It's easy to call something innovative. People do it all the time. They relaunch their site to include a +1 feature over a competitor and all the sudden they're hailing their product as innovate and new. Really, innovative implies something that hasn't been done before, and should imply something that pretty much makes the alternatives feel obsolete in comparison.

Google released AdSense, a truly innovative way to create an effective advertising network. It, and the ensuing copy cats, took over the advertising world and made publishing online for profit approachable by even the smallest, most obscure people. YouTube, as simple as it may be, made online video accessible and launched an entire genre of copy cats. Friendster, even if it was kind of lame and lacked a sense of purpose, kick started a million social networks. Blogger brought blogging to the masses.

Tough economic times seems to bring out the next generation of innovation. After playing with AppStore and some of the Apple dev tools for the iPhone, we may very well see a slew of truly innovative out of the box thinking come out of the mobile landscape. The stuff that's out there right now is fairly tame, nothing has really blown me away, but no doubt it's coming. It's probably waiting for approval on appstore this very moment. We'll see.

In thinking in terms of the "new web", are there other examples of things that are truly innovative, or are we building better and better variations of existing themes? Any thoughts on real world applications for mobile? I saw some stuff on crowd sourcing traffic data. That may not reach a critical mass, but that's a killer line of thinking in terms of applications.