(The Future’s So Bright) I Gotta Wear Shades
(March 17, 2009) Twitter, twitter everywhere and not a drop to drink. Stealing a line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a useful way to begin to unravel the terrors of the deep blue sea that is social media. Like the intrepid land lubbers who watched exploration from afar, most people want the new world to be like the old world. So, early experiments are about replacement of the old with the new.
When the trajectory shifts from evolutionary to revolutionary, something important happens. In an evolutionary mode, change is gradual and incremental. In the revolutionary mode, change is traumatic. Old things break and are not replace. New things that look a little bit like the old things emerge. Then whammo.
Imagine the history of the automobile. The first models were custom made and resembled the carriages they replaced. Today, it is hard to imagine that our cars have their roots in ‘horseless carriages’. First evolution, then revolution.
Twitter is the first real revolution in a communications medium that has always seen itself as revolutionary. The word itself (revolution) is overused to the point of meaninglessness. By constraining functionality (a counterintuitive move for software engineers) and making an easy to use API, the service set the stage for an explosion of companies and services. Twitter drives a fast growing ecosystem. Twitter itself is growing at nearly 1400%
Twitter is the next step in the sequence that goes: Web Pages -> Dynamic Web Pages -> Search Engines -> Search Engines That Work -> ???. Unfortunately, the right term, Web 2.0, got used a little prematurely.
Here are some key sites that will inform your thinking on the subject. Tomorrow, I’ll dig into them a little further.
I’ve got a job waiting for my graduation
Fifty thou a year — buys a lot of beer
Things are going great, and they’re only getting better
I’m doing all right, getting good grades
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades
I gotta wear shadesWell I’m heavenly blessed and worldly wise
I’m a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes
Things are going great, and they’re only getting better
I’m doing all right, getting good grades
The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades
I gotta wear shades
I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendfeed. Catch up with me.
