First, the startup tempts everyone (well, almost everyone) with promises that yes, this little company can be a mighty weapon or a tool to reshape the world and gosh don't you just look like the best guy to use it. Let's go disrupt the powerful middleman who lives over there to get started, shall we? This is why the nerds made great ring bearers, because they're pretty happy with the way things are and don't aspire to greatness. Of course, there's Sergey and Larry, who started out as nerds, but all things considered, they held out pretty well for a decade. Set the ring on the desk of most men and they wouldn't be able to finish their mail-order espresso before heading to Silicon Valley to rule the world and do it right this time.

That you can sit there and go “I really want to do this” but you just can’t actually get up and make it happen is thuddingly amazing.

Interestingly my posting of Instagram photos increased over this period. I’ve tried to figure out why and this is the closest I could get. Kellan wrote a blog post [http://laughingmeme.org/2012/07/10/oldtweets/ ] about the 1st year of tweets, in which he said it worked best in the first year because of “ambient intimacy”. There were so few of us (relatively) using it that when you tweeted you knew you were mainly broadcasting to just your friends, even though the tweets were public.

Importance is a bit like power, but heavily diluted. Power is about being able to make people do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. The Instagram founders weren’t in it for power: they have very little interest in making people take photos they wouldn’t otherwise take. But nonetheless, their decisions had a great deal of importance for their users. If they decided to put ads in their app or remove a favorite filter, millions of people’s lives suddenly get a little bit more annoying.

Importance is different from impact. Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web) had a huge impact in the world, but he’s not particularly important. He decided long ago that the Semantic Web was the next big thing, but few people cared, because practically there was very little he could actually do about it.