We throw around words like “game changing” and “paradigm shifting” far too easily here in the techosphere. Why? Honestly, it makes good copy and at the end of the day most tech bloggers are a complex mix of armchair journalist and carnival barker.

With the year drawing to a close and most tech companies going into hibernation for the Winter it might be time to evaluate what it takes for a product to really change the name of the game. To illustrate the point, lets take a few products that made the jump from interesting web widget to “game changing” innovation.

Email

The Granddaddy of them all, Email completely altered the way that we communicate. Just as importantly, email managed to cross the technical divide. People who might see no other use for a computer will go out of their way to learn how to use email.

Why?

Because like the telephone before it, email significantly lowers the cost of human communication. It gave people an easy, efficient way to keep in contact with their friends, family and business partners. Not only that, it created a new personal identifier – the email address. No matter what email client you use, this address followed you around, making email extremely easy to scale.

Finally, the information is not tied to a rigid platform. I can transfer my emails between a dozen mail clients, anyone can send me an email no matter what service they happen to use and when I decide to go from Hotmail to Gmail, for instance, moving my data is fairly painless.

Spam Protection

Spam protection is the single most under appreciated web technology in existence. Without it, email, blogs, instant messaging, social networks and an entire host of other web applications would be completely unusable. So there is the first point, spam protection enables other technologies.

Spam protection also has the benefit of being transparent, for the most part it comes bundled with other web applications. For your average user, there is little to no installation required and any configurations that needs to be done can be done once and never fiddled with again.

Like Email, spam tools also tap into sources of free floating information. Black and white lists that aren’t tied directly to any particularly platform are available, and since spam guards add new entries to these lists daily, spam protection as a concept benefits greatly from network effects.

Instant Messaging

What makes instant messaging a little different than the other two technologies mentioned is that instant messaging became popular because it managed to capture a single demographic to the point of saturating it. Kids and young adults flocked to instant messaging as a faster, more efficient and more fun method of email.

Instant messaging solved a broad problem, how to send messages that need a quick reply or are too short to warrant email. Or more generally, how do I have a real “conversation” on the web. Instant messaging also benefited from simplicity. In the U.S., the mainstream public was introduced to instant messaging through AOL. Since it came bundled with the AOL software, the barriers to entry were extremely low.

Finally, instant messaging created another portable identity — the screen name. Often, your AIM screen name became the basis for your user names for all kinds of other web services. It became analogous to a phone number, giving someone your screen name was giving them access to you in the same way as your cell phone number.

Web 2.0 Roundup

There are several other product concepts that have made waves, but the biggest thing that we can draw from these are some broad questions you should ask when deciding whether an application is paradigm shifting.

• Is the data portable?
• Does the application create a new personal identifier?
• Is the application transparent?
• Does the application enable other technologies?
• Does the application have a weak learning curve?

The more of these questions that you can answer yes to, the more likely the application has the potential to become wildly successful. How many other applications can you think of that meet these criteria?

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