Has Google done it? Check the Goollery

[Ewan McIntosh]

It's a disappointing truth that many of the ideas we get at 4iP have been done before. A two minute noodle around your favourite search engine would reveal your potential competitors and either prevent you spending an afternoon on a pitch that'll go nowhere, or thrust you into a niche that's a sure winner (well, maybe).

I'm convinced, too, that Google's algorithms regularly seek out development producers and coders as they look for similar products to the ones they're dreaming up, as more than the fair share of "competitor products" we encounter come from their stable.

A top link, therefore, for those seeking The Next Big Thing has to be the Goollery, the stupidly named but time-wastingly brilliant gallery of all things Google and, importantly, the inspirational (and silly) stuff that people have done using their APIs.

[Ewan McIntosh]

I see your point - we do, though, get a lot of carbon copies, exact sameness which hasn't been spotted simply by Googling some keywords to see what's out there. You can understand the disappointment with that kind of thing.

You're also right that most ideas are incremental improvements on previously produced services. We've often invested sums in services which already exist to make them better. What we're not so keen on is setting up competition against those previously existing sites, as they will be able to innovate faster and already have built up the community over months and years to use them.

[Neil McGuire]

maybe talking at cross purposes, apologies if maybe misunderstood original post. my definition of done before was more 'very similar to something done before', some examples being talk about local and much of the work done by mysociety.org, central station to creative network platform - my reason for raising this was not to question the validity of any of these ideas, but ask where the line is drawn because everything is an incremental improvement of something that has gone before, or a synthesis of ideas from one sector into another. Central Station is very different to facebook in terms of where it's placing itself and its outlook, but currently the functionality is similar, though will probably grow beyond that over time. etc etc.

Maybe you are getting a lot of proposals which are carbon copies of something that already exists, in which case can understand the thrust of the original post...

[Ewan McIntosh]

It would be interesting to know which ideas spring to mind as having been done before, especially for a UK market.

[Neil McGuire]

To be fair though, quite a few of the ideas that 4IP fund have also been done before. It just might be that there's an opportunity to do them better, or in a different way, or make slight modifications that then take it into another area.