Sunday, May 20, 2007

Hidden treasure

In this post I plan to break every unwritten law of blogging. I acknowledge David Bullard's post and revel in my sweeping statements and lack of point.

As always, I will point you to a link. This is pure gold. I mean who hasn't been swept away by the story's of Treasure Island, or more recently by the Pirates of the Caribbean?

Similar things are true of Google. They found gold, and are defending its location. We all know they are a great source of information, but we don't really know how they find it, we only care where it is. As developers we have recently been major advocates of Google products that we feel more like Google consultants than developers. The rise of web 2.0 website features gives users more power and control over publishing their content. Our only advantage is that we know a fair bit more than our customers. But this wont always be the case.

What has this got to do with hidden treasure? Well, read this. Scobleizer explores the reason for Google's strategy in this particular area of hidden treasure and defence of it. Today I was visiting a friends house who is an architect, who not only uses Sketchup (a Google acquisition) but also trains students in it. I explained how it took me a while to realise that Sketchup was the perfect complementary product to Google Earth. Whereby you could add your house or any other new project in 3d to their predominantly pseudo 2d environment. Brilliant. Just imagine the 3d treasures one will soon be able to find on Google Earth?

So what has this to do with hidden treasure? Nothing, really, its a just a ramble in the blogosphere. And I can do it without conscience or consequence. David Bullard, eat your heart out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, I found David Bullard's post boring and vacuous. He makes the assumption that people blog because they want to be columnists - not many of us do.

In fact, he comes off sounding kind of nervous about these "scrofulous nerds". Ah bless, he just needs a cuddle.

I think there'll be work for developers for longer that you think. Here's why:

The more complex our technology has become, the less people have wanted to interact with it. Accordingly, interfaces have got simpler and smoother - APIs and what you can do with them remain the domain of the supergeek.

So while we have more - and more accessible - information than we've ever had before, working with it and inventing new ways of looking at it remains the art of the developer.

Joe User still just wants to click stuff.