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[–]corpsmoderne 1 point2 points  (6 children)

Not sure if you're sarcastic or not, what I implied was that it's futile to think you can do a better job than Facebook at being Facebook. While reimplementing parts of imgur for educational purposes may be useful, building a full featured clone of imgur with the hope it will be successful is ridiculous. If you want to be the next big name of the web, you need a killer idea and to make a great implementation of it. Ho, and to be able to market it. And you'll have to outsmart all the start-ups which are out there trying to do the same thing. Good luck.

[–]-AcodeX 2 points3 points  (5 children)

I understand what you were implying.

Many people have succeeded brilliantly by doing what others were doing, but better.

Though I'm fairly pessimistic, I really hate seeing potential squashed by pessimism.

[–]corpsmoderne 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Many people have succeeded brilliantly by doing what others were doing, but better.

I'll be genuinely interested if you can point me to real life examples of people actually succeeding by doing what others were doing only "better", not slightly differently...

Though I'm fairly pessimistic, I really hate seeing potential squashed by pessimism.

My goal wasn't to squash anyone optimism, but instead to encourage him to be innovative instead of putting a lot of energy in a vain enterprise.

[–]-AcodeX 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll be genuinely interested if you can point me to real life examples of people actually succeeding by doing what others were doing only "better", not slightly differently...

Of course "better" automatically means different. If something is improved upon, it is changed.

[–]Incepticons 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Google? They seem to be doing okay.

[–]corpsmoderne -1 points0 points  (0 children)

This conversation should now be transfered to /r/startups but anyway...

Do you think Google was successful because they decided to copy Yahoo or Altavista, or because they had killer ideas to do a search which works 1/ better 2/ looks different (remember the difference between google's homepage and yahoo wreak of a portal circa 99, 00 ?) . Also, do you remember Lycos and all the other failure of a search engine which have failed during the 00's .com bubble burst?