Thousands of people a day are signing up for a service that nobody really knows anything about.

Hipster is a new tool/service/network/magical potion that promises to change the way we interact with our community. At least that's what Hipster CEO Doug Ludlow explains in his answer to the question everyone wants to know, on Quora. But you'd never know that from the entry screen. No product promotion. No information. Just a single sign up box, over a provocative city image.

Want to sign up? Use my link, and I'll have a better chance at an earlier beta invite. The more you share your referral link, the faster you get an invite. Next, we'll find that they've been valued at $35 billion. Freakin' genius.

via brandflakesforbreakfast.com

The above reminds me of two fascinating concepts:

1) "Haha remember when everyone thought the iPad was going to be a horrible idea (right when it was announced)?"

The first lines my roommate and I speak to each other each morning tend to be pretty abstract; the above happens to be what started our day this morning. The standard reference for this sentiment is captured in the Gartner Hype Cycle's notion of the "Trough of Disillusionment."

 

I couldn't find any reference right away, but I remember someone mentioning that a Saturday Night Live skit during the first week of sales poignantly called the iPad something like "the first device everyone bought without knowing at all what it does." 

I thought it reflective of an interesting development. Think about the fact that there's long been the notion that when you build a website, or web app, or anything on the web, that ultimately what *you* have in mind as its use doesn't really matter; what matters is what people decide to use it for.

Move a bit forward to the app era, and you now have physical items that operate the same way - you've built a phone, but your users have decided to turn it into a remote control/DJ station/credit card instead. You've built a gaming system and tell people that they can control game characters with their body, and they decide to build autonomous robots and surgical aids and teach sign language instead. 

I find it interesting because now the role of the producer no longer includes telling people what the product is. The idea that thousands of people a day would sign up for a service that no one really knows anything about isn't too far fetched. 

2) Okay so if you're not buying into what the seller tells you about the product, what is it you're buying into then? There's the joke that Apple could paint bricks white and sell them for millions. Which is true, only because Apple wouldn't paint a brick white and sell it. There's nothing too profound here, it's the basic notion that people don't buy products, they buy ideas (I'm particularly fond of Simon Sinek's notion "start with why").   

So I imagine that what people are buying into in the above "new tool/service/network/magical potion" is somewhere along the lines of "something potentially big because it combines elements of currently popular aesthetics with currently popular cultural discourse." 

But there's something potentially very fascinating here. It probably comes from the same place as the tone captured in the statement "people signing up for something they don't know what it does [is a silly thing to do ]." And along the lines of one branch of what's (sometimes pejoratively) known as "social engineering." It's the following idea:

What if the service did nothing?

That is to say, it reminds me of an art project/social experiment I would consider doing: Build hype around an object that serves no purpose, so as to make a comment about the concept of hype and social spread. In this context, a wonderfully clever mechanism to help expose the core drivers behind social influence would definitely be something like "the more you share your referral link, the faster you get an invite."

It would make for a wonderfully fascinating experiment in infusing value into otherwise valueless things. 

That is to say, I hope Hipster *does* do something; I've got something of an art project now brewing in my head ;)