(Forgotten draft from May 31st 2010)
I’m a little sad to see some of the paths the internet is taking lately. I personally think it’s enough about the infatuation that people have with “Social Networking”, enough, it’s boring and it makes us waste precious time as a race.
Technology is coming together for you to re-assess those technological ambitions that were not possible 10 years ago. Our networks are faster than ever, our home computers are several orders of magnitude more powerful, with multicore processing, gigs of RAM, powerful video cards, and what are we doing? Sending 140 chars at the time, and wasting time on Facebook a huge but simple friend database that can be resumed for external access to a simple 6 file “SDK”.
I write this (ongoing) manifest to inspire you to not waste your time on building the next social bullshit web “service”. I want you to think of yourself as the entrepreneur or scientist that truly changed the world for the better in a little way, not the one that made the entire world waste it’s time for you to make some bucks.
Everyone is in the Clouds, wake up, use those powerful CPUs
It’s like we forgot that we have powerful CPUs and hardware in our computers, like we forgot all the amazing technology we’ve created over the years and fell for the o-mighty-cloud. While at it we’re stuck with HTML5 and Javascript of all languages.
If we’re indeed going to rebuild and create new things for the browser, why the hell do we have to do it with such a limited set of technologies. Since I think we’ll be stuck in it, it’s time to create better IDEs and debugging tools for it, or start making those new browsers support the latest iterations in ECMA, to have proper Object Oriented support, a freaking binary primitive data type, threading and lower level I/O.
And why are we all buying this cloud crap, it’s like going back to mainframe/dummy terminal all over again, and paying for it. If things keep going this way, I might as well go back to a Pentium II with 64mb ram.
It’s about how we imagine the future
Think the future is not happening the way you thought it would be? Re-imagine, do something about it.
Stop cloning crap, build on top of it If you’re too late in the game
Competition is good, but you should recognize when you’re too late to enter the game unless you have something truly compelling and new to offer, on which case you might try to do business with the market leaders. For example, we don’t need another Twitter clone. Twitter was not the first on their space, Jaiku was there before (google even bought them) but they didn’t win. Remember what happened to Pwnce?