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Letter to hackers frm a non-hacker: Quit your "wow" app and build us something useful.
7 points by rokhayakebe on Oct 27, 2007 | hide | past | favorite | 20 comments
First of I am not a hacker, so I can clearly see things you guys can't (vis versa). Stop building cool things and build something useful for the 95% of us who don't know how to. Your web (yes the one you help build) is unstructured and there is so much data that I am sure we will never be able to organize it. But what we can organize is our individual data. BUILD (us) MY OWN API. I don't want to go to 20 different sites a day to do the 20 things I want. Facebook's, Digg's and all this other APIs don't really matter, what matters is mine. Let me rephrase this, APIs are great, but you guys have been going the wrong way about this. It should be the other way around. Services shouldn't have an API (ok they should) but I should be able to gather all my data into one place and let services I want plug into it and do the work. I am tired of supplying similar infos to one million different startups. I want to simply click "ADD" (the Facebook way) and give the service an access level. That is it. I dont even want to know your URL. And when I click delete, give me back my data collected. I want a place where it all comes together. And please do not tell me (us) about your webOS project. I (we) want something helpful not a copy of the desktop. That's it. Sorry if I offended you guys, don't take it personally.


"First of I am not a hacker, so I can clearly see things you guys can't (vis versa). Stop building cool things and build something useful for the 95% of us who don't know how to."

I am a hacker.

I am also an adult and therefore I actively choose what to do with my time and what to build, and whether to build something cool, useful, both or neither.

What I really don't need is inarticulate people who haven't demonstrated any particular expertise in anything giving me advice on what to build and how I should spend <b>my</b> time and resources.

Now go away and do something useful.

As you said, "Sorry if I offended you .. , don't take it personally."


Listen "adult" the way I see it is very simple. If you are offended you are probably one of those hackers I am talking about. If I made a similar statement and said that NBA players need to play better, I am sure Steve Nash wouldn't feel offended, the ones who will (like you) are probably the other 80% who quite frankly are just above mediocre. Now, Prove me wrong and show us what you have that is sooooo useful.


I am not offended. I just think you are just wasting everybody's time and have a misplaced sense of entitlement.

Why should I spend time on "proving you wrong" or "showing you what I have"?

Who are you to judge what is useful or not, how other people should spend their time and resources? If you are not a hacker that is fine. Just "prove to us" you are good at something (anything!) before making such outlandish requests asking other people to change how they work to satisfy your notions of what is proper.

If a hacker wants to work on a webOS (to use your example) it is no one's business but his own. If you have some inchoate desires on how you'd like the internet to function, and you can't do anything about it and are not willing to pay anyone to do it, its just too bad.

"hey Wall Street Investment Bankers, I don't think you provide any value to me by working on exotic derivatives. I don't understand how they work or why you spend time on them. Please stop what you are doing and work on balancing my bank account and pay my credit card bills for me and persuade my bank to give me more money"

Bozo alert! Other people don't exist to satisfy your desires or work towards your vision of what the world should be. You might be able to get other people to work towards what you want if you offer something in exchange - money, skills etc. In the absence of having anything to exchange, you are just babbling into the wind.

Demanding that someone work in a style that seems perfect to you (when you admittedly know nothing about what they are working on or what the issues are) seems to be .... suboptimal.


Edited: PP. I could ask people to all follow a new religion named "Zigajaga", but they probably won't. I am not demanding you. I don't know you, and honestly after today, your username won't remind me much, but all I was doing was asking you guys to help. Now you can look at the first layer and say "Oh just another ignorant one", or you can say "What can I learn from this post"? The answer will be "Am I doing something useful?" or "Do I really need to write a script that reads a post and knows to send it to me or trash it or block the username forvever?" and that would be building what I ask you to? Not Demand, Not Forced, But asked. At the end, seriously, I got love for all hackers. I trully do, but if that means I can't be honest and straight with you guys then it certainly means I was wrong in the first place.


I'm offended. Not by what you say (which would take some effort to decipher) but by your tone. You only need one O in "so."


I didn't intend to insult anyone. Seriously. Sometimes we must call the cat by its name. Ok saying "do something useful" may have been a little harsh. Sometimes we need a mean voice to sparkle the energy, not some nice/sweet talk. Think "Hitler" he did a lot of bad, but sparkle lots of Good ( from people who wanted to prove us that Good still exist) around us. That is not to say we need the bad, but sometimes I takes a mouth like mine. I didn't point to anyone in particular. When people post comments like "You are crazy to build your startup around Facebook" I understand it and do not take it badly. All I do is go back to the lab and tell my team " Hey guys, noone is happy Let's build something good, something that adds value". We all say we like feedback, but we want to dissect it. No. Take it all the same. Now If my team had the expertise to solve this issue, I would not ask for action here. We have Mobile expertise and we do not ask for help here. That's all guys. And remember I am not a hacker so maybe you can simply say " He doesn't know what he is talking about. After all I am still unproven" (until I launch, then yo will love it. Something actually useful)


I see what you're getting at - the user owns the data and access permissions (stored on the web), and the services work from that. With S3, this is a much more realistic idea. The problem is that many services will not allow your information out, such as facebook. The question is, is this something alot of people want? I know what I would like is to be able to always export my data out into a common format (like xml) so I can use it somewhere else.

If there were big demand for this kind of service, a startup could launch that became MyWebApps.com - a place where your data is stored and which has interfaces to the key other apps that you use and allow data to come out and possibly synchronizes etc. Your portal to the web where you always go first. This is a pretty ambitious idea with countless lines of code involved for getting all the different systems to speak the same language, but if it were pulled off, it could be big.


No one cares what YOU want, we care about creating something useful, be it for ourselves or for a larger group of people. Further, utility can, in fact, be derived from "wow" apps. You wouldn't understand because, as you've said, you're not a hacker. You should try it though, because building something yourself is a lot of fun and very rewarding.

Regarding the "personal API," I think it's a good idea if properly implemented (read: incredibly easy to use). Obvioulsy you haven't done much research because there are people working on this already. Someone below mentioned OAuth, and OpenID is another effort in this direction.

You'd get a lot farther if you simply just asked the community if someone was working on this and/or pointed out that it's a good, useful idea.


Your post is as disoriented and unfocused as the kinds of work you're railing against. If you can't even discuss the idea in a succinct and compelling way how can you condemn others for not creating it?

Fear not though, the problem your discussing is probably the trendiest of all trendy ideas anyone is working on right now. It will be solved, by people who can articulate it in terms users can understand and create it.


staunch. Blaming the way I express myself is not gonna get us anywhere today. The fact of the matter is you understood it, now let's do something useful plz.


Blaming entrepreneurs and hackers for how they express themselves through what they build isn't going to help either.


I'm sorry to say that but what you're looking for is called the desktop (not that it's a bad idea). Unless you really like ads, privacy issues, slow applications and inconsistent user interfaces.


I am sorry to say that but I want mobility. I dont want to drag a laptop or PC around.


I have no idea what you're talking about so I don't even understand what itch you want to have scratched.


I like it. It sounds like you want to center the data on individuals, not on the applications they use.


You make great points. I think good hackers who are interested in doing a startup really should pay attention - what we think is interesting is useful is often not anything people want. Great if you're just hacking, but not so much if you want to build a business.


I think a problem is that either all the APIs have to agree, so new sites can be added without manual coding, or every startup has to agree on something, which could get hard. Also, the sites without APIs will not be included in this app?


http://oauth.net/


Thank you. Now we are getting somewhere.


You don't get it, Cool is Useful.




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