For people who agree that Instagram, for example, is a small idea. I am going to leave you with an excerpt from a Hal Abelson lecture:
"Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. And indeed, on some absolute scale of things, we probably know less about the essence of computer science than the ancient Egyptians really knew about geometry.
Well, what do I mean by the essence of computer science? What do I mean by the essence of geometry? See, it's certainly true that these Egyptians went off and used surveying instruments, but when we look back on them after a couple of thousand years, we say, gee, what they were doing, the important stuff they were doing, was to begin to formalize notions about space and time, to start a way of talking about mathematical truths formally. hat led to the axiomatic method. That led to sort of all of modern mathematics, figuring out a way to talk precisely about so-called declarative knowledge, what is true.
Well, similarly, I think in the future people will look back and say, yes, those primitives in the 20th century were fiddling around with these gadgets called computers, but really what they were doing is starting to learn how to formalize intuitions about process, how to do things, starting to develop a way to talk precisely about how-to knowledge, as opposed to geometry that talks about what is true."
Ideas do not have to be earth shaking breakthroughs to push the human race forward. Things build on each other, effect of which is often missed.
There is wisdom is thinking long term, but not too long. The mental trap smart people fall into of thinking their idea should make an impact that will last longer and deeper only makes them vulnerable of being wrong. When you're just scratching the surface and don't know what's beneath, it's better to keep scratching than to speculate.
Even in short term, "no wireless, less space than a Nomad" changed the music industry. "Just a bigger iPod touch" is changing education.
So you're telling me that articles like the one on High Scalability on how Instagram builds a product and scales with 13 employees is not valuable knowledge to all other startups?
Making a network for sharing something trivial among millions upon millions of people is still valuable.
The pyramids were friggin' tombs satisfying the superstitions of a few powerful individuals. I'd say that that is far far more trivial than a social network that provides connection and satisfaction for millions.
There's a bunch of fluff in the post, as well as much poorly-articulated navel-gazing.
Also, something I begrudge about the comparison: Ancient geometry had nowhere near the formalism and maturity of study that computer science as a field does. And even if it did? Computer science doesn't seem to be closer than arms-reach to most projects.
Hell, your modern operations and engineering in many cases is just throwing together other people's libraries and fiddling with config files until you have a liquidity event that lets you buy real talent--themselves pretty far removed from the greats of the field of computer science.
About the only thing the pyramids and your socialized twitterscapegrams have in common is the waste of thousands of man-years of productivity and intellect in the pursuit of ego and fleeting fame.
Seriously, folks, let's not treat our industry with such gravitas.
I did not imply that Instagram (or any similar product) is like a pyramid. All I said that if it is a step towards building one, there is no way to know this, yet.
Things that ultimately become useful are most of times never conceived in a straight trajectory. It's a curvy road. Claiming Instagram was a bad turn is just purely naive conjecture by people who delude themselves into thinking they have the magic map.
All we know is, more people than most countries' populations are using this invention to make their lives better. For me at least, Instagram was a massive shift in Camera interaction. I have never captured random moments on daily basis like that before. I only took pictures when I thought I visited some place important, not that great coffee I had in some new city. A good memory to have captured.
You are so full of shit [1]. Tens of millions of people do not share data about their day to day lives. If they did, it would not even be a valuable process. Small groups of friends and family share data about their day to day lives, in a slightly more convenient and slightly less thoughtful/personal way than they did with photo albums, postcards and phone calls 50 years ago.
This is not innovation, it is a small convenience that does not better us in any real way.
Yes, in some instances you are right and Instagram replaces a more personal way of sharing a photo. However, in other cases, in empowers and encourages people to share more and in some cases to share when it wasn't before possible.
My baby daughter's grandparents and great grandmother live in another country. Her great grandmother is too old to travel, and so doesn't get to see us as often as we'd all like, so a very simple system that enables her to see regular photos of her great granddaughter is a wonderful thing. Sure, we could snap a polaroid and mail it, or try to educate her more so she could manage Facebook, but in reality these are less likely to happen and more difficult to make happen.
I'm aware in the grand scheme of things Instagram isn't important, and I'm aware it's primary motivator wasn't the situation above. However, I'd suggest being less quick to say it doesn't better us in any way, or even to say it isn't innovation.
Progress and innovation are often built upon a series of "small conveniences" that, when added together, make our lives immeasurably better, or enable other innovations which do.
That said, you're clearly too emotional about this to have a reasonable discussion.
You are now talking about the washing machine effect, which is not what you were talking about before. You described a photo sharing site as, "a network of tens of millions of people sharing data about their day-to-day life", which is ridiculous. True, washing your clothes a bit faster is not important by itself, but it is if you can read more books or spend more time with your family. I think it would be a tough case to make that using Instagram instead of emailing zipped photo albums like I did in 1995 allows you to accomplish more with your life.
All that means is that advertisers now have a new venue to sell into right? Isn't that what all of this is about? I don't see why we should care.
It's not making the market more efficient as nothing but a close to duplicate graph is being created along with pictures that have slightly more value than Facebook pictures, or any other.
> Dude, it's Instagram. It lets you add faux vintage to your pictures. Building pyramids we are not.
