Here’s My App for That!
Posted in Apps, Entrepreneurship, Fun, Innovation, Market trends on March 12th, 2009 by jose.arocha – Comments
Need to scratch your back? There is an App for That – you may think. Well, not yet*. But the iPhone TV Ad reminds me of the times we live in when users just think of a need or problem and the web cornucopia seems to have an “App for That” at the other side of the search query. When not, the frustrated users build it and start to market it by themselves, at their own expense.
I was recently looking for an App to manage my 2 twitter accounts and avoid the inconvenience of logging in and out between accounts. I asked both my Twitter followers and Google.com for alternative apps and got several responses: Matt , Splitweet and Tweet3 on the web, Tweetie for the iPhone, MultiTweetDeck and Twhirl for desktops. I felt as if I was shopping for a pair of shoes in Zappos.com. There’s [already] an App for That: purple, free-spirit, minimalist, etc. Not only the variety but the “time to market” of these Apps grabbed my attention:
“And all in one single page (and all in less than a week, but it was only a silly personal challenge…) While we were developing the tool for ourselves, we thought that maybe it could be useful to other people with our same needs, and that was the origin of Splitweet. I think that the main value of Splitweet is that people can save time having all these features together in a simple interface. And, well, we are only 5 days old…”, says Albert of Splitweet.com
“And just as a fun fact we built it in 4 days. It was a challenge we set for ourselves…”, says @RyanCarson of Carsonified.com in this video.
“Multiple accounts have been really missing from TweetDeck. My frustration lead me to spend a day creating a small utility that lets me switch between multiple TweetDeck profiles…”, says Guy Rosen of Guyro.typepad.com
Years of building infrastructure layers, from semiconductors to web standards and APIs, are now paying off for any of us to create and be a part of the internet economy. Crisis and all, the possibilities for internet developers and entrepreneurs seem endless if we make up our minds. In a matter of days, you may also want to say: “Here’s My App for That!”
(*) This one is close! . But it may need a case with a surface like this. 