I must be in some sort of funk today, because I’m seeing doom everywhere I look. Right now, I see the next dot com bust hiding just beyond the crest of the Web 2.0/social networking wave. VCs are dumping money into startups left and right and piece of crap companies like Club Penguin are being snatched up by major corporations for insane gobs of money. Or maybe what’s depressing me is the fact that once again I am seeing dozens of sites spring up that offer very little new except an interesting idea, but the product just isn’t there.
Take a recent startup: MyProgress. Now the idea behind this is actually quite a good one. Track everything you do, everything you know, everything you spend and earn, etc. Then compare your stats against the average. 
Privacy is ensured, but you can see if you are keeping up with the Joneses. The benefits are that you can see areas of your life where maybe your skills or lifestyle are not quite up to snuff (assuming you give a flying flip how other people live, which isn’t all that important to me). But it’s also a very detailed record of how you’ve lived your life. You can see trends in the crap you do and maybe identify things that are really just not worth your while and things that need more attention. The downsides are many. For one, you now are spending a large portion of your life tracking your life. Which means you are not going to be getting ahead since people who are getting ahead are out there doing it. The second thing is of course the free account does not include these so-called analytics, which means you’re basically just tracking your “life detail clutter”. Also, why are we so damned concerned about how we stack up to other people? That’s rhetorical.
Another startup, Helium, aims to grab ahold of crowdsourcing and milk it in the media market. Basically they find some company that wants to buy an article about some topic, and then get people to write stuff about it. These writers rate other peoples works (by comparing them head-to-head in some system-specified fashion) and the best will supposedly rise to the top. So, you can make money by writing quality material, and Helium makes money by selling your stuff. Like MyProgress, this is a good idea. Crowdsourcing is a neat thing. One problem. The site is boring. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t want to spend hours pouring through drivel. Where’s my motivation? I get enough drivel reading and re-reading my own blog posts.
Anyhow, these are just the most interesting ones that have caught my attention lately. Plenty of others are popping up that aren’t even based on something interesting. Copycats like back in the good ole days when employees were glued to e*trade. And soon enough, people will be tearing their hair out, ripping their clothes and walking around wearing sackcloth and ashes.
