Geekery

Geek God – Jack Dorsey

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Jake.

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey helped transform the way the world communicates online. A true geek god, we owe him credit every time we tweet.

Weighing in at 138 characters, the above sentence summarises the content of this entire article, and, in the process, demonstrates the primary way that Twitter has changed the way we communicate – it has forced us to say less and reminded us of the importance of brevity, of stripping information of the unimportant frills and keeping it to the essentials. Twitter teaches us that if it can’t be said in140 characters or less it’s not worth saying.

“Simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship”, may sound like the slogan for an executive class automobile, but it is actually the personal guiding principles by which Dorsey lives his life. A cursory look at the site shows that these principles are very much in place. The social networking site (although Dorsey himself has rejected the term, stating that he sees Twitter’s role as spreading information rather than helping people socialize) is like Facebook grown-ups, there are no quizzes, no photos, no silly applications, no long comment threads. Instead, Twitter is all about the business, consisting of nothing but status updates of 140 characters or less. It provides a simple and effective way for you to inform people on where you’re at, and more importantly a way of seeing where, from friends to colleagues to one’s heroes to major companies and organisations.

Dorsey was a computer wizkid who was designing open source software in the area of dispatch routing at age 14. In 2000, at age 23, he started his own company, which dispatched couriers, taxis and emergency services from the web. It was then that he had his idea for a site that would allow users to communicate through real-time status updates. This would eventually lead to Twitter when Dorsey teamed up with Biz Stone (formerly from the company Odeo) and Evan Williams (who had worked for Google, selling them his two inventions – Blogger and Pyra Labs), and within 2 weeks they had made his idea a reality.

The rest, as they say, is history – we all know about how Twitter quickly became one of the most important forces on the internet. Interestingly, the site has no direct way of creating revenue, and for quite some time people have been speculating that Twitter will start charging users to use its service. That may be Twitter’s greatest ever test – if they can charge their users and still remain relevant and popular, than their position as one of the most powerful sources of information globally will be entrenched.

Continue Reading

Thought piece: Too much tech?

Posted on 13. Jul, 2009 by Jake.

A young fogey of my acquaintance put down his pipe and single malt just long enough to deliver this rant:

Two inventions are responsible for the contemporary inflation of people’s sense of self-importance: the cell phone and 24 hour news.

Everyone now takes for granted that they, at all times, need to be contactable and to know what is happening everywhere in the world the moment it happens. But unless you are a trauma surgeon or the president neither of these is likely to be true.

Seriously, do you need to know the foreign minister of Uzbekistan has moved house? More to the point, do you need to know it now? And because it has to be instant, the networks focus on speed rather than reliability. Because it’s all day, the focus is on impact rather than substance.

And everyone will have at least one experience of planning to meet someone and then running out of batteries/airtime/decent signal and getting completely lost. I say ‘plan’ in the loosest sense. In the pre-mobile era, you’d give clear, precise instructions: ‘meet me at the left side of the fountain at 11.15’ for example. Today it’s more like ‘I’ll be inside in the afternoon sometime, call me when you’re there’, inevitably followed by hours of confusion and frustration.

The world, and our social and intellectual lives, would only be improved if we switched off and tuned out.

My response might surprise you: I agree.

Sort of.

Except instead of less technology, I think we need more.

Yes, the language of texting leaves plenty to be desired. But it’s a symptom of an underlying problem, not the cause.

Look at how rich and sophisticated the more advanced Twitter users have become. Creating nuance out of 140 characters takes tremendous skill; there is, after all, an art to making more out of less.

Blaming texting for the illiteracy of the youth is like blaming the sonnet for junky teenage poetry. (There is, however, no hope for the cell phone novel.)

And social networking, as well as being a medium for posting embarrassing pictures of your friends, opens new ways of speaking, often to people you might not have spoken to before.

What we’ll do with these powerful technologies is another thing altogether, but here again I think freedom of communication triumphs.

Yes, 24 hour network news overloads us with schlock and awe, and every jerk with an opinion has his own website, but the flipside is that every jerk with the opposite opinion also has a blog.

And amongst the tumult, occasionally a fresh thought emerges.

More importantly, there is now oversight – or perhaps we should call it undersight -
with bloggers taking the mainstream media to task. Lazy opinions are scrutinized, partisan columnists are called to account, facts are checked.

FiveThirtyEight was the source some of the most informative, and accurate, polling data during the recent US election, and that’s basically some guy with a head for stats and a laptop.

And shoddy science reporting wouldn’t exist if there were more people doing what Ben Goldacre does.

Yes we might have delegated just a little of our decision making to our electronic devices (don’t tell my friend about SatNav!) but that’s our fault.

Anxiety about the effect of new technologies isn’t new.

It’s what we do with it that counts.

I look forward to hearing why I’m completely wrong.

 

Continue Reading