People in the past did lots of things that seemed completely normal at the time, and seem completely bizarre or perverse to us now. Human sacrifice, slavery, mullets, that sort of thing. So it’s likely that lots of the things we enlightened moderns think normal will seem completely backwards and barbaric to our descendants. What might those things be?

Here’s one. Having millions of young people, in virtually every country in the world, spend three years of their life doing useless busywork. Having them all repeating the same tasks, producing work which is likely of no value to anyone, but will only be glanced at for about ten minutes by their taskmasters. I’m talking, of course, about the current university system.

Up until about, say, 1991, it made a lot of sense to tie research and education together. Professors were gatekeepers of knowledge at the limits of human experience, and it made sense for students to go to them to learn. Then the web appeared, and that knowledge has slowly opened up to everyone. But the universities have remained the same.

The main priority of professors is not teaching, but research. The main priority of students is not learning, but earning grades and getting their career passport. We’re so used to this situation that we rarely stop to question it. The part that will seem really weird to future generations is the monumental waste of labour involved. At this very moment, tens of millions of students are writing near-identical essays, solving near-identical equations, or debugging near-identical pieces of software. Bleary-eyed postgrad students will then be distracted from their research to mark all this work. Yes, the students are “learning”, but in an incredibly inefficient way. The system simply isn’t optimised for learning, but for ranking people by intelligence and the disposition to complete arbitrary tasks when ordered.

The current system was great at producing the bureaucrats needed to run an industrial society, and completely incapable of producing the knowledge workers needed by modern society. Evidence: youth unemployment is in the double digits, and university graduates are being forced to work menial jobs for no pay. Meanwhile, firms in the few areas of the economy that are actually growing cannot find the highly-skilled and enterprising employees they need.

Please, someone, disrupt education.

Recently I’ve been working on a few different projects, mostly web-related stuff. The same question came up a few times: do I try and solve problem X myself, or do I use a solution that someone else wrote?

Not long ago, I would have leaned towards writing my own solution. The stuff I was working on – creating a web form, for example – is stuff that I could crank out myself in 30 minutes or so. I learned to program by doing stuff “the hard way”, that is, trying to do everything myself, and it’s a hard habit to break. I’ve got a masters degree in computer science, I’ve worked as a professional web developer, and I use Wufoo to create a web form for me? It feels like I’m a trainee chef eating at McDonalds.

But, I don’t know, programming little fiddly things doesn’t really excite me any more. And now that I have a million things to deal with, I can see the value in an off-the-shelf solution that “just works” instead of something that might require constant maintenance and tweaking. Anyway, here’s the three problems I had and the apps that solved them.

The first problem I had was finding a way to auto-share posts from this blog on Facebook and Twitter. I first looked for a WordPress plugin that would do the job. There didn’t seem to be any that would do exactly what I wanted with no fuss. Then I remembered ifttt, which basically lets you chain events on different web services. I’d previously seen this marketed as a tool for non-programmers, but it turned out to be useful for me as well. With about 5 minutes work I’d set things up so any new WordPress posts were automatically Buffered and Facebook shared. This might sound small, but it removes a lot of friction to promoting this blog (not having to think “is this post worth sharing?” every single time).

The second problem was creating a form for my new mini project, Warwick Meme Posters. I decided to do the whole lean startup thing and check if there was any demand before I went to the printers, so I decided to make a “pre-order” form and see if people would actually fork over their hard-earned. I could have written one myself. I could have used Google Spreadsheets, which I’ve used for this purpose before. Instead I decided to try out Wufoo, mainly to see how it stacked up. I found out they’ve made a much nicer product than Google, and included a bunch of features I didn’t know I needed – analytics, nicer design, and so on. One drawback of Wufoo over Google Spreadsheets is that Wufoo is a freemium product, so you need to pay if you get over 100 entries.

