mway’s blog

It’s both awesome and sad how I can cite Penny Arcade to express exactly how I feel at almost any point in time.  That said, here is how I currently feel about the internet:

I think this is sufficient enough to avoid captioning.

Maybe it’s living in New York that makes things seem more dire than they really are.  Maybe it’s trends like Twitter.  Who knows – the point is, things get really old, and fast.

When I say things get really old, I don’t necessarily mean that they are useless – I mean that, in no uncertain terms, the people who exploit these things are ass clowns.  To expand on the word exploit in this context: anyone who continually produces useless stuff because they think the “next big web app” is built entirely on a single, trendy social medium and regurgitates stale technology that is only minimally different than anything else because no one has any goddamn ingenuity whatsoever.

I’m all for improving things, but jesus christ, please do just that: improve them.  Almost every web, desktop, and device app in recent memory that has even the faintest whiff of social networking has been exactly the same; what’s worse, there are retards out there who eat this shit up.  I won’t go so far as to hope for a technological dark age, but something really, really needs to come along to put all of this shit out of its misery.  To be fair, that could very well be a technological evolution of sorts – and yes, that sort of thing, like many others, comes gradually and with trial and error – but if you are a developer or creative mastermind and you find yourself circling the drain around Twitter visualizations, Facebook quizzes, or, hell, even restaurant finders for the iPhone, please let me know so I can give you a courtesy flush.

I have an idea: make things we need.  Example: for those of us who aren’t about to get fucked in the ass by AT&T and the iPhone’s siqqQqQQqqQqqqqq new 3GS release, make a fucking G1 mail client.  You know, that thing that is so broken it makes G.W.’s reign of, heh heh heh, terrer, look like the icing on the 80 billion wedding cakes being made this time of year (don’t even get me started).  Even better: if you love Twitter so much, stop writing useless apps, move to California, and work for the fucking company so they don’t eat shit 70 times a day.

The times will change – and sooner, rather than later – but until then, for the love of all that is holy, think about whether what you’re doing is even remotely useful or just makes you another idiot that happened to jump on the web app bandwagon.

It’s because of all of this that, when people ask me “why don’t you release all of the stuff you do as open source?” or “why don’t you make an app that does x y and z?”, I’m forced to reply that I just don’t see the point.  Most of what I do is proprietary, but more importantly, I like to put a little faith in the people who are actually heading these movements, like Facebook and Twitter themselves (despite the fact that they faceplant when more than 3 people make an API call at the same time).  Additionally, everyone else in the world is busy trying to write every possible implementation of social networking right now, so I’ll just be here making useful apps for clients while everyone else is playing make-believe in Web-2.0-All-Over-Again Social Networking Start-Up Land.

On a slightly related (but not really) note, BING really stands for But It’s Not Google.  For some reason, when I envision the future of the web, it always has Google as the ubiquitous hub of information that we all somehow orbit, even more than we already do – and strangely, I’m okay with that.