Developers do not get it
Some random guy made a "Youtube Instant" product and got his 15 hours of blogger fame and one job offer. And suddenly every developer in the universe is doing the same thing with X, Y and Z website. And they totally do not get it. The reason the Youtube Instant guy is hot is the Stanford education, the stupid instant coffee hipster latte reference, the Youtube celebrity management tweet, the blog writeup and the fact that he was first. And by first I mean years after some 40 year old boring guy who did something similar with a boring data-set using boring technology from a boring company.
Lots of these new "OMG amazing" products are simply manifestations of new API's, low cost computing and platforms such as Amazon EC2. Cool demos that showcase other peoples property in a different light. Like taking a picture of a million dollar home you do not own or control using a camera made by a company which you have no connection with.
I call it the "Canon effect". Suddenly everybody is a professional photographer. And the only thing that separates us is social background, verbal skills and clothing. 99,99 percent of the product is often open source and yet 0,01 percent is enough to amaze the crowd. And software patents are fine, because it is important to protect the 0,01 percent that was made in America or copy/pasted from a server in Stockholm, Berlin or Tokyo.
BTW, I am not dissing developers here. I love new stuff. I am just ridiculing the hype machine by meta-blogging.
Check out Jan Erik Paulsen on Twitter.