The question “why not?” stops most people from chasing ideas – there are too many easy answers. “There’s no money in it.” “Client work takes priority.” Whatever. All you have to do is ask the question, and the answers will get to you.

Take the same idea, ask the question “why?“, and you get answers like “Because it’s an awesome idea that won’t take much to implement.” It makes you want to go.

I don’t care if you roll your eyes when you spot reference to Web 2.0 or not, but a very specific characteristic of the shift was people dropping the gating question “why not?” and running with “why?” Great ideas — many of which made little to no business sense — began to hit at crazy pace.

And then it stopped. You see facebook apps now that make you scratch your head or even smile like you did when you still read techcrunch, and there’s definitely a lot of tying-on-to-twitter going on that does so without regard to profit. But it’s a minority thing again.

Unless we’re talking about mobile. In which case, absolutely nobody should be asking why not.

And, if you’re at all unsure of the intended audience of this post, you should know I sometimes refer to myself as absolutely nobody.