Inspiration, it is one of those funny things that can sneak up on you without you knowing or even looking for it.  It can take many shapes, it can be both good and bad, but it purpose is the same - to cause you to do something different, something potentially much better, maybe even something inspirational to someone else.

Throughout my life, I have been inspired by many things, from a book I have read, a speech I had heard, from an action of a friend or a loved one.  I have also been inspired by some things that would at first glance seem like they would not be inspirational at all.  An erratic driver, and obnoxious sports fan, a drunken and belligerent patron at a bar.  See, even in those acts, I found inspiration.  Inspiration to be a better driver because I do not want to be “that driver”.  Inspiration to not be a poor sport, inspiration to not be “that guy”.  I guess the higher purpose of these negative acts was to inspire me to be a better person.

Inspiration does not have to be some profound thing, in fact it can be found in everyday things.  If you are looking for it, you can find it.  It is up to you to decide what to do with it.  Take your blinders off and embrace it and make a change, or go about your business and continue to not see the forest for the trees.  The choice is yours.  For me, I try my best to cut through the noise and recognize inspiration when it hits me.  Do I always take it and make a change for the better, no, but that will not keep me from trying.

K.I.S.S., that was a phrase I heard growing up, keep it simple stupid. Never understood why it had to be stupid, but the purpose of the anagram rang clear. Funny how things that you learn as a child can carry in to adulthood, and this is one of those examples.

If keeping things simple is the best way, why do so many things have to be so difficult when they really do not have to? Being that I work for a Web 2.0 company and spend the lion share of my time on the intarwebs, I have noticed that some sights make it extremely easy for you to accomplish a task, and others make it so difficult, that you sometimes scratch your head and wonder why in the world you are even wasting your time with the site. I mean, after all if you are providing a service to your users, why would you want to make it damn near next to impossible for them to get anything done?

It never made sense to me, especially for sites that require you to sign up in order to take full advantage of what they have to offer that they would guide you through a six step process just to sign up. I mean come on, if you are making it that difficult for me to sign up, I can only imagine what the rest of the experience is going to be like. I came across this post tonight on ReadWriteWeb and it got me thinking about specifically the sign up process and how you can crack the holy grail of sign ups. What I mean is how can you give the user the ability to leverage another account they have already created on some other site for the purposes of signing up for yours. Hello, if you can get the sign up process down to just put in a user name and we will fetch as much info as we can for you so you do not have to fill yet another form out, then I am all in.

Well low and behold, some one out there is doing just that, and it is a company that a friend of mine, Micah, works for. The way they go about doing this is extremely clever, hats off to them for coming up with the idea. It is really quite simple, you provide them with your most common user name that you user on the various sites that you belong to and they go out and fetch all publicly available information they can find. Wow, that is what I call keeping it simple (well at least from a sign up perspective). I think what Lijit has done here is rather clever, and it surprises me that you do not see this happening on other sites as well. As more and more companies are opening up their APIs to allow more an more access by 3rd parties, it seems like a logical next step for more companies to do just what Lijit is doing. What to go guys, now if only everyone else was doing the same .