jlgbecom
Getting rich has never been my motivator for being involved in technology, and to be honest, I'd probably be happier if the industry were de-funded (hopefully in favor of something like biotech or alternative energies, instead of url shorteners like bit.ly), and it cut the fat out, of all the people who prefer schmoozing to hacking.
Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly.
Habbo + MySpace + Bebo + Orkut + Friendster + Hi5 = 679 million. Assuming 50% cross-over (which is a very high estimate), that means 340 million unique users, for just six social networks.
And that is nothing to sneeze at.
As for active versus registrations, we can't be sure of that from anyone, but rest assured, a decentralized network has much greater potential than Facebook does. Especially in the rest of the world where Facebook isn't nearly as popular.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...
Facebook has the most users in one place, but the dust is nowhere near settled on where everyone will end up.
This bodes very well for a decentralized solution. I doubt Diaspora will be the first (I think Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org) is much more likely), but ultimately, it will be an easily implemented protocol with mature cross-platform libraries that'll really take it down.
This is a good PR move on Facebook's part, because it willfully misinterprets people's frustrations with Facebook. It's not that you didn't have a local copy of your data, it's that you had no control over your data when it was out in the wild. This will take some wind out of the sails of the decentralized solutions, but the armada is still coming.
Facebook has none of those characteristics, and nobody's proven that there's anything substantial where they're digging.
The approach to social networking they've taken simply isn't a particularly profitable approach, the profitable approach hasn't been invented yet. Eventually, people will realize that, and while they're running and begging venture capitalists for another $100 million just to keep the lights on in their server farms, someone else is gonna build the next big thing, and Facebook will go the way of Friendster and Myspace. If we've learned anything, social networks are fickle, and it doesn't take long for a trickle of users to become a flood.
Zuckerburg won't ever starve, and the company probably won't ever fold (heck, even AOL is still around), but the idea that his wealth and any perceived power is in any way stable just doesn't check in with reality.
And there are more people who rely on Facebook for social connection, than people who rely on Google for business and finance (especially if you're talking about the under-25 crowd).
Facebook, on the other hand, holds your social network hostage. We'll always resent any site that takes advantage of that.
Seriously, when you've been programming long enough, you really stop caring about programming languages. I could build a huge project in VB.Net or ColdFusion if I had to at this point. If there's good reasons for why a language should be used (and PHP has plenty of them that are external to the language itself), then it's immaterial to me.
namespace my\name;
$c = new \my\name\MyClass;
I've noticed that, too, I think a lot of people who bash PHP may have used it at one point, switched to something like Rails or Django, and assumed that PHP stood still, which just wasn't the case. In fact, while I may not use rails, I'm very glad it came about, because it was a very necessary kick-in-the-ass to other language communities to address common and necessary development concerns.
The thing about new technologies, is that they rarely replace the old technologies, usually they just provide new ideas to make the old technologies better.
I wouldn't complain if a better server-side language came around (not a big fan of Ruby's syntax, but Google's Go looks enticing), but until then, I've built incredibly complex apps in PHP, and rarely do I run into a limitation of the language. My biggest issue in the past was the lack of namespaces, and 5.3 has those.
I think the best thing you could do to get a new language as popular as PHP isn't to evangelize, or even to make the language dead simple, but make it dead simple for administrators to add support to a typical shared hosting environment.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=unequal+funding+educatio...
A good "primer" book, although a bit old, but not outdated, is called "Savage Inequalities"
http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Inequalities-Children-Americas-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities
Another book is "The Shame Of A Nation" by the same author. These are just starting points, though, there's no shortage of studies, essays, books, and scholarly works on the subject. What I'm presenting here, in terms of social critiques of education, is by no means unique.
Unequal funding based on property taxes further penalizes the lower classes. The wealthiest go to posh private schools, the upper-middle classes have public schools with greenhouses and olympic size swimming pools, most everyone else has outdated textbooks and low salaries, and the lower classes have lead paint and crumbling infrastructure.
The result is that, averaged out, we have terrible results. Mostly because there's only so much you can do with money, so the wealthiest who have access to a surplus of funding can only do so much to balance out the disadvantages of the rest.
An equalized system would produce much better results for the country. This is how Finland and other social democracies operate.
I'd prefer to see people focus on building entrepreneurship in other cities, as well as experimenting with alternative forms of business structures (non-profits, cooperatives, etc), for those who are really adventurous.
There doesn't have to be a one-size-fits-all track for creating a new technology, and a diversified tech economy is a healthy one.
However, this "magic" comes at a price, and at some point you will hit a wall, and if you're a very attentive programmer, you'll have been paying attention to what the magic has been accomplishing without you behind the scenes, and you'll be able to figure out a way around it without scrapping your code base. If you haven't done that, then you're going to pull your hair out in frustration.
To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of rails or other magic frameworks for anything other than prototyping, but ymmv, I definitely understand why people like it.
The same thing will happen to Facebook with the open web. At least AOL had subscription revenue.
Open source is not good for making use of the "Many eyeballs" for architectural decisions. It's where the wisdom of crowds provides little benefit. This is why most open source projects are not a haphazard bazaar of stone soup contributors, like most people think, but are actually small dedicated teams of talented software developers, who are usually paid.
I think our conception of what OSS can achieve, simply by being OSS, is somewhat inflated.
(Don't get me wrong, though, OSS is fantastic, and I think it's, by design, much better than close source)
But that's why the apprenticeship model would work so well. I've always thought the way union electricians are trained (a four year apprenticeship, which includes a lot of practical and theoretical schooling, until becoming a journeyman) would be a great fit for software development.