Internet geeks grow up already
Written on May 31, 2008 – 10:39 pm | by admin
It has been a while since I wrote a post on the topic of Internet geekdom, but recent articles on TechCrunch have prompted me once again to revisit this category. I visit TechCrunch at least once daily to check out the news about new Internet startups and keep track of the performance of some older ones. The only problem is that TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has slowly been changing his blog from one that tracks new and promising startups to nothing more than a Silicon Valley trash magazine.
First of all, let me say that it is his blog and he can write about anything he likes and so I am not saying here that he should change it on my behalf. I do have other options and I could get my startup news from other credible sources. That said, I keep going back to TechCrunch because I find the Web 2.0 drama to be as ridiculous as it can be. If this blog is considered the cornerstone of Web 2.0 culture then one can learn much about the people working in this sector by visiting TechCrunch. And the lesson to be learned here is that geeks (and I use this characterization in a positive way to mean intelligent engineers) need to finally grow up.
The most recent drama on TechCrunch centers around Twitter and the large number of service interruptions due to technical difficulties that have resulted from the unexpectedly high grow rate that the service has received over the last few months. Anyone would be upset if a service they use daily stops working as frequently as Twitter has. The only issue here is that Twitter is, first of all, a free service and as the company need make no guarantees to the users in terms of uptime or any other variable. If I could get my phone for free instead of paying $50 per month then if it happened to be unavailable for a few hours every few months, I would not really complain about it; would you? Other than the fact that Twitter is free and as such one should expect to get what one pays for, there is another more significant reason why Twitter outages and Web 2.0 drama such as that often found on TechCrunch is stupid to say the least.
It seems that Twitter users, who some happen to be very influential people in Silicon Valley and many are computer “hackers” who work in the Valley, have convinced themselves that this service is more important than National Security! I mean, seriously people, if a simple text messaging or micro-blogging application as I believe people call it goes down for a few hours, it is not such a big deal. So a few insignificant people won’t be able to inform other insignificant people about what they are having for breakfast or which coffee shop they are about to enter. Bid deal! Get over yourselves. If you want attention, try to do something important in your lifetime; something that will make people remember you for it. Crack the atom or invent something new that will have a real impact in people’s lives. Don’t waste your life bitching about Twitter being down. Think, what would Einstein do if he was in your place? I bet he would not be wasting his time on trivial things like a Twitter outage when some of the bigger and most important questions out there remain unanswered.
Honestly, you need to grow up!
Tags: Nerds, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch, Twitter, Twitter outages, Twitter problems