No Idea’s Original…

There’s nothing new under the sun, it’s never what you do but how it’s done — Nas

I was between my senior year of high school and freshman year at Temple University when Facebook, as a social media platform, truly began to take off. I was jealous of my older sister’s Facebook account at the time and I remember one of the more exciting moments of the summer of 2005 was getting access to my Temple University email address so I could set up my own account (at the time Facebook was only available for college students). It felt like I was part of a movement. Prior to 2005, I had a Myspace, AOL, Yahoo, Flickr and Blackplanet account (don’t judge me) but Facebook just seemed so radically different. It was my first glimpse of college life. I guess maybe it didn’t feel as creepy as those other social networks. I knew that there was a good chance that I would actually cross paths with the people I ended up connecting with on Facebook so I was just more honest with the information I put on the platform. Realistically, the same could have been said for the other social networks, but something about it’s exclusivity made Facebook feel a bit more safe.

Fast forward ten years later and Facebook is by far the most successful social network of our generation. Was it really that much better than all of the other social networking platforms at the time? As a software product manager, I am constantly analyzing various digital products for either inspiration or for design flaws to avoid. As I am also working with a group on a side endeavor (a mobile app), I’ve been thinking a lot about product originality and the morality behind potentially copying someone else’s ideas. This lead me to start thinking about the apps I use on a daily basis and contemplating how original their functions really are.

I mentioned that Facebook’s exclusivity is what originally got me hooked to the platform. Back in 2005 I think the perception of exclusivity was the big differentiator between Facebook and Myspace. Now, Facebook is open to absolutely everybody and touts more than 1 billion active users. The notion that Facebook wasn’t necessarily original is not a novel idea. You can do a whole case study on what behaviors allowed Facebook to reach the success of today, in fact there’s a really good HBR case that does just that. For me, I try to simplify it and focus on what allows new competitors to jump into any market and potentially surpass their incumbents.

Originality is overrated. If you really take a look at some of the popular social apps that people use today, none of them truly breed original behaviors. Of course some of them have original technology, e.g. live-streaming and broadcasting, but that is always going to be the case as technology continues to improve. New apps tend to focus on existing human behaviors and understanding how their apps can make it easier to carry out those behaviors. Its human nature to want to share things such as video, images and text. Additionally, it’s also human nature to want to communicate with other people using video, images and text. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Slack and various other applications, all allow you to carry out these actions as some of the main functions of those applications.

Revisiting the notion of originality, I think that simply focusing on product features or functions isn’t productive to understanding their success. How can all of these social apps co-exist, even though many of their features overlap? One realization is that each of these products are hyper-focused on one particular human behavior without limiting their capabilities to only that behavior. I use both Snapchat and Instagram to share images. Snapchat makes it super easy to take quick flicks of just random day-to-day shit. I don’t put any work into my snaps and after sharing my story I quickly forget about it. Instagram allows me to take more polished flicks. I actually put more thought into what I post on Insta because I know that the pic will be there for awhile. For that reason, Instagram offers me some more advanced editing tools than other apps like Facebook or Snapchat when sharing photos. These apps are original because of how they guide you to certain actions, not necessarily because of the actions that they allow you to take.

Contrary to the title of this post, I do think that originality is a very important aspect of product success. The focus should be on originality of the approach to solving a particular problem not originality in actions your product allows users to take to solve that problem. Features and functionality eventually become more of an expectation for users, so it’s super difficult to find a product feature that hasn’t been used before. Finding innovative ways to make those features easier or more intuitive to use while guiding users to better experiences is where the challenge is. As I continue to work on different products I hope to explore the notion of product originality more in the future.