Guest View: The world spinning 'round
By Tom Clement
January 15, 2009 —
(Page 1 of 3)
My 85-year-old MySpace-using mom saw it before I did. With a knowing look, she handed me a somewhat battered copy of Andrew Grove’s 1996 book, “Only the Paranoid Survive,” with the not-so-subtle suggestion that I read it. As I did, it dawned on me that she was gently trying to warn me that, if this 53-year-old programmer doesn’t get off his duff and pay attention to the changes around him, he could find himself growing old.
Andrew Grove’s book teaches that, if you don’t vigilantly watch out, the fast-changing world will pass you by before you know what’s happening. Every now and then, something happens that fundamentally changes the game. Today, my business, technological and work environments are all in flux.
Business. Three big paradigm shifts are converging on my professional life.
First of all, Facebook and MySpace exemplify the phenomenon of social networking. As often seems to be the case, a younger generation discovered it before the rest of us (well, with a nod to my mom—most of us). It’s a fundamentally different way of communicating that works well in the chaos of our modern world.
Instead of choosing between spamming all your friends with newsletter style e-mails or spending the time to write personal letters to each of them, you just announce things to a community of friends you have identified on a social networking site. While social networking doesn’t preclude more personal communication, its success is an indication that much of what we want to communicate is our own status, interests and discoveries.
For example, my niece Claire is studying in England. We haven’t spoken in over a year, yet we know the trajectory of each other’s lives thanks to MySpace. If you’re a computer programmer (or a parent for that matter), you ignore this phenomenon at your peril.
Next, when Google Maps came on the scene using accessible public programming interfaces, the mashup application emerged. My favorite example is when someone mashed up a database of public toilets with Google Maps to create a cell phone app to help pedestrians with urgent needs in New York City. The basic idea is that when you expose data through the right kinds of interfaces, it becomes possible and even easy to combine data in new, interesting and valuable ways. Although this started with consumer-facing applications, businesses are starting to notice that making their systems mashable enables integrations that were once prohibitively expensive.
Related Search Term(s): agile, cloud computing, mashups, networking, outsourcing, professional development, SaaS
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