaper restaurant reviews). Others are popular because they are curated by crowds, and thus express a collective social signal about what's valuable (Reddit, HN).
So, I'd have to say that lists are a horizontal thing. Lists will succeed or fail based on their utility and relevance, which to me says that lists don't really compete across verticals, except to the extent that everything competes for mindshare in general.
After reading this blog entry and some of the comments it is obvious that tools like KimonoLabs and Blockspring are here to help fill these gaps. Excel is indeed the mother of all list-making apps and will probably stay like this forever.
Why do you think Google Forms / Typeform allow you to (or default) to saving the data in Excel? It just builds a complex list out of those cells..
Basically the reason is that these are the tool our generation has grew up with and we find it hard to tell people to use anything else...
Why am I mentioning those companies? Because they help you make lists from data that isn't necessarily available with an interface - I'd keep an eye on those guys
I thought it was a silly post at first, then I remembered I had in gmail draft emails for lists of: to read books, to watch movies, to never forget quotes, to never forget girlfriend related facts ... etc
haha, oh man! I used to have drafts open in apple mail and do the same thing. But it just became a mess for me; i'd have 100 draft windows open, with various bits of useful/useless information. The drafts were autosaved, which was nice, but they just piled up for me, and all came rushing back if I restarted apple mail. That was one of my primary motives for building my own solution.
> I am somewhat perplexed by the lack of breakout success to date in listmaking. It’s an obvious category. And it is certainly not for lack of trying. The commercial internet is 20+ years old now. So you’d think someone would have cracked the code by now. But I don’t think anyone has.
I bet someone has cracked the code, but it didn't become fashionable. The commercial internet being 20+ years old is just more time for fashion to change, and not an indicator of potential success.
The killer list app will appear when AI is better. Lists are very personal things. They can cause stress, they can be important or not so much depending on the context. They intersect work and home life. The killer list app for executives is their executive assistant. Once we have a little machine implanted in our skulls that is smart enough to make fun of its wearer, ala KSR's 2312 qubit, the killer list app will remain elusive.
Can this be because, there is no _need_ for making an internet based solution for lists. Pen and Paper are working just fine for me for for the past 3+ years.
Lists are only part of project management/collaboration, and because that is a situation where needs vary widely and the benefits of customization are huge, it is futile to try to design an app for making lists. The best list making app is a good scripting language. Wunderlist, Evernote, todoist, etc. all have nice features, but they are just not ever going to work for more than a small percentage of the population.
I have bought one item off it and am paused at the (no credit card, Romanian payment page) of another. But really the FSF could become the consumer guide for the net and I would happily read all their lists.
I've been working on this since around the beginning of the year, still a lot of things missing, but might as well get some feedback since this "topic" has been getting a lot of attention (with BJ Novak's app and Fred's post and others): http://alpha.ohyeahlists.com/
I created a little tool that helps you made lists of things with defined properties. For example, I can use it to make a list of houses I am thinking to buy, and also a list of my favorite movies. By being able to define the properties of the list item, you can make any kind of list. Check it out: https://listmakr.com
A little more on subject, and I am totally failing to find a good todo list app. I am not sure what I really want but something like
- can extract todos from my code
- can be very very context aware (location, time, am I in code base or out on street or on a phone call?)
To be fair that last one is the list problem - it's an Embodiment of intelligence - a list is a marker for a agent, that jogs my memory at one point in time
I use Toodledo [1] for contexts. You can actually filter your task list by context, and I've created similar contexts myself to what you've described (i.e. "On Phone", "At Laptop", "Out Of House"). There's a separate field for Locations, and you can set reminders for when you're near a specific location if you want.
Times are easy, you can set a Due Date / Time and a Start Date / Time. I use that for Gardening ToDos that can only be done during daylight hours.
It won't extract todos from code, but there's a way you can email to-dos into Toodledo, so you could write a script. There's a full API as well, but I've not put in the time to get that to work.
The web version has Saved Searches, which are really custom views on your to-do database. You can create your own searches use boolean logic, substring searches as well as filtering by field.
Works on mobile & web, with some third party clients for both desktop and mobile. (I actually use Ultimate To Do List on Android instead of the official Toodledo client.)
You'll be hard pressed to find a todo list app that extracts your todos from your code. But, you could do that yourself with some scripting.
As for being very context aware - also something you could do yourself, to some extent. "on a phone call" would be tougher but not impossible. Still at that point it might make more sense to proactively reach for something you need.
I've done my own tinkering in this space, along different lines; it worked, but it didn't change anything for me. Sometimes dreams do come true! and they just don't work out.
Quip is my tool of choice. Shared lists and easy transition from desktop to mobile and vice versa.
I can start a list on the phone while I'm out and about and continue when I get to a desktop machine. Nice way to organize different contexts/subjects.
You could argue data structures represent business models and that a startup's true nature is how their data structures are tied to their customer's needs. Or lack thereof, in some cases.
There's no "killer app" for lists because lists are dumb subset of rich data that we are much, much better equipped to navigate than we were pre-Internet.
I've recently been using an app called Mashfeed (http://www.appstore.com/mashfeed), which lets you create & follow lists of social media feeds from the top networks (Instagram, YouTube, Twitter). It basically combines all the posts from the selected feeds into a master feed, making it easy to stay on top of content you're interested in, without all the clutter. this app should def be on the "list" (wink wink) of apps for list making!
