Incentive
Here's some great words about getting the code down and not talking about it by Andrew Torrez on his Torrez.org blog.
People too often confuse the success of a site on the idea. They think that it's the great idea that's going to reign in the users. They worry about whether the idea is sound. They bounce it off of friends and eventually kick the idea around so much that the original motivation, to make something people want to use, is lost.
Personally I find the more I talk about something, the less I do it. Sometimes working alone, I wish I could bounce ideas of someone, but then I usually just get distracted or de-motived so I try not to do that. Also just putting the words down in an email, somehow take them out of my mind... it's the reason I haven't talked much about what I'm doing on my Journal project besides general frustrations or things I've learned. I don't want to lose momentum chatting about it.
I got the above link from Philip Pearson's 2nd Post blog who has this to say:
People spend a lot of time messing around talking about what they want to code, and how they're going to do it. What they forget is that the most important thing that decides whether a project will succeed or not is motivation. If you come up with a good idea, the best time to build it is now. If you talk about it for a week, that's a week worth of motivation you just wasted talking rather than coding.
Philip's the guy who wrote the Python Community Server and the Blogging Ecosystem. I can barely read his blog because it's messed up on Mozilla, but he just announced today a couple new projects that he's completed (or more like 1 plus another half done).
Very cool... just get it done, baby.
-Russ