Infographics are one of the worst things about having eyes, and like photos of venereal diseases, I will try to avoid posting them here whenever possible. This slide, however, from some hellish marketing presentation, does a good job making a nightmarish point: we've got a major startup surplus.

Just look at all of these things. You don't even need to read the labels. In fact, don't—they're all just called things like Zbloosh and Farbly and NaNaNa. Make up your own names. But they're grouped together because they do more or less the same thing. This is the new normal—in fact, it's the new aspirational. To be the something of something, as noted in the New York Times writeup of YCombinator, which urges our youth to go forth and clone:

In a Forbes magazine article, a college classmate wrote of [YC participant David] Chen’s evolution since moving to the Bay Area: “He used to tell me, ‘I want to build a product that helps social entrepreneurs and changes the world.’ Now he tells me, ‘I want to be the next Airbnb or Dropbox.’ ”

Luckily, there's room in our economy for dozens of derivative companies all vying for the same money that all do more or less the same thing in more or less the same way. Right? [via BI]