I was watching a documentary of sorts about Second Life a while ago, and fell in love with this quote:
TICKY FULLERTON: And yet people are very excited in-world about the idea of buying a book through Amazon [inside of Second Life].
CLAY SHIRKY: No. No-one is excited about that. People are excited about other people being excited about it.
It’s such a great quote to keep in the back of your head. I find I often like the idea of something, but I don’t like the implementation of something – and it’s an important distinction to make, especially when designing a new product. Hype is not reality, and hype is not revenue.
Before you begin a project, make sure that both the idea and the implementation are worthwhile – you’ll need to sell your customers on both.