Simple interactions, social engineering, immediate practicality, deeper meaning. Win.
First off, I love the idea of Lift, the first venture supported by the Obvious team (i.e. Ev and Biz). A simple service for people to share accomplishments, with the requisite social engineering and big data analysis to turn it into a powerful platform for helping people accomplish things they care about.
As least that’s the idea, since it appears to be a ways off from launching.
It will launch into a busy space: Fitocracy and the newly funded Habit Labs (think Health Month, Budge, Get Up and Move Me) as prime examples of companies built to combine personal health data tracking + social interactions to create a socially-engineered platform for personal change.
Epic, a company I’ve been using for a couple months, is broader than just health tracking; marketed as “It’s about what matters”, they are laser focused on building “the simplest way to see, share and accomplish what matters to you.” Create a goal, track your progress, and earn currency to reward others and promote what matters. It’s a mix between Basecamp + Tumblr + Mint that is built to achieve a lot of the same goals as Lift, but because I know more about Epic, I can share that it’s powered by some deep thinking about the distributed web, the learnings from their alpha and beta products, and an ethos attuned to making something simple to use, practical for an individual, powerful for a group, and meaningful for a society.
The more I see companies like Epic and Lift, built around simple interactions + social engineering + immediate practicality + deeper meaning, the more excited I am about how we use the web. They are technology companies built to solve human problems.
Even the names sound human and meaningful.
And the interest in the space gives me hope that people are thinking bigger about how to use the web to make our lives better. Let’s be frank: this is not a mature market. Right now, each company in this area proves the need, educates the market, and lays the path for success. The competition between each one will make their focus sharper, their product development faster, and their communities better.
And if there was any doubt, that’s a good thing.
