It becomes easy to believe that the problems we are currently working to solve are among the most important problems to solve.  This isn’t a bad thing, in fact, this becomes a valuable utility in the process of defining, and committing to, the purpose of our work.

The other side of this is to realize that everyone else feels the same way about their projects.

What I find fascinating about this is that there really are some fantastic new projects being worked on, problems being solved, and businesses being created as a way to provide those solutions to the customers whose needs they serve.

I was speaking with Sanjay Vikal from LuckyCal this morning at Open Coffee, and he likened where we are to the Cambrian Era.  As a dinosaur nerd, I liked this analogy.

For those with a different sense of nerdiness, the Cambrian era was a time in the history of animal evolution where there were a significant number of different organisms coming into existence.  This can be said to be due to three key factors:

1. The external environment to support new kinds of life
2. The evolutionary technology (DNA) necessary for rapid and varied evolution
3. A history of proofs of concepts of varying complexities of organisms

It immediately exploded into an era marked by new, compelx multicellular organisms.

Extending the analogy to social media…

1. The external environment, or “how (and the fact that) people use the Internet,” has been cultivated to allow significant evolution in the online marketplace.  This is due to the symbiotic relationship of service providers and service users.  Before Facebook, the average consumer didn’t know they wanted Facebook.  It had to be created to meet the needs consumers didn’t know they had.  At the same time, there were many other sites like Facebook that didn’t do nearly as well.  What sites that have been as successful as Facebook did differently was to recognize the needs of this kind of consumer, and fulfill them over, and over, and over.
2. The evolutionary technology here is defined by rapid application development frameworks like Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, etc.  The common essential building blocks for rapid evolution have been designed and incorporated into even easier-to-use tools.  This kind of development environment promotes, creates, and defines the impetus for more rapid evolution.  Even this segment is growing significantly.  Where I used to be able to keep up with 90% of highly technical conversations, that has dropped to near 50%.
3. The history of proofs of concepts here is the fact that we have an increasing number of communication and networking tools that have been proven to work - and by proven to work, that means that they not only function, but people find them valuable enough to actually use.  Without MySpace, would Facebook be as large as it is?  Without Blogger, would WordPress be as large as it is?  The argument here is that there are websites and applications that have been critical to proving the concept of extending the offer of various forms of networking and communications.  Without them, the evolutionary chain looks much different.  Extending to the analogy to the evolution of organisms, it begs the question: Would dinosaurs have existed if birds had never come to existence?

I like the Cambrian era analogy because it feels so accurate.  We are in a period of growth that is, in some ways, completely lacking any direction other than intuition.  Many projects will fail, and some will survive.

One of the areas that I think is especially exciting right now is the mobile application space: The external environment - the iPhone, etc - is here…how will people use it?

And the answer to this lies within the realm of the applications that are developed within this space.  It is the innovators, entrepreneurs, and midnight hackers that provide the opportunities.  It’s the users who will provide feedback through their use of it.  And it’s simply a matter of time to see how it has evolved.

And it’s the applications developed by people who think that the problems their application solves are among the most important to solve.