You own the spectrum

WorkHappy selected this:
“From excitement and bold moves, great things often happen”

It’s a quote from Evan Williams, founder of Pyra Labs who created Blogger which was bought out by Google. He later launched Odeo – the full assets of which he just bought back so he could start something exciting.

This is a business quote. It’s not poetic. It’s not rhetoric either.

Evan and his crew founded Obvious Corp.™

The Obvious model goes something like this:

  • Build things cheaply and rapidly by keeping teams small and self-organized

  • Leverage technology, know-how, and infrastructure across products (but brand them separately, so they’re focused and easy to understand)
  • Use the aggregate attention and user base of the network to gain traction for new services faster than they could gain awareness independently
  • It’s obvious to me that Odeo and Twitter attract hungry clicks in lonely places. It piles up.

    If a circus clown is passing out evangelical tracts to a crowd of kids, I suppose you can call it using “the aggregate attention and user base”.

    But I can’t imagine the usefulness of randomized social sites like these any more than I can use
    can 800- dating service to get married.

    One great and coming danger in the internet is highly capitalized attention aggregation. Note the reversed term.

    Odeo and Twitter capture clicks. These are easy sites – as easy as a kid browses an old fashioned candy store with a nickel in his hand.

    The transportation system helped carve our communities into branded aggregation designed on the basis of trips per day (tpd). The web will thrust our attention into branded aggregation too, based on clicks per day.

    Unless you learn that the spectrum belongs to you….