Stuff you were sure would never catch on

[Torkuda]

Let's face it, many of us should never play the stock market, we're terrible at predicting the future. Anything you saw while you were growing up and instantly said, "That will never work!"?

Me, I saw texting. Talking on a phone via incomplete sentences and seriously bad grammar when you could just call the person, that will never catch on! Yea... then those incomplete sentences and bad grammar became so popular they started showing up in every day language.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Twitter.

I've always thought that social media sites are stupid (and I don't use any of them), but I could kind of see the appeal if you for some reason want to stay in touch with a big group of people who you only had a tenuous relationship with.

Twitter on the other hand seemed (and still seems) like an incredibly stupid idea, yet for some people it's the greatest thing ever. I guess some people just don't have thoughts that need more than 150 characters to be expressed.

 

[Elfgore]

Facebook.

Back when Myspace was a thing, I thought it would be king of social networking forever. Then some of my friends started using facebook. I still called it stupid and ignored its existence. Within a month I was on Facebook and my Myspace was deleted.

I think it is safe to say it ran unchallenged until Twitter came into play.

 

[Zhukov]

Twitter on the other hand seemed (and still seems) like an incredibly stupid idea, yet for some people it's the greatest thing ever. I guess some people just don't have thoughts that need more than 150 characters to be expressed.

While I don't personally use Twitter, I can see the value in a method of communication that forces people to be concise.

Surely at some point you've clicked a forum thread and been confronted with a massive wall of text (possibly even written by me) and just thought, "Oh fuck this, I ain't reading that."

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Twitter on the other hand seemed (and still seems) like an incredibly stupid idea, yet for some people it's the greatest thing ever. I guess some people just don't have thoughts that need more than 150 characters to be expressed.

While I don't personally use Twitter, I can see the value in a method of communication that forces people to be concise.

Surely at some point you've clicked a forum thread and been confronted with a massive wall of text (possibly even written by me) and just thought, "Oh fuck this, I ain't reading that."

Well of course, but there's a sweet spot between the two and I don't think anything particularly meaningful can be expressed in 150 characters. Maybe it's just confirmation bias but I've never seen anything posted on twitter that wasn't vapid tripe.

 

[Michael Deeley]

"Cool Beans". It's such a random collision of words and ideas I never dreamed anyone said it outside my high school. God, I wish that was true.

 

[FalloutJack]

"Cool Beans". It's such a random collision of words and ideas I never dreamed anyone said it outside my high school. God, I wish that was true.

This phrase became the landmark name for a series of small coffee shops which would also serve ice cream. I use to get a good malted milkshake from such places.

OT: I don't generally predict the general way a thing is going to take-off or flop unless it's fairly obvious. I tend to reserve my energy for wondering why something really stupid and pointless ever got off of the ground once I get a good look at it.

 

[Summerstorm]

"Hehehe, playing games on your Phone? Why would you do that, you can just use a Gameboy or something - something with good controlls and upsized display" - Games on Smartphones

"Why would i write about stuff i am doing and my feelings on the internet? Most people aren't that interesting... people only want to read about interesting stuff." - Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, pretty much all social sites in "Web 2.0".

"Techno"

"Chocolate with Chili"

 

[Torkuda]

"Who would ever want to watch a movie on a device the size of a cell phone?" iPhone.

"Who would ever want a touch screen phone, you'll end up butt dialing people because it won't know the difference between your hind quarters and your finger." Ironically, that's actually a thing now. Still, iPhone.

 

[FPLOON]

Any thread I make in general...

I think having more letters added to the original LGBT acronym... I guess when the name of your community is based around an acronym of those that support homosexual rights, it was bound to expand to include those that did not fit under the original umbrella of supporters...

Another, for me personally, would mostly be how popular any show can get over time... I mean, I remember watching these two new animated shows (back in 2010) that used to just have a small "outside" community to them and then in less than a year, they both evolved into full-fledged fandoms based around these animated shows... One of those animated shows is so obvious, I don't even have to say its name and most people know what I'm talking about... online, mostly...

(I was referring to Adventure Time as one of those animated shows from 2010 that I watch...)

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I never truly understood how/why Twitter took off. I find character limits stifling and I don't need to hear about what's happening right now, right this instant in someone's life. A lot of them tend to just link people to their blogs anyway. <.>

The other thing that surprised me was how Let's Plays have turned into an actual viable source of income. I just enjoyed gameplay vids when I was still going through the school system, I never thought they'd be monetized. Crazy.

 

[Hoplon]

Tablets.

"£500 for an oversized iPod? who would be dumb enough to pay for one of those?"

lots of people apparently.

 

[ThreeName]

Snapchat.

It's become a general messaging service, because apparently MMS was too difficult. It's also frustrating as hell.

 

[McElroy]

Google+

Ah, shit...

Also if someone would've said back in 2004 that World of Warcraft would still be up almost ten years later... With a bucketload of expansions to boot.

 

[UniversalRonin]

... I once called the iPad (and by extension tablet computing) a wasted effort, citing the HP and Acer slate PC's that had become the preserve of artists and, well, nobody else beforehand. Now I use my Nexus 7 for everything, and my laptop for DVD's. Haha!!! It's healthy to be wrong sometimes amiright?

 

[Rariow]

When stuff like the iPhone and the iPod touch (in short, anything that had a touchscreen on it) was first coming to market and everyone was crazy about it I cynically thought that it was just the new and cool principle in action, and we'd be back to the dominance of normal phones in a few months. Boy was I wrong.

Social networking was another big one. I thought Facebook would be long dead by now. That said, even though I have Facebook I still don't honestly see the appeal: the only features it has beyond being used as online chat seem to be designed either to irritate you by flooding you with photos you don't care about or to invite you to put your photos online for everyone to see and get irritated by. I guess I'm just that antisocial.

 

[krazykidd]

Blu ray . I'm still not sure how popular it is. Everyone i know conpletly abandoned dvds and bluray for Netflix.