New interactions, not just moved interactions

By Seth Godin

eBay is basically an auction online. It's a great idea, I wish I'd had
it, but it's still an auction, same kind we've had for a million years.

Jeff Jarvis points us to a new feature
<http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-sharing-spreadsheets-start.html>
in Google Docs. Think this through for a moment:
You send an email to your permission list. It points to a spreadsheet
online. People can fill it out without logging in. You get the
summarized data back, and can present it as a chart, a graph or just run
with the numbers themselves. The depth of analysis you can generate is
far deeper than a simple poll. My guess is that 99% of the people who
use it will do a simple one dimensional poll. It's more powerful than that.

Now, what else do we need?

How about a simple system that lets you run a new kind of auction for an
event with limited seating? Say you want 200 people to come to a
networking event, the sort of thing that's no fun if only a dozen or two
show up... Instead of charging $50 a ticket, why not charge $1 for the
first five tickets, $2 for the next five, and on to $500 for the last
ten? You'll earn just as much (if not more) but reward the brave who
sign up early. (The folks who like to wait until the last minute 'to be
sure' end up paying for the privilege). It's easy to imagine a simple
interface to set up whatever graduated pricing model you'd like.

Or, how about a geography-based system for pricing? Many services are
sold by a flat fee, but add a zip code and a map and it could completely
change the pricing model.

Why don't airlines have tools in place to make it easy to integrate
charter flights with conventions so flights run when (and where) people
are going? Flights for passengers instead of passengers for flights...

There was a lot of this discussed 9 years ago. The world wasn't ready.
It is now.

I guess my point is that this is just the beginning of using internet
tools to change the world we interact with, as opposed to trying to make
it easy to interact with the standard world using the Internet.

Quoted from Seth Godin's Blog