¶ DinnerPeace · 27 January 2006 essay/tech
Here is my favorite current example of a good bad internet business idea. My wife and I have a number of friends with whom we often get together for variously collaborative dinners in various permutations of availability. Nearly everyone has some kind of eating preference, and several of our friends have menu-changing physical or moral constraints like wheat allergies, lactose intolerance and levels of vegetarianism. Keeping track of all the personal variables and their interactions is hardly impossible, but neither is it trivial.
DinnerPeace, then, would be a web-based eating-constraint resolution service. Each participant specifies their own food rules, the dinner's host selects the guests for a specific event, and the service automatically combines the guests' needs to produce a composite constraint profile for the evening's menu.
Later versions might add invitations, recipe-database integration ("I've got these eight people, a lot of spinach, and a good sale on Alaskan salmon; give me some suggestions."), pre-event/potluck planning discussions, post-event notes and recipe-sharing, and historical context ("Oh, and I don't want to make anything I already made for any of these people before.").
As a stand-alone business this is a fairly dismal idea. Users won't be willing to pay much, if anything, for what is at best an appealing minor convenience. Food-related advertisers might be interested, but the only ones really likely to benefit would be grocers local to the people preparing dishes, and there probably won't be a critical mass of participants in any given locality, soon or ever.
More significantly, though, an independent service is simply the wrong model for the idea. It requires the builder to provide and maintain all the framework of a generic social service (notably member- and discussion-management), and requires the users to join another thing, keep track of another set of credentials, and of course provide a bunch of information whose privacy they have to consider, and which is unlikely to be reusable in any other parallel or future venue.
The biggest jump-start for building little good ideas like this would be a pre-existing public infrastructure for distributed identity management, with portable authentication, ratification of trust, communication uniqueness (that is, your new managed identity is sufficient contact information for IM, email, etc.), arbitrarily extensible personal profiles, integrated personal past-and-future calendar-handling and straightforward control over what information is exposed to whom. This needs to be at least as easy and ubiquitous as email is already. In the new world, in fact, this (and not just email) needs to be the new baseline for online presence, in the same way that the baseline for telephone presence grew from home-phone to home-phone+answering-machine to home-phone+remote-messaging to cellular.
This new baseline identity system would get DinnerPeace and everything like it (including much bigger things with ultimately the same structure) out of the commodity headaches of name arbitration, password resetting, access control, scheduling, elemental data-storage, history, recovery, etc., and leave each inventor to put all their work into their idea's unique characteristics, which in the case of DinnerPeace are really only a reference schema and vocabulary for the representation of a person's eating constraints, and the associated reconciliation logic for sets of these constraints and their histories.
The business problem may be a little harder than the technical problem, but it is of the same shape. Along with the new identity system must come a distributed microcommerce system of which ad-click commissions are only the distant ancestor, their replacement being much closer to a pervasive method of tracking and apportioning credit for all the influences on each spending event, including the new possibility of tipping as a networked and optionally aggregated act.
Thus DinnerPeace, and all the other little pieces of a smarter new world, mostly shouldn't need "business plans" in the old sense, nor investors or funding or stock or even companies. They shoud live or die or evolve based on their usefulness, and profit or not based on how much commerce they touch. DinnerPeace should generate one little trickle of money from how it affects what its users buy, another from its users' direct gratitude, and a third from its share of its users' collective appreciation of all such services they employ. This money flows in outgoing trickles, in turn, to the contributors to the service's logic.
Probably the trickles from one idea usually don't add up to a living for even one person, let alone several, but then most of the little ideas from which they flow are not life's works, either. They are inspirations of moments, and the work of hours or days. The new world is improved by little touches, and rewards them with little gifts. And if it becomes less compelling to dream of retiring on windfalls of luck or greed, then maybe it will become easier to live by caring.
DinnerPeace, then, would be a web-based eating-constraint resolution service. Each participant specifies their own food rules, the dinner's host selects the guests for a specific event, and the service automatically combines the guests' needs to produce a composite constraint profile for the evening's menu.
Later versions might add invitations, recipe-database integration ("I've got these eight people, a lot of spinach, and a good sale on Alaskan salmon; give me some suggestions."), pre-event/potluck planning discussions, post-event notes and recipe-sharing, and historical context ("Oh, and I don't want to make anything I already made for any of these people before.").
As a stand-alone business this is a fairly dismal idea. Users won't be willing to pay much, if anything, for what is at best an appealing minor convenience. Food-related advertisers might be interested, but the only ones really likely to benefit would be grocers local to the people preparing dishes, and there probably won't be a critical mass of participants in any given locality, soon or ever.
More significantly, though, an independent service is simply the wrong model for the idea. It requires the builder to provide and maintain all the framework of a generic social service (notably member- and discussion-management), and requires the users to join another thing, keep track of another set of credentials, and of course provide a bunch of information whose privacy they have to consider, and which is unlikely to be reusable in any other parallel or future venue.
The biggest jump-start for building little good ideas like this would be a pre-existing public infrastructure for distributed identity management, with portable authentication, ratification of trust, communication uniqueness (that is, your new managed identity is sufficient contact information for IM, email, etc.), arbitrarily extensible personal profiles, integrated personal past-and-future calendar-handling and straightforward control over what information is exposed to whom. This needs to be at least as easy and ubiquitous as email is already. In the new world, in fact, this (and not just email) needs to be the new baseline for online presence, in the same way that the baseline for telephone presence grew from home-phone to home-phone+answering-machine to home-phone+remote-messaging to cellular.
This new baseline identity system would get DinnerPeace and everything like it (including much bigger things with ultimately the same structure) out of the commodity headaches of name arbitration, password resetting, access control, scheduling, elemental data-storage, history, recovery, etc., and leave each inventor to put all their work into their idea's unique characteristics, which in the case of DinnerPeace are really only a reference schema and vocabulary for the representation of a person's eating constraints, and the associated reconciliation logic for sets of these constraints and their histories.
The business problem may be a little harder than the technical problem, but it is of the same shape. Along with the new identity system must come a distributed microcommerce system of which ad-click commissions are only the distant ancestor, their replacement being much closer to a pervasive method of tracking and apportioning credit for all the influences on each spending event, including the new possibility of tipping as a networked and optionally aggregated act.
Thus DinnerPeace, and all the other little pieces of a smarter new world, mostly shouldn't need "business plans" in the old sense, nor investors or funding or stock or even companies. They shoud live or die or evolve based on their usefulness, and profit or not based on how much commerce they touch. DinnerPeace should generate one little trickle of money from how it affects what its users buy, another from its users' direct gratitude, and a third from its share of its users' collective appreciation of all such services they employ. This money flows in outgoing trickles, in turn, to the contributors to the service's logic.
Probably the trickles from one idea usually don't add up to a living for even one person, let alone several, but then most of the little ideas from which they flow are not life's works, either. They are inspirations of moments, and the work of hours or days. The new world is improved by little touches, and rewards them with little gifts. And if it becomes less compelling to dream of retiring on windfalls of luck or greed, then maybe it will become easier to live by caring.