[jelmerdejong]

Something I noticed a while back: many people have the same idea at the same time since the timing is just right and things come together.

A few years back I had the idea for Dashboardy (and still have to domain name): a simple tool that just consumed multiple saas apps and their statistics in one beautiful looking dashboard. No one could offer me that. I did not built it, but a few months later Geckoboard and others where there and deliver exactly what I was looking for at the time.

Earlier a few friends launched Avertize, a simple app to get overlays on your Twitter picture: no one doing it when they started building it. But on the other end of the world a day before our launch someone launched the exact same app.

And more examples like this. People, completely unknowingly of each other have the same idea at roughly the same time. Strange? No: the timing and trends are right and the market is just asking for these things.

The uniqueness therefor is not in the idea. The win is in the execution.

[mmahemoff]

Exactly, even Leibniz and Newton had this argument in the 17th century, after coming up with Calculus concepts independently.

There's a name for this phenomenon: "the adjacent possible". Covered in this book - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence:_The_Connected_Lives_...

[sergiotapia]

Dennis The Menace comes to mind. :) http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2010/10/18/the-odd-case-of-de...