I’m surprised at the interest this little chart caused:
The analysis of the post was spot on, but a lot of the reactions were far off (techmeme). Now the meme is back (albeit on track this time).
I think the platform’s unfairly getting a bad rap with many writers overly criticizing the platform. Boomtown and AlleyInsider criticized the platform as trivial, essentially saying apps were trivial and that they earn no money. While many apps are trivial, what did they expect? A mammography app that would detect cancer? People log on to social networks in their free time, not as part of work. Users, in aggregate, will cringe at the idea of real work. That’s why Google’s image labeler doesn’t work as well as Flickr’s image tagging.
Arguing that the entire platform is trivial because a subset or even majority of apps are useless, broken, or boring is tantamount to saying there’s nothing interesting in the blogosphere because there are 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day (source). That’s about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. And some of them are even inane spammy blogs like this.
