Angry people are the best.
They are motivated and passionate about a problem in the world, a problem they are driven to solve. They want to create/fix/build something that solves this problem.
That's partly how why we started BubbleShare.
Its also the reason why David Crow started TorCamp.
Which is also why I've been talking to him about riffing off the whole concept into something bigger something around innovation in general. Because innovation is a key ingredient for economic growth.
The interesting thing about innovation in technology is that sometimes all it takes is for two like-minded people to cross paths to forever change the world.
Imagine if Woz never met Jobs (apple). Or if Gates never met Allen (microsoft). Or if Clarke never met Andreesen (netscape).
I think about how things would be different if I hadn't crossed paths with Erwin, my friend from my first company where we shared offices during my MyDesktop days in 98. 6 years later he introduced me to Diane, one of our early and very talented IAs, whom then led me be to Stephen, BubbleShare's uber "simple designer."
Erwin -> Diane -> Stephen
The chain goes way back before Erwin of course. But its really interesting how events link together and ultimately bring you to some amazing intersections -- crossroads of people who literally change your life.
I'm willing to bet if you mapped all your relationships back and figured out all of the intersections in your life, you would be amazed at how you came to know the people in your world. Trace them back to the time before they were part of your chain. What if you hadn't met him, her, them? How different would your life be?
Our CTO, Chris, came to us due to a number of circumstances and introductions and re-introductions. If we traced our relationship with Chris across our social networks, those links would be all over the map.
If only we had a device, and software technology, that would act as an always-on relationship ad social network tracking, recording, and scouting service.
Wouldn't that be an interesting offering. A technology that tracks your social networking patterns in the real world, real-time, proactively creating opportunities based on your schedule and geographical location, to create interesting collisions between like-minded friends or potential partners.
Of course, we are sort of seeing the basis of this with things like Friendster (general social networking), MySpace (Music + social networking), LinkedIn (business social networking), Dodgeball/GPS enabled mobile ventures (geographical social networking), MS Research's MyLifeBits (always-on digital life style recording), Spoke/visible Path (enterprise sales + social networking). Tools like Wikis and others allow us to plan events like TorCamp (done in less than 40 hours of one person's time) and make create more interesting physically collisions take place.
But what if we were able to bring everything together, and have an intelligent "Google-like" service that, in real time, automatically routes you to "semi-random" likely/profitable/interesting physical collisions based on your social network and communication patterns.
Of course, then there's the "always on - location aware - privacy sensitive - uber find-a-date engine" that could be the killer app/extension of the lavalife/match.com's of the world.
Okay, well, maybe not; maybe that's just too scary.
But certainly, as a general and business social networking possibility, it could be interesting. I'm sure someone out there much smarter than I am on this is already working on something to aggregate all these social network data sources. Perhaps those crazy dodgeball guys at Google are already working on it.
Perhaps it's two high school students in their basements.
But that's the cool thing about software... the next killer implementation (note, not idea -- ideas are a dime a dozen, as they say) could happen anywhere -- and these implementations are likely to come from connecting (usually two) people, people who happen to be thinking along the same lines and can complement each other perfectly to create, innovate, change the way a little piece of the world (or the whole world) works.
Which leads me to why I started this post in the first place. People who are passionate and angry about the status quo, and who want to fix/change/build stuff, need to have a place to gather around the globe to inspire and find each other.
We're working on a crazy idea right now to help people do that in the spirit of TorCamp.
Let me know if you also feel frustrated with a lack of a venue or out to meet and collide with interesting, passionate, driven, angry, innovative people in your geographical area.
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