TITLE: A Hint for Idealess Web Entrepreneurs
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 30, 2007  6:51 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I'm still catching up on blog reading and just ran across
this from
<A HREF="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/sfearthquakes_o.html">
   Marc Hedlund</A>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs
is, find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented
on the web, and fix that.  <TT>talk</TT> and <TT>finger</TT>
became ICQ, <TT>LISTSERV</TT> became Yahoo! Groups, <TT>ls</TT>
became (the original) Yahoo!, <TT>find</TT> and <TT>grep</TT>
became Google, <TT>rn</TT> became Bloglines, <TT>pine</TT>
became Gmail, <TT>mount</TT> is becoming S3, and <TT>bash</TT>
is becoming Yahoo! Pipes.  I didn't get until tonight that
Twitter is <TT>wall</TT> for the web.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Show of hands -- how many of you have used every one of those
Unix commands?  The rise of Linux means that my students don't
necessarily think of me as a dinosaur for having used all of
them!

I wonder when <TT>rsync</TT> will be the next big thing on the
web.  Or has already done that one, too?

Then
<A HREF="http://www.untyped.com/untyping/archives/2007/03/instant_busines.html">
   Noel Welsh</A>
points out a common thread:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
The real lesson, I think, is that the basics of human nature
are pretty constant.  A lot of the examples above are about
giving people a way to talk.  It's not a novel idea, it's just
the manifestation that changes.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Alan Kay is right -- perhaps the greatest impact of computing
will ultimately be as a new medium of communication, not as
computation <EM>per se</EM>.  Just this week an old friend
from OOPSLA and SIGCSE dropped me a line after stumbling upon
Knowing and Doing via a Google search for an Alan Kay quote.
He wrote, "Your blog illustrates the unique and personal
nature of the medium..."  And I'm a pretty pedestrian blogger
way out on the long tail of the blogosphere.

This isn't to say that computation qua computation isn't
exceedingly important.  I have a colleague who continually
reminds us young whippersnappers about the value added by
scientific applications of computing, and he's quite right.
But it's interesting to watch the evolution of the web as a
communication channel, and as our discipline lays the
foundation for a new way to speak we make possible the sort
of paradigm shift that Kay foretells.  And this paradigm shift
will put the lie to the software world's idea that moving from
C to C++ is a "paradigm shift".  To reach Kay's goal, though,
we need to make the leap from social software to
everyman-as-programmer, though that sort of programming may
look nothing like what we call programming today.
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