Blastoff and Winston

Recently, a friend bombarded me (and presumably his entire contact list) with texts and Facebook messages about a new site called Blastoff. He claimed it would be "revolutionary," though he didn't explain what it was about at all. At first, I didn't feel like signing up for the site because 1. I had no idea what it's purpose was, and 2. For what else do I really need to remember a username and password? However, one night, boredom got the best of me, and I decided to see what this "Blastoff" thing was all about. Here's the premise, from the Blastoff Network website:

And the written description accompanying the YouTube video:

Blastoff is you launch pad into cyberspace. It is a customizable home web page with your favorite news and sports feeds as well as video and music on demand. You have your own Blastoff mall that allows you to shop and get cash back at over 300 online merchants. When you invite someone to join your Blastoff Network and they shop in the Blastoff Network Mall, you get paid! Imagine getting paid every time your friends buy music on i-tunes, books from Barnes and Noble or airline tickets from Travelocity. The more people you invite, the more money you make so share the love and cash in!

When I signed up, I was still very confused. The homepage can be customized to have easy access to all your favorite websites and information; for example, on my homepage I chose to add blurbs from Yahoo! news, fitness magazines, and sports information. Apparently, you can shop on it and receive cash back, though I didn't explore that aspect. It actually looks like it has a lot of features that you'd probably have to become more familiar with to take advantage of; I only messed around with it for a night.

Anyway, I remembered this occurrence and thought of Winston and his "communications revolution." My friend is definitely an early adopter - he promotes it shamelessly and swears by it. I'm not sure what I'm considered, because I don't know how popular this site actually is yet, and I haven't really committed myself to anything.

The true question is: is this site actually a revolution, or is it an evolution? Have enough people started using it to deem it successful? I'm not sure it's truly revolutionary. Long ago, my mom started using a website called Fat Wallet that sends you a certain percentage of cash back when you buy through the websites on their list. It seems that Blastoff simply took this idea and added it to a page where you can easily access anything you'd want to access on the internet. Thinking upon it, I don't think that it is revolutionary, but only evolutionary. I can click on Facebook, or I can access it through Blastoff. The same is true for ESPN scores. And online games, as well as YouTube, Fox news, or anything you could think of, really.

I've also been thinking about what could possibly be "accelerators" and "suppressors of radical potential." I'm not quite sure was the accelerators are going to be, but I can see the iPhone being a hindrance. The iPhone basically does all the same things, as far as combining all your interests in a single, easily accessible device. In addition, the factor of portability is in favor of the iPhone.

I thought this was very interesting, actually being able to see the beginning of a possible new medium. Who knows? Maybe this will become huge, and everyone will think it came out of nowhere, not realizing the hours of inventing (as Winston said) and promoting (as I witnessed).