The third problem I had was finding a way to send out mass emails. I needed to email all the Warwick Meme Posters customers, but found myself getting spam filtered. I decided to try out MailChimp. This app is awesome, and basically helped me get set up with a proper, professional level email marketing campaign with about one hours work. (One issue here was that I didn’t need a proper marketing campaign, I just wanted to update 50 customers via email without being rejected by Mr Bayes – so MailChimp was somehwat overkill). Again, it’s a freemium service.

Point of this article? Two things. First, over the last week I’ve gotten an increased appreciation for the freemium model – the “free” part hooks you in, but if the app is helping you make money, it’s easy to work out if a premium upgrade is worthwhile. In both Wufoo and MailChimp’s case, they tier accounts based on how many customers you have, so if you’re a growing business it’s likely you’ll become a paying customer. I can certainly see myself paying for MailChimp in future, and maybe Wufoo too. Second, even if you know how to program, there might be value in using someone else’s solution. In the long run I think it can save you a lot of time, both in upfront programming and long-term maintenance.

I feel like a kid that’s addicted to a new video game. I have a long list of important stuff to work on, and I’ve spent all day on this?

As soon as I read one notification, two more appear in my news feed. My most popular post on the “University of Warwick Memes” Facebook group now has 223 likes; I put it up about 4 hours ago. I keep hitting F5 like a rat pushing a lever – I want to see if I will beat the most popular post, which has over 400 likes. The group itself started just two days ago, and already has more than 3000 members. On my news feed, I see my friends at Aberystwyth, Bangor, LSE, Edinburgh, York and other universities are joining similar groups. I have a few friends in the US – I check their profiles, and they too are joining groups like “Boston College Memes” and “NYU Memes”. What’s happening?

Memes – crude, often offensive, and occasionally brilliant image-based jokes – for a long time were nothing but a strange curiosity that grew in the more fetid corners of the internet, the 4Chans and the SomethingAwfuls. Memes are similar to the in-jokes shared by any group or subculture, but upgraded to suit the online, viral world. Someone combines a funny image with a funny caption – and over time their joke gets shared, referenced, and remixed, until just maybe it becomes a lasting piece of online culture. More often, the joke grows old, people stop repeating it, and it withers away.

Of course, it’s not much fun having in-jokes you can’t share, and for a long time it was pretty rare for me to meet another person who was familiar with, say, 4Chan’s humour. From 2008 up to about, say, two days ago, I’d watched memes slowly become more popular. They spread to sites like Reddit, Digg and 9GAG, which themselves became mainstream. By 2011, I could reference a piece of internet humour to a random university student and have maybe a 1 in 4 chance of it being understood. (Or a much better chance if they studied Maths/Engineering/CS). Sites like MemeGenerator, QuickMeme and KnowYourMeme sprang up, allowing people to easily create and share their jokes. Memes had become widespread amongst the techy, early-adopter crowd, but were still considered a purely subcultural phenomenom.

Then the last 48 hours happened. Overnight, hundreds of “University Memes” groups have appeared on Facebook. Warwick’s group now has over 3000 members, and about 400 posts, mostly poking fun at university life or our rival university, Coventry. The group is divided between the meme noobs, who don’t quite get the new humour but are trying it out anyway, and the meme hipsters, who already know the in-jokes and rules and are annoyed by the noobies messing them up. The same pattern is being repeated in hundreds of campuses across the UK and America, and no doubt other countries will soon follow.

MemeGenerator was down earlier. QuickMeme was down intermittently too. These university meme groups are no small trend – they took down MemeGenerator! A site with an Alexa ranking of about 4500, with the infrastructure in place to handle high traffic volumes – but the traffic increased so rapidly today it was knocked offline. Earlier, I had an IM chat with a friend working for a related company in the states, and he said he’d heard MemeGenerator’s traffic spiked 250% this afternoon. Whatever the true figures, one thing is clear: memes have gone mainstream.

Why did this happen now? There’s two theories I’ve heard floating around.

