Difficulty can be a decent heuristic for novelty, though. There are obviously a great number of simple things that have never been tried (or even thought of), but certainly difficult things are less likely to be tested, all other things being equal. That said, small ideas and small changes can be surprisingly impactful.
I rather like the idea of small changes that result in cognitive shifts. An article I read a while ago said that Lisp programmers are often unimpressed with language features other people have because Lisp can easily emulate and subsume them, essentially dismissing the idea for its technical simplicity and not an actual lack of merit.
I'm not a big web guy, but a lot of web tools seem to work that way - easy to think up, easy to code up, but once they're actually available they change the game in subtle ways. There's a mindset where people (myself included) say "Well, that's easy enough to hack up using cron and ssh and..." and we fail to recognise that actually having it makes us use it, and actually using it improves our lives.
I rather like the idea of small changes that result in cognitive shifts. An article I read a while ago said that Lisp programmers are often unimpressed with language features other people have because Lisp can easily emulate and subsume them, essentially dismissing the idea for its technical simplicity and not an actual lack of merit.
I'm not a big web guy, but a lot of web tools seem to work that way - easy to think up, easy to code up, but once they're actually available they change the game in subtle ways. There's a mindset where people (myself included) say "Well, that's easy enough to hack up using cron and ssh and..." and we fail to recognise that actually having it makes us use it, and actually using it improves our lives.