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It seems to me that the ideas that you call valuable (ChatRoulette, Million Dollar Homepage), are recipes for shooting stars: they become popular overnight but have little staying power. By contrast, dumb me-too ideas (Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Zappos), when executed well, can create lasting businesses. Does anyone have counterexamples?

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The Million Dollar Homepage may be a shooting star, but it is certainly valuable idea. You can make a decent living if you come up with an idea like it every year.

I would argue that Chatroulette has staying power. It's not as popular as it was during the media hoopla, but they still get 250k users day. That's not Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, but that's enough to get by.

I would also look at Groupon, Woot, and HARO. Simple ideas that have created sustainable businesses.

I think ICQ is a counter example. based on great idea(for that time) and got viral very fast. stayed strong for a couple of years. Microsoft has beaten it , using it's windows platform, so in a fair world , ICQ might have become the winner.

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