Social concept testing

Via @researchrocks on Twitter comes a link to http://www.quirky.com/ - a site offering “social products”. Their process is as follows:

People submit ideas for new productsOther people vote on them and commit to buying themOnce a product reaches a certain number of commitments it goes into production

I’ve not used the site – and I’ll be honest, inventions like the write-on mouse pad don’t set me afire with wonder – but it’s an extremely elegant process. It’s a kind of cafepress (T-shirt designers) for products, or a vanity press for small inventors, with the voting-and-discussion mechanism adding a nice tint of game mechanics.

It’s also a reminder that everything – even the nuts and bolts of product/concept testing! – can be made more interesting and more social. And it underlines Clay Shirky’s idea that one of the really big deals about the web is that it allows small projects to coalesce more easily and even profitably.