Several weeks ago I was at a <insert name of programming language> user group meeting where a couple of start-ups were demoing the applications that they had developed.  As is typical of such demos, the presenter explained what the application did, showed off some of its features and then got into the technical implementation details.

On rare occasions, the demo is noteworthy because of the technical merit of the application or even better, because of the usefulness of the application itself. Most demos however possess neither quality. Yet these presentations always seem to be given by a new start-up whose founders think that their application is going to be the next big social network. They go on the networking circuit (see the irony here?), demoing and touting their application to anyone who will listen. However, their application never seems to get any persistent traffic. But they keep at it by making the rounds of the same networking circles, hoping that if they tell a critical number of people about their brilliant idea, it will take off.

Sadly, nobody really cares about another social network that repackages social networking features without giving users a compelling reason to sign on and become active members. What’s worse is that successful sites have very poor monetization. This is what Antonio Rodriguez said about Facebook at his Pycon keynote:

“Facebook wants to trap you in a silo and feed you ads and pokes and farmville animals and hope you crap out some cash”

The lesson here is that if you want to experiment with the latest web framework, comet techniques, or distributed database to build an application, feel free to do so. Just don’t build a start-up around that application and annoy other people with your “me too” attitude because your brilliant application is really just a learning project that any 15-year old can emulate.