I was just gonna comment about this. I've been a huge fan of Mashfeed for about a year now. Surprised I don't hear about it more often. I hate how the big social media networks give me one huge feed to sort through. Mashfeed lets me organize my favorite feeds from Instagram and Twitter into lists so I can literally only look at posts I want to see without scrolling through a bunch of nonsense.
Actually, combined with outlook tasks Sharepoint makes a pretty good to-do platform - you have a site per project already. Add a task list to each site (which you may already do). When you go to the mysite (or newsfeed, or whatever they're calling it nowadays) you see a consolidated list of all open tasks, including your personal ones from outlook).
I'd argue that the killer feature for a todo list-making app is the ability to delegate/share a task and then track it without your own list becoming overwhelming. Outlook is 90% of the way there, but strangely haven't seen a huge uptake in the BigCo's I've worked with...
We encountered this “orthagonality” in the early days of SFDevLabs while trying to build a list-based site for navigating the Internet. Our approach to list creation was bookmarking, yet the more we build for the individual, the more we built a siloed product and strayed away from the potential of network effects, which was objective in the first place! (whoops)
I’m still fairly-well convinced that list-based sites are superior to google for discovery, and a combined list-site/discovery-engine could be a huge boon for finding new and relevant content on the internet. (Google might be fast, but it is far from pleasant and isn’t great for a “wandering” mindset).
Pinterest is the obvious standout here IMO. They nailed the individual use case (I speak to designers and females all the time who use it for vision/inspiration boards), and they leveraged their connected content into what I believe is the best discovery engine for visual-based content online — to put it in a “Facebooky” way, they have structured data, which is immensely valuable. Suffice to say, humans can process and navigate bulk-imagery better than a page full of text, so Pinterest was well-poised to have this effect on the previously non-visual search landscape at the time.
Some points I think about:
* BIG PICTURE: We’re missing a “site map” of the internet, and a horizontal list site has the potential to provide the navigation experience that we need.
* As an experience, the “related” search on google is pitiful; the internet deserves better. (e.g. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...). I think the search experience on a list-based tool will mimic this action pretty closely, but will give a way better result.
* Form factor is an issue for content creation. Generating lists from URLs isn’t pleasant on mobile (I haven’t found a satisfying way around this yet), so I suspect the power-users will come from a web-first generation — unless a novel approach to the mobile piece is created and adopted.
* Horizontal list sites require a bootstrapping mindset. They’re inherently unprofitable in the early days unless you’re going after product-focused lists, in which case it’s difficult to break out from being nichy/materialist. My prediction is that we’ll keep seeing product-focused lists while in a boom-cycle (Wanelo, canopy.co, kit, etc.), however they will have a hard time breaking out of the consumerist space if those are the origins.
* The process of list-building is extremely similar from one vertical to another (bookmarks, music and fashion, for example), so despite the lack of a horizontal product that is a clear winner, I still expect one site will dominate in the long run due to network effects, similar to how Reddit effectively dominated the forum space.
* We’re in the midst of a boom-cycle, so the ideas I’m seeing around me all seem to be very money-focused (nothing wrong with that, there’s just a different focus), however I expect a true horizontal list-building site will take a patient long-term approach that will emerge in thriftier times when rent and talent is cheaper and entrepreneurs are freer to try wild ideas.
* The technology behind creating and leveraging connected graphs is more approachable than ever (Neo4j & GraphQL come to mind). Powerful “woven” experiences with overlapping content are possible with a fraction of the engineering talent of, say, 5 years ago. I personally think this is an interesting variable to watch, as it could be the bridge between the individual and social use-case that you mention. (Put mildly, we can extract more utility from less content creation).
* Community is the key. Slightly contrarian but I see the injection of too much capital as a potential killer of list-based ideas. “Easy money” (if there is such a thing) and not-enough focus on fanaticizing an early user base will be the death knell of all who enter this space.
* What is the correct balance between altruism (wikipedia) and narcissism (social products)?
- What are the lessons from Delicious? By all accounts, it should have “won” but lost its way somewhere (the acquisition?). Social bookmarking still deserves a better solution.
- I think the original list spaces of a horizontal winner will come from an area that is extremely nichy, extremely nerdy, text-heavy and unprofitable (or not obviously profitable). Maybe it’ll start out with poets and researchers and spread from there? The smaller the community, the better, because there’s greater recognition for contribution when everyone knows each other.
I worked on a project for a while with exactly these assumptions, but haven't been able to find the magic sauce to make this approach flow the way it needs to. I think my one discovery, though, is that any new Internet "site map" is going to have to be carved out of some level between websites and web pages. Websites are too broad, while web pages are too ephemeral.
The pattern I've seen over the years is that a bookmarking site will arise, based on some fairly specific idea of what managing bookmarks should look like. As it catches on, the owners will discover that people have distinct and curious ways they like to manage their bookmarks. In an effort to grow the site, they will add features that try to please these different constituencies, and eventually end up with a kind of insipid and aggressively social product that no longer appeals to the initial audience, and resembles a lot of other sites.
At that point people move on to something else, and the cycle begins again. Sites that break out of it (like Instapaper or Pinterest) seem to succeed by picking a very specific vision of bookmarking and sticking to it.
I think of this as "abstraction syndrome", where you are tempted at every step to build a more abstract version of the product because of the diversity of uses people put it to. But that very process makes the project generic, boring, and less useful than the original niche idea.
I believe a similar dynamic explains why no one has "solved lists". It's like "solving social" or "solving writing". The details are where the fun is.