Realizing Our Potential and Other First Impressions From Would Be Internet Powerhouses

Remember when Facebook first started? The homepage looked like the picture on the left and if you didn't type "the" before "facebook.com" you'd find yourself lost in cyberspace.

Why was the transition so seamless? When did we stop typing "the" and did anyone notice?




Or how about four short years ago when YouTube looked like this? We've come a long way. (If you're interested in seeing the way 20 other sites looked when they launched check out this great Telegraph collection here.)

Perhaps more important than memories of MS-DOS, floppy disks, and external hard drives though, is the fact that it's easy to forget the power we hold. It wasn't all that long ago when people never traveled much more than a few miles from where they were born. Letters were delivered via horseback and now we can send our words circling around the world with a few keystrokes.

It's miraculous and about as easy to forget as the days when we used to type "thefacebook.com."

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Founded in 1986 but still current in a retro sort of way, Shudder to Think plays rock that walks the fence between gritty and surprisingly gentle.

Stale Chips and Other Reasons Why We Should Rethink The Way Companies Operate

I woke up this morning with an intense craving for salsa, the kind that leads you sprinting for the kitchen with eyes still bleary and a lack of balance that sends you bumping into walls. Usually I make my own chips, but this morning cried urgent hunger so I reached into the back of my pantry and grabbed a bag of tortilla strips I'd bought a few weeks ago out of laziness and should have thrown away.

But like I said, I wanted salsa. And if you know me, you know my combination of an iron stomach and twisted, stubborn hubris means I'll eat just about anything no matter how weird it smells or old it seems. And so I started eating.

The salsa was everything I'd dreamt of (literally, a salsa dream is what started this all), but the chips, they were a different matter entirely. And as I chewed I had a bit of an epiphany. Why should chips get stale? The answer is, they shouldn't have to.

It's not like chips are made of organic ingredients and real corn. They're practically crunchy chemicals, yet no one has solved the stale problem? It seems counterintuitive. Counterintuitive unless you're the chip company aiming to earn as much money as possible from families who will either devour your chips or buy a new bag the second the chips lose their crunchy freshness.

And so I wonder: Will it ever become truly integral for brands to tap into the entirety of their resource base in order to give us a product that's top of the line, as best as it can be for consumers?

Will we all ever truly be on the same team where win-win isn't a rare choice but a standard business practice? And if that were to occur how would innovation change? Most of all, how unstoppable could we be?

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Bring the house to shambles with the dancing you'll do to Finn Riggins, a band best suited for fans of Matt and Kim and other fast rock.