Social Programming
While the supposed grand ole days of helpful and responsive use net forums went by before i even opened a script on a computer.. what’s evolved of so called social networking is seemingly working it’s way with dynamic apps into programming circles which makes sense considering it really began there in the first place. Being entirely self taught, I’ve learned quickly that the best way to do things is to stand on the shoulders of giants and keep up with the user groups of the things that i want to learn. This concept of sharing documentation and information is ever so important to the open source communities and it has crossed over into an important step in venture capital funding. Say that google wants to make product ‘A’ (we’ll say a mobile phone map with gps). In order for them to garner users and uses of this new technology, they will need a community of developers to broaden the spectrum of what this particular gps technology will be able to do when applied in day to day terms, as related to specific business need, and on a variety of handsets and operating systems. This concept is important in understanding why google might give away 10 million and why Apple put up 100 million in venture capital for development on the Iphone.
Apple, for instance has it figured out.. they make great products for the developers too. I mean you can’t compare anything to the xcode iphone sdk for the cool factor, ease of use, and robustness.
What’s evolving of this is that companies are able to build a developer base the old fashion way.. person to person instead of just hiring the programming talent. And this person to person aspect operates in a much more “show me the cool stuff first” sort of way than the old school “how much for ye developers toolkit” approach.
Here’s a project that pretty popular project called GitHub (based on the open source Git ) ..that is a unique version control system that allows developers to use social networking tools..
and… here’s a Git Textmate bundle.
I think i had a point to that but i’m not sure what it was.. oh..it’s something akin to the article that i read this morning about the tea leave market in India.. and the debate over it going digital so that you can broker tea trades from anywhere. Brokers are afraid they’re going to get cut out and it’ll make the market unsteady.. sound familiar. It’s not unlike open source programming in the sense that the information is readily available and the social aspect of getting developers and programmers involved in a certain technology is no different than moving market information to a public arena.. sure there’ll be a ton of hacks/bozos like when our stock markets got inundated with day traders from the advent of desktop trading software, but that will tail off in a short time and in the end you will be provided with a much more stable and varied market.. supposedly but the last line of the article sticks with me. Still, Mr. Saraf, who began trading tea in the 1950s, said he could not stand in the way of progress. “The new generation feels the computer is better,” he said. … and this reminds me that you cannot reinvent the wheel just add tires to it and in my case, I can deploy complex social networking sites like Lovd by Less, that’ll end up sitting around with no users unless i call up all (4 or 5) of my friends to sign up and test it.
And for an idea at what’s possible with this (besides my five user social networking site) and how far the digital domain has crossed…take a look at this site providing micro funding for the poor with social networking tools. Kiva.
