Killer App Formula

Lets work this killer app thing down to a formula... Napster Peer music "sharing." Its "success" seems largely due to the direct purpose of the app, in that it was not for sharing other files. Consisted of Integrated music player, flaky peer file transfer, chat, and search. Many attribute its success to its peer architecture, but that's only a small part. Napster's real success was in its way it "convinced" its users to break the law. Suddenly everyone was a fearless music pirate, plundering the seas of the world wide web, ferociously ready to behead the plump recording industry. Napster remains a testament of how powerful the right mixture of ideology and personal gain can be. Real player Streaming video and music player. Flash Web page embedded animation and sound. Typically faster than real player. Popular for company index pages and online funnies. Instant Messaging Interesting niche between email and chat. Allows somewhat real time conversion over the net, much like passing notes. Interestingly most client have many rarely used features. Java Promised cross platform programming. Missed its mark, but still highly popular. Clever marketing along with tremendous free and paid advertising helped. Doom Great 3d graphics for its time, mixed neat weaponry, ugly monsters, and lots of shooting. Multiplayer. Ebay Auction site. Makes it easy for people to buy and sell things online at a fair price. Anti Virus Battles that other killer application, the computer virus. E-Mail Many people buy computers just for this application. Seems to have brought about a world resurgence in letter writing. Chat Real time typed communication, in "rooms" or private. Originally a hit for sys-admins, then lonely people over the internet, it now is often used in online games, customer service, and business meetings. Maybe the oldest killer app. Web Browser The killer app that changed it all. Brought GUI to the web, ruining it forever. Now any nimrod that could push a button could traverse the world on a computer. Reminiscent of the invention of the automobile. File Transfer Well, sharing files was once a really big deal. Graphical User Interface Another killer app that changed everything. Enabled anybody that could push a button to be able to use a computer instantly without having to read the manual first. Of course there are many more of these not listed. I can see allot of commonality from the just those I did list. They all were relatively new in their category when they became popular. Most made something easier and/or faster. Nearly all were free, at least to some extent. Most involve some sort of sharing of media. Nearly all have some communication aspect. Most had pretty direct intentions. We can categorize a bit... The web browser, Flash, Real Player, and to a certain degree Java are display technologies. Email, chat, and IM are personal communication technologies. File transfer, the web browser, and Napster are sharing technologies. Doom is a shootem up game. Ebay and Napster are trade centers. Anti Virus software is a utility. The GUI, Java, and the web browser are operating platforms. It seems with the display technologies, faster is important, but being first or the most popular is most important. With personal communication technologies a need for diversity might explain the niche of IM. The viewing of ebay and napster as trade centers is thought provoking. Hmmm... A rebol version of either of these would work nice. --Ryan

Look closely at those apps for a minute, closer, come on closer. What do you really see? They all have or had the ability to stimulate the brain through one or more of the five senses through a machine. Each one were suppose to connect you to a person, but they rarely were used for that. They were used to get our personal feelings out there while we hid behind those keyboards. Stimulation is great but depression is worse so they must leave you with something. What did they leave YOU with? How about a sense of control and self gratifacation? Wich were not really percieved in the real world, so to get the fix people keep going back for sound, speed, destruction, animation, power, and closure. Build that and give it away for free, step back and watch them buy it over and over again. 2cents... Killer app? Free internet access but prepay for your choice of content... Rebol can do this easily. Bundle sight content for the customer and let them download through a Rebol peer-net Search engine. Don't log on to internet, but peers with a wide area network behind them. Think College............... Requested info is bundled into personal portals, logged, just in case they must share net content with others in there area. Every thing seeable on the internet is public domain, they don't have to pay for content just to see it, you make rebol code that shows it to them. Can't really be stopped, or sued, the content was put there for the public, and now they can get it, share it, search it by way of stored peer net info without AOL, Earthlink, MSN, BellSouth, etc... Those guys will start making someone pay for there stuff, but people will not stop using Rebol as the messaging language of choice, because REBOL has given them self Gratification. FREE INTERNET ACCESS. Start small, pump it through email, then try putting personal portal script in there free pages at places like Geo or Angelfire. GO FOR IT. True Rebols with a rebellious cause. Over throw the IE's (Internet Empires) take away the ISP.