Wired.com reports on serial entrepreneur Ev Williams’ talk at the XOXO Fest in Portland:
“The internet makes human desires more easily attainable. In other words, it offers convenience,” [Williams] said. “Convenience on the internet is basically achieved by two things: speed, and cognitive ease.” In other words, people don’t want to wait, and they don’t want to think — and the internet should respond to that. “If you study what the really big things on the internet are, you realize they are masters at making things fast and not making people think.”
In other other words, people are wired for inattention and inertia. Make things easy (or better yet, automatic), and move the benefits of whatever it is your doing closer to the here and now.
Williams argues that the internet is just a really powerful machine for dealing with those problems.
“Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar internet company,” [Williams] said. “Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time…Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.”
