Curse the Rabbit Hole

So I'm going to be doing something (not here but over there) that leads in with a consideration of Kevin Kelly's now-internet-ancient "1,000 True Fans" trope.  I went to take another look at that article to refresh my memory.  Instead I fell down the rabbit hole of the undiscussed internet, again, specifically with the odd sidenote of Fundable Dot...

Well, "dot what?" is sort of the issue.  I noticed that Kelly discussed using a crowdfunding site (in this 2008 article) whose core arrangement seemed nearly identical to Kickstarter - but Kickstarter wasn't founded until 2009.  A current search turned up Fundable.com - a corporate start-up site that appears designed to leverage the JOBS Act (one of those phantasms like Low Power FM Radio that seems to generate huge buzz when it's a maybe and relatively vanishes when it becomes an actuality - I'm sure it is happening out there but I've never to my knowledge listened to a LPFM station and I've yet to read any stories about a true JOBS Act-enabled crowd-funded start-up.

But its irrelevant here, Fundable.com was founded in 2011.  What gives?

Then I noticed Kelly actually linked to Fundable.ORG rather than .com and followed this to a very simple website of mostly church-basement scale fundraising ideas (nothing wrong with that, but nonetheless a sharp contrast to the seeming ancestor-apparent of crowdfunding's big gorilla Kickstarter that had once gotten a nod in what looks to be Kevin Kelly's most popular Technium article ever).  Hints of a scandal on the front page, which eventually led me to this Metafilter article which appears to lay out the nail in the coffin (and is primarily notable for the nascent and brief-lived phenomenon of people complaining about not being able to get into the Kickstarter beta, also the comment "Is this something I'd need Google Wave to understand?" which is obviously pretty funny).

Upon my review I wouldn't call it a scandal so much as a business and PR failure.  A little additional scrounging around the principal actors reveals little except that the original Fundable's non-programmer founder was quite bitter about Kickstarter, as of 2010 anyway.  I can see why, in this context, but this is a story that lays out one of the cold truths: the idea is not sufficient.  Coming up with an idea doesn't entitle you to anything.  You can complain if you like but in a few short years you'll have been forgotten.  Hey, I came up with the iPod in 1999 (I can't remotely demonstrate that this is the year I wrote that essay but it is - not that it matters) and invented crowdfunding in 2005!  And it would have worked, too, if I had more than 15 people in my "crowd"!  But I'm not bitter.  I am filled with love.