Disgusted?

I just saw a YouTube video of Oprah talking to Ashton Autcher about Twitter and how he got 1 million followers. She was talking to him as if he was the one who invented Twitter, or that he is the only one that is doing anything productive with it (read: malaria no more), and it got me thinking: are we at risk of losing good technology in favor of something more mainstream and pretty? Let's look at the iPhone. It had been almost 2 years and two iterations before they got cut and paste, and why? Because Apple didn't want it so. Their apps have to go through an acceptance process, and no private developers can distribute anything by themselves. Let's say I wanted to make an app that really only applied to our group. Lets pretend Jake has an iphone. Even if I can code for the iPhone, there is no way I could make it so that just he has it. And maybe it wants to use some features blocked by apple.. And it goes beyond that, with twitter and facebook. I mean they are by no means the elite sites of the internet, but I just feel like they are foreshadowing.

Spoketh by Sam at 4/18/2009 11:04:00 AM

2 Remarks:

Ender2010 said...

I believe you have a poster or sticker or something that says "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups" I mean look at the wii it sucks and its still flying off the shelves. There are more wiis sold than houses to hold them. There is nothing you can do the market will always be dominated by the majority.

April 18, 2009 at 11:50 AM  
red_herring said...

Well, I think that there are kind of two competing trends out there. The first is as you say, the pretty and sleek thing taking over from the frumpy and functional. The second, however, is the trend both towards technical proficiency on the part of the user, and interoperability. There's always going to be at least a core of users who know how to unlock things, and there will always be a market for those people that will always be filled by some awesome company like Google. Considering how many phones with Android that are coming out in the next year, frankly it's tough to imagine the first trend winning out.

Of course Apple's being an asshole, and I see what you're getting at with Twitter and everything, but the thing about the web is that it is by nature an open platform. If someone made a website that accomplished the same thing as a worse-implemented, lamer website in a streamlined and efficient manner, the internet would migrate over, provided sufficient hype/exposure.

I'm not worried, in short. No doubt the masses will cling to the comfort of their Iphones and such, but it's always been that way with technology, and hopefully we'll always be on the cutting edge. Or at least somewhere on the blade...

April 20, 2009 at 3:02 AM  

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