This is a false dichotomy. It's like comparing Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" to Jimi Henrix's "Purple Haze". Egyptians may have built the pyramids, but they also built thousands of small homes and fields that don't have any value to us today. Jimi's work was likewise born amid a bunch of forgettable pop songs by others that served only to entertain for a short time. Great things are born in a sea of the mediocre. You can't optimize this away. In fact, to do so will do far more harm than good because it stifles and crushes the mind's ability to explore.
The goal of geometry wasn't to build the pyramids any more than computer science was to build the Internet. At the time, each solved a business purpose (farms for the former, ballistic calculations for the latter). They were the byproduct of several big minds that wanted to build something else beyond the practical. Ask yourself how pyramids allow me to build a better farm? How does the Internet make ballistic calculations easier?
Everything of cultural significance throughout history had little or no practical value at the time. The pyramids were huge mountains of stone, had large and priceless paintings put inside, and filled with golden items. For what? Some dead guy. Leonardo shunned practical architecture, math, and anatomy so he could paint some girl. Bach was genius in patterns and sound, but all he wanted to do was bang on ivory keys. Even science takes a long time to serve a practical purpose. If kings and nobles asked for the practical from Galileo et al., we wouldn't have the telescope or even bothered studying astronomy. [1] Every significant song, play, artwork, architecture, and book serve almost no practical purpose. Do we do away with them because of their apparent lack of practical purpose?
Instagram still had to solve problems that aren't directly related to hipster pictures. They had to solve image processing in real time with a small device. They had to solve the problem of updating and messaging tens of thousands of nodes with millions of users. They had to solve network outages, slow connections, and availability at scale. It taught the Instagram team those concepts can be used to solve other problems. Now they have both the technical knowledge and the capital to build something else. Maybe they solve a "big" problem or they go off to build some other widget.
I hate the obsessive view that everything needs a practical purpose. Why does Instagram et al. teams need to solve any "big" problem? When you back up far enough, most services don't solve any big problem at all. Poverty isn't solved by Google's search algorithm. War isn't solved because Paypal made it easier to buy stuff online. Hunger isn't fixed by Amazon's internet shopping. If we measure everything by the metric of solving really hard problems, then almost everything we do every day fails to live up to that metric. Is that really the metric we want to use to measure the usefulness of a business or product?
People are working on the hard problems we are facing. They are very passionate about solving them, even just a little bit. Looking at Silicon Valley and saying they aren't solving any real problem is being incredibly insulting to those people who are working on the big problems. It's like saying that "If only those SV people would look into such and such problem, it would be solved." No it won't. We aren't Superman. We would only be adding our great minds to the sea of great minds already working on those problems.
Family Guy [2] sums up my feelings of whether or not a service/product solves a "big" problem. Go out and do something you find interesting. Who knows what it will become or if it will serve a useful purpose.
[1]: I understand that Astronomy was used to plan for farming, harvest, and other time keeping purposes, but that was known thousands of years prior to the Middle Age thinkers. What 17th century problem did finding out that points of light in the sky went around other points of light in the sky? Probably a whole lot of nothing. Now that knowledge is very useful, but it took 300+ years to become practical.
how is the "bigger ipod touch" changing education? I mean, really, what is so great about and ipad that is changing education for better? Or are you talking about just a change in methodology and not quality?
I currently intern for a company that does e-education for probably the biggest education services vendor in the world. My team owns the test delivery engine, including on mobile platforms.
a more intuitive touch interface is always easier for students to give tests on, that and more interactive questions, more colors and realtime assistance, analytics, central and quick test dispatch, quicker assessments and well anytime access being 'mobile', tracking. Doing all that is impossible with paper based education, and only some of it is possible using desktop.
And besides, change in quality arises from change in methodology. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Let's keep perspective here: Instagram is a popular photo-filtering gadget. If it disappeared in a day, the human race would not be pushed backwards at all.
"Now, the reason that we think computer science is about computers is pretty much the same reason that the Egyptians thought geometry was about surveying instruments. And that is, when some field is just getting started and you don't really understand it very well, it's very easy to confuse the essence of what you're doing with the tools that you use. And indeed, on some absolute scale of things, we probably know less about the essence of computer science than the ancient Egyptians really knew about geometry.
Well, what do I mean by the essence of computer science? What do I mean by the essence of geometry? See, it's certainly true that these Egyptians went off and used surveying instruments, but when we look back on them after a couple of thousand years, we say, gee, what they were doing, the important stuff they were doing, was to begin to formalize notions about space and time, to start a way of talking about mathematical truths formally. hat led to the axiomatic method. That led to sort of all of modern mathematics, figuring out a way to talk precisely about so-called declarative knowledge, what is true.
Well, similarly, I think in the future people will look back and say, yes, those primitives in the 20th century were fiddling around with these gadgets called computers, but really what they were doing is starting to learn how to formalize intuitions about process, how to do things, starting to develop a way to talk precisely about how-to knowledge, as opposed to geometry that talks about what is true."
Ideas do not have to be earth shaking breakthroughs to push the human race forward. Things build on each other, effect of which is often missed.
There is wisdom is thinking long term, but not too long. The mental trap smart people fall into of thinking their idea should make an impact that will last longer and deeper only makes them vulnerable of being wrong. When you're just scratching the surface and don't know what's beneath, it's better to keep scratching than to speculate.
Even in short term, "no wireless, less space than a Nomad" changed the music industry. "Just a bigger iPod touch" is changing education.