The echo chamber has been effectively confined to the space between Arrington's ears with this post.

No commentary necessary:

Cringley is asking a very lucid question that more people in the upper-echelons of business today should be asking: "What Does Gartner Really Do?"  Leaving aside the fact that I agree completely with the author's derision of these research firms' "real function being to provide $2 billion worth of IT management CYA per year", A couple of points got me thinking.

First there's this:

"How often do these consultants tell their customers that everything is fine and no action is required? Almost never. In fact I'm tempted to say "absolutely never" simply because I haven't heard of such an instance, but I'm playing it safe here."

The consultants he is referring to are the research firm analysts.  There are a lot of good I.T. Consultants out there doing good work and providing a valuable service by, at times, preventing their cilents from spending money they shouldn't on the latest and greatest buzz-word technology.  I can say absolutely that I have indeed told clients NOT to spend money on things they don't need and won't or can't use.  (I'm a flawed consultant, driven by the ideal of helping clients rather than increasing my own sales.  That's probably why I don't work for any consulting firm but my own.)

But the bigger issue is one of professionalism.  Cringely is right that many I.T. workers are clueless about the technology they're working with.  There is no professional standard (no, A+ certification doesn't count here) and no independent, credible organization conferring a professional accreditation to I.T. pros.  Unless you have a masters degree or better in Computer Science and/or engineering, there's no way to measure your skill set against any other. Most business leaders would be amazed to learn how many people with the title CIO or CTO can't keep their VCR clock from blinking 12:00 continuously.  (Be even more frightened that in 2008 CIO's and CTO's still even HAVE VCR's in their homes!)

Which brings up the question of just what measurable qualifications could and should be included to provide an I.T. professional with quantifiable recognition such as medical doctors and Certified Public Accountants.  If we came up with that list, updated on an annual basis to stay current with the latest technology, rest assured that the only people qualifying would not be the types who look good for the photos included in the glossy annual report.   

This situation has been a long time in coming, and I've been angry for years at the state of the U.S. Code and the absolutely arcane state of it currently.  Instead of going off on a rant about how we A. need to burn the U.S. Code back to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and start over and B. need to prevent lawyers from becoming legislators (inherent conflict of interest), I'll just present this revealing piece with minimum commentary.

For your consideration: http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm

This Twitter thing is getting out of hand.  I've been in technology for a long time, and while I've never been a 1st tier early adapter, I am and have been on the front lines and usually in the second or third wave of the early adopter set on the Internet.  I still don't completely get Twitter, and I probably won't any time soon because I'm not immersed on a minute-by-minute basis in the minute expansions and contractions of the bubble as people inside the echo chambers of the Web2.0 startup/VC/media crowd are.  Read: I don't have enough friends and/or colleagues on the bleeding edge to make this limited service useful to me.  A brilliant intern last summer showed me the tumblog he and a friend had built in RoR, and I was impressed with the functionality, but the only way I could imagine the usefullness of such a thing would be with widespread adoption.  Twitter has apparently reached the first-stage critical mass that it's a phemonenon inside the echo chamber, but remains unknown and relatively useless to the world at large - including the vast majority of the population with broadband access.

But being in the industry (if not in the beating heart of it), I pay attention.  Recently I've been seeing more and more conversations decrying the state of Twitter and whether it will survive, what should be done to make sure it survives and whether it should survive at all in its current incarnation. Articles such as this one at TechCrunch with it's obvious allusion to drug addiction are increasingly disturbing.  If you thought information addiction was a problem before, the instantaneous gratification provided