Two great showcases of Surprise are Time Magazine's annual "What's Next" and "Inventions of the Year" issues, the latter which I just finished. This year's top laurel goes to YouGuessedIt--YouTube. And in the accompanying piece, Lev Grossman explains why Chad Hurley and Steve Chen's baby can also be considered the "Surprise of the Year."
"Even though they built it, they didn't really understand it," he says. "They had no idea. The opened up a portal into a new dimension."
What started as a simple video-sharing tool--a moving Flickr, if you will--was usurped, hijacked by the masses and made into a phenomenon. This is why there's a rage a-brewin' down in the marketing community, as folks on Madison Avenue debate whether or not YouTube's Julie Supan should've been annotated as one of Brandweek's "Marketers of the Year." It wasn't HER, the critics cry, it was US who made YouTube.
Grossman agrees. "(Hurley) and his partners may have started YouTube, but the rest of us, in our basements and bedrooms, with our broadband and our webcams, invented it."
Two guys innocently toss something into the public fray, we adopt it for a slightly different purpose than they originally intended, and turn into the Surprise hit of all hits. Maybe that's way even though it's gone big biz since the Google buy-out, we can still find YouTube's ascension to be heartwarming and inspiring.
And gratifying, too. I'd rather discover something like YouTube on my own or from my friends than have something like Zune force-fed down my throat.