[Note: This is a repost of a post I made a few weeks ago – I just noticed it was missing, probably from upgrading WP a couple of days ago.]

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Scott Burkett’s rant about Twitter, and have been wanting to do a post about it.

It isn’t that I disagree with Scott’s assessment of Twitter’s usefulness - I do disagree, but will leave it others to offer their reasons to Twitter’s usefulness.

It isn’t that I disagree with Scott’s assessment of the need for building a better Twitter - I agree with him here, there’s a very fine niche that Twitter in it’s simplest form fills, and I don’t see room for a better Twitter. And its very hard to succeed just by building a better mousetrap, unless it is a damn good one.

But let’s start with what Scott says here:

Here’s a novel idea. Unless your business idea solves a painpoint for someone, or otherwise introduces an efficiency into their lives or business, it is most likely a novelty. And while they may be easily bootstrapped, novelties are rarely venture-backable.

Novel ideas have a way of easily becoming a future necessity. At one point ideas such as blogging, e-commerce, and even the Internet were considered novelties, but once they were there users were able to see it for was it is and leverage it to solve their own painpoint and utilized it to introduce efficiency in their own lives or business. If we don’t encourage the creation of these novel ideas, we’re potentially killing off future innovation.

Here’s another quote:

My advice? If you really want to be a successful entrepreneur, stop worrying about creating mindless tools to keep track of everything your friends are doing, and start solving real problems.

In other more ‘startup friendly’ scenes, you do see these novelty and meme startups, and they are accepted and encouraged. If we want a more vibrant startup culture here in Atlanta, maybe what we needs is to encourage a little more naivete and little more foolishness. Am I saying that we should all going into this blindly? Of course not, you should definitely do you own due diligence, but sometimes ignorance is bliss, and failure is a part of success.

Here’s my advice (for what its worth) for that young entrepreneur: don’t stop, go for it. If it fails, learn from it, then try again.