I was once tasked with building a web app for a real estate company. The ultimate stake holder (can't remember his title) told me as we were wrapping up a requirements gathering meeting:

    I don't know what I want, but I'll know it when I see it.

I was still too green to know that I should have run for my life after that statement.

Really? When I hear that I think I think "You Beaut!"

A customer who wants to pay you to mess around with new ideas and come up with something great. Nothing more boring than client that knows exactly what they want.

> who wants to pay you to mess around with new ideas and come up with something great.

My experience is that the only want to pay for the "coming up with something great" part, not the messing around with new ideas.

Worse still, they only want to pay for what they see, which is usually just the tip of the iceberg.

Give me a boring client over someone with lots of imagination, any day.

"...too green to know that I should have run for my life after that statement."

Yep.

Even when customers think they know what they want, they usually don't. They lack imagination and an analytic mind.

Customer wants A, B and C. You point out that A and B collide, and offer a solution, D. Customer insists on A, B and C. You tell him again. Customer insists on A, B and C. You create A, B and C. Customer realizes that A and B collide and that A, B and C are really not working as imagined. Customer blames you. You present D again. Customer caves in and orders D, as a replacement for A and B. Customer blames the additional cost on you and is unhappy.

Customer wants H, I and J. You tell him that he wants M, N and O. But that M, N and O cost twice as much as H, I and J. Customer is furious. You want the business. So you build H, I and J. Customer realizes it's not working. Customer blames you and is unhappy.

Customer wants X. You ask him why. Because of Q. You realize that the customer would need E instead of X. You offer X but you build E instead, because it's possible within the same budget and time window. You relabel E to X. Customer is happy. His vision worked.

This is where you bill by the hour

"Dalton has no idea how to build what he wants"

How do you correlate that with the mostly-functional alpha which already has 90% of what I use twitter for?

I wasn't expecting anything functional for 5-6 months, and, as it exists, it's already mostly there.

>How do you correlate that with the mostly-functional alpha which already has 90% of what I use twitter for?

I don't mean technically. I'm sure Dalton is quite qualified to build anything he commits to. I mean he doesn't know how to build it because he doesn't know what he's building. (Yet.)

I think part of the disappointment people have in twitter stems from the days when TWITTER didn't know what twitter was going to become. It didn't become what they (and Dalton) hoped, so this is an attempt to reboot.

Except the rules didn't really change.

I'm not sure I'm interpreting your phrase "the rules" correctly, but if you mean "the conditions that led Twitter to become what it became"… of course those have changed. Twitter was born in a world that didn't already have a Twitter in it.

To argue otherwise is like saying that it made no sense for my parents to have a second child, because they already had one. Aren't two kids, with similar genetics and similar environment, simply redundant?

Obviously not. You can't duplicate the original even if you try. Nor is that the point. The point is to diversify.

I think Twitter is working fine at the moment – whatever ugly shoe they're allegedly about to drop, it hasn't dropped on me yet. But it's still great to try and reinvent Twitter, just as it was great to try and reinvent Perl, even though Perl still works just fine. You end up somewhere different.

I'm with you 100% on every point you made, but my original point was that the thesis seems to be "the money comes from the users & developers now", and I don't think that's as dramatic of a shift as its been painted to be.

what's i saw is just a prototype but nothing close to '90% done' like you said. app.net just has only 10,000+ backers at the moment. they probably haven't done any thing about scalability yet.

I'm not sure if app.net will even begin to live up to the expectations of it's users and spectators, but maybe this is a discussion about how we would like to see services behave in the future. We can show people that respect for personal data, and an open API is greatly valued.

This is bigger than Dalton, it's about what we want the services we use to look like.

This is the healthy outlook I wish more people had...and that we didn't need to throw money at a false idol to have that conversation.

Hence, the money being an intentional distraction (red herring) from the real issues.

You can't have the conversation without money. Anything else is a land of wishful thinking, simply because it takes money to run the service.

I did not commit to app.net, but I am philosophically backing them. I think the meta-goal is right, even if this particular incantation is (or isn't) the right one.

I'm with you on the meta-goal being "right". And I didn't say to exclude money from the equation, Dalton and his team deserve to be paid for their work: once they actually solve a real pain point. Right now the pain looks a lot like fear & hope to me, two things that make people do silly, unsustainable things with their money.

He's trying to start a movement to figure it out. Big difference.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Movement? Difference? Trying?

Movement, ha.