Dear One Trick Ponies:

Is it better to create something useful and unoriginal or useless and original?

That’s the double-edged sword by the developers behind Twitter Blocks. Being original, often results in the product being viewed as useless as… well… they haven’t figured out a use for it yet. Conventionally speaking, the product is completely useless (emphasis on conventional) as so obviously demonstrated by the criticism surrounding the launch. But, it still gets used and, considering many of the other web apps out there, it is very original (at least in implementation).

So what have you developers created recently that could be considered original?

Content Management Framework?

Reworded Content Management System. Yeah, like the several billion other CMS’s out there… What’s the point? The only time to create something from scratch would be for an incredibly minimalistic CMS for a very unique project. There are plenty of them to choose from, but not many that aren’t bloated or otherwise overly “feature rich”.

Blog?

A stripped down or otherwise modified CMS anyway. I could have used a custom blog engine to write this, but why should I? What would be new unless it was for a significantly unique job? Next…

Gallery

NEXT…

Web Application Framework?

Not-Invented-Here syndrome. Granted there’s an appropriate place for every tool, but come on… Unless it uses a completely new concept in frameworks, what’s the point? There are already thousands of MVC tools out there that can be easily adapted. The only thing less original than a CMS is a tool to build CMS’s.

In keeping with my position that 50% – 70% of all programmers are con-artists (something I will not change until I have good reason to) the only talent most people seem to have is adapting (or stealing) code that already exists, making a few changes and selling it as your own. So I’m right!

I may be influenced, somewhat, by my belief that services are more significant and tangible than a product.

It’s easy to criticise something as useless (which is stupid in itself, considering people found a use for the Pet Rock), but it’s much harder to be original in anything at all.

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