- This is my profile in the 1997 edition of John Brown University’s facebook.
In 1997, I was on a team of students that used our university’s only digital camera (for real) to produce what we called facebook. It was a squareish paperback book hybrid, somewhere between a yearbook and a phonebook. Sound familiar?
The cover was blue. The title was lowercase white letters. The idea was to create a book that provided all the information about our classmates in one spot. It was a major improvement over the previous year’s phone directory.
The idea didn’t take off. But no worries. By 2004 there was a replacement: facebook.com. Unlike our little booklet, facebook.com made Mark Zukerberg a zillionaire and earned him the title “innovator.”
So what did we miss? Where did we fail at innovation?
- We only thought about what people needed. In 1997, the information you needed about your classmates was the phone number in their dorm room, their campus mail box number, and their mailing address back home (in case you wanted to mail them a mix tape during Christmas break).
True innovation must also think about what people don’t need yet, or what they don’t know they need yet. That year we published facebook was also the first year our school assigned email addresses to every student. But no one needed them, in fact, we couldn’t figure out what to do with them. So we didn’t include them in the book. Oops. - We were too late. We beat Zuckerberg by 5 years (he was still in middle school?) but it took us until sometime in October to have our book in hand to pass out to students. By then, so many campus phone numbers had changed as students moved to different dorm rooms, that our book had become obsolete. Besides that, they had already become used to using the simple printout of phone numbers hanging on the bulletin board in the hall. facebook was just a novelty, like an early yearbook with goofy pictures.
- We played with what we knew. As I already said, email was brand new to us. The Internet had only recently escaped from inside Prodigy’s prison. But print media was becoming easier to produce. While the newspaper editors were still “pasting up” every page of their weekly paper, we produced facebook entirely inside a page-layout software. It was cutting edge. But the end result was still paper. We used the Internet to purchase our font for the cover, but no one ever thought of skipping the printed book and putting this thing online. We just didn’t. Oops again.
The truth is, good ideas are everywhere. I’m coming up with them all the time. The same year we published facebook, I suggested we make a computer that was all one piece with no keyboard. “We can put a keyboard on the screen when you need it and make it touch sensitive.” Everyone laughed. It’ll never work.
In my next post, I’ll look at five things you can do to foster great ideas.
What was a product or service you thought would never work that has made someone else rich?
