Super Normal by Dave Morin (Path)

> A good place to start when creating a new social app for the first time is to build upon these normal concepts, and then add your own twist. Much success has been seen on the Internet by doing this.

But you have to break out of this pattern to create ground breaking innovation, no? What Dave Morin is saying is that you take a particular product in a particular category and then improve it a little, and iterate over the process.

This only works if someone else has created that product/category in the first place. This article is perhaps about social networks, but someone must have initially imagined social networks on the internet when there were none and tried to create one. Of course it follows that innovation follows from many false starts in the same space and I can see his argument making sense for things like Myspace improving upon Friendster; and Facebook improving upon Myspace, etc. But if I come up with a better facebook (Super Normal), there isn't any interest or mindshare because facebook has a majority mindshare and there is only a certain minority that might choose my super normal app vs what already works.

Also, this pretty much fails in a lot of real world applications. For example you could argue that people were social to begin with and TELEGRAM was an improvement on that process. But then the TELEPHONE came along. Was the Telephone an improvement on the Telegram (it's super normal) or was it a new product category all together. Were Personal Computers the super normal to mathematics/games/writing or an entirely new product category?

I'm not sure if Dave currently reads Hacker News, but if he does (and this might be an unpopular opinion on HN) I'd like to ask him what his motivations behind continuing with Path are? Surely he is financially secure enough (w/ FB and now Path), and Path is mature enough that it could live on as a functioning experience on its users phones, but is this really his life's mission? I mean he is smart, financially secure, perhaps has awesome friends and familial relations, but why make another social app at all? I mean how much can you optimize the user experience? What happens after you can't optimize further? It's not like users will jump on your platform because they find their current social apps sub-optimal. Surely smart people have some end game in mind, so in this case is it just more money?