I saw an interesting Tweet from Josh Bernoff today:
This made me wonder, what is the importance of coolness vs usefulness. Paper.li is a pretty cool idea, but I would have to agree with “everyone” that every experience I’ve had with the service comes off as spam. On one hand it does a great job of creating usefulness to it’s users as an aggregation tool, but if there is no usefulness created on the publishing end of the service then why is this better than something like Google Reader?
Usefulness is always going to be more important than coolness. I look at services like Backupify and Dropbox that create a simple solution to a problem in a very useful way. These are great services that focused on usefulness first which created coolness later. The moral of this story? Create something useful, and let the coolness happen.
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