"This is a field where one does one's work and in ten years it's obsolete," he said. If Facebook can do a better job than Flipboard, Twitter, Google or LinkedIn in delivering similar functionality that its users will love, then it should clone, or legally imitate, away.Īs Steve Jobs acknowledged in a recently unearthed 1994 interview, products are built on top of what came before, and then buried in supporting layers beneath the surface as they are replaced by the next generation. It could be called inspired reinvention or rethinking of a feature or app that delivers an "aha" moment. For the most part, what appears to be innovative is a new twist on existing technologies and features, combined with luck and perseverance. The fact is true lightning bolts of discovery and innovation, such as the Internet's TCP/IP protocol, the DNA double helix, or the first stirrings of social networking, are uncommon and in gestation for years. So is Facebook, and the tech industry in general, more of an opportunistic cloner or improver of what exists than an innovator? Slate's Farhad Manjoo contends that "instead of invention, many in tech have fallen into the comfortable groove of reinvention."
Prior to Facebook, Zuckerberg toyed with building social networking services, including Facemash, a Web site for comparing two student pictures side-by-side to choose who was "hot" or "not." Facemash came about three years after two former University of California, Berkeley, engineers created .Īt the same time, others have copied some of what Facebook has done well, such as the News Feed and Likes.
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Earlier this month, Facebook added Twitter-like hashtags for searching items associated by a common # tag. Many other features in Facebook could be deemed derivative, including the check-in feature pioneered by Foursquare and the Poke feature established by SnapChat. Adding filters and image stabilization isn't groundbreaking, despite Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom's view that taking some of the fuzzies and wobbles out of video is "completely mindboggling." No doubt, Instagram had to keep up with the competition by adding video to its photo-sharing service, and Facebook provided the infrastructure assist to make it happen. Last week, for example, Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) rolled out a new 15-second video capture and sharing feature, which has been characterized as a response to Twitter's Vine and several other video-sharing apps that preceded it. Facebook has recently been criticized for being uninspired, for basically redoing features from competitive products rather than adding truly innovative new elements to its platform.