Standing Out

The following is something from your post I would like to write somewhere and read again and again, any maybe quote if I get to writing on similar topics.

<i>Passively creating a product won't cut the mustard anymore. It used to be that you could design something cool and tell your friends, and they'd tell theirs and so on. Then bigger companies got wind of this and started exploiting it with "Social Media contests" and the like. Now, if you try and tell your friends about something, they'll ignore it or worse, see you as a corporate shill.

In the days of the Altair, it was possible to wow audiences by making a game. Every new game has to live up to the greats of it's genera (hard) or create a new one (harder). And yet, books have been around for millennia and great ones still come out. I think it's safe to say that it's absolutely possible to come up with good material, perhaps even easier now that one can study the greats.</i>

You are spot-on with (not) trying to make your friends your first audience, I have been that way with my blog, and it just annoyed some of them.