Theory one: it was spontaneous. A lot of these groups are known to have been inspired by other groups. For example, Aberystwyth Uni Memes was created by someone who’d seen Bangor Uni Memes, which was itself inspired by Lincoln Uni Memes. It looks like the trend started in the States, and crossed over to the UK soon after. We students tend to be a pretty incestuous bunch, and most people have many links to other campuses (look at how fast Facebook itself spread), so it’s easy to see how the idea could spread. The big question is where it got started – did one student somewhere have the idea, and it then spread organically? Was it something that had laid dormant for many years (a friend from Durham claimed that such a group has existed there for years). Or – was it something that was purposely seeded in serveral places? Which brings us to the second theory.

Theory two: someone has been planning all this. The leading candidates are obviously one of the existing meme publishers, such as the sites mentioned above. Internet memes have already become big business; KnowYourMeme, for example, is just one of a number of sites under the Cheezburger publishing network, which last year raised $30 million in funding. Investors clearly see the advertising potential in gaining access to millions of meme addicts. It’s very plausible that one of these companies is astroturfing this uni memes trend in an attempt to cross the chasm and reach mainstream audiences. The other possibility is that it’s being driven by a plucky startup or individual. A Boston-based website which had an article discussing this trend, mentioned one Alex Lee, “a student from the University of Michigan who’s been reportedly recruiting students on several campuses to begin their own pages”. Notewagon, a startup targeting students, has also been cited as the originator. Hmm.

Whatever the case, it’s going to be entertaining to watch this story unfold over the next few days. Not quite as entertaining, though, as the memes themselves. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to thinking up new meme ideas…

Update: this strongly suggests that the trend was started by Notewagon, who had the idea of holding an inter-university memes contest in California. That was last week, and it looks like it’s grown virally since then.

Here’s a thought I had, for anyone building a product that’s a “two-sided network”. A two-sided network is any product that connects two kinds of people – a marketplace is the classic example. Look at eBay. To attract more buyers, they needed sellers. To attract sellers, they needed more buyers. These two-sided network effects create a very nice barrier to entry if you’re already established, and a very tedious barrier to entry if you’re trying to get established.

For some reason, people love these kind of ideas. Recently I was sat next to a group of first year business students sat in the library, who were discussing different business ideas for their coursework assignment – I think over two thirds were some variation of “online marketplace” or “site to connect Xs to Ys”. Just last month at Warwick I’ve seen two “online marketplaces for students” crop up – HelpBuddy and UniBubble. I know the founders of both, Asad and Kartik, and I think they’re both very smart entrepreneurs with that rare knack for making money. But, like many people, they’ve found themselves facing this chicken-and-egg problem. How can they crack it?

Here’s a suggestion. If you’re struggling to build a two-sided network, you should replace one of the sides with yourself.

Example: say you’re building a website to connect catnip dealers (and sellers of catnip paraphenalia) with addicted kittens. The dealers won’t sign up until you have more kittens logging in, and kittens won’t log in until you have more dealers. Solution: start selling catnip yourself. The kittens don’t care who is selling the catnip, but they’ll know your site is the place to go. It’ll build kitten trust and mindshare. It’ll give you their kitty credit card info and billing addresses. Most importantly, it’ll let you know if kitties actually want to purchase catnip online; maybe they don’t, maybe they’re worried the feds will will track them down, or maybe they can’t actually use a keyboard with their feline claws.

So, you work on a touchscreen-friendly iPad app selling only legal catnip. Suddenly you’re getting tens of thousands of hits a day. You’ve gained one side of your two-sided network, and now you’re making so much money that PayPal thinks you’re a fraduster. Now the manufacturers of catnip pipes and growers of rare catnip varieties start emailing you, begging you to let them sell their wares through your site. If you wanted to, you could now build your original catnip marketplace idea. Now that you have users, the network effects will work in your favour.

Or, you could choose not to. Why bother setting up some crazy marketplace when you can just sell stuff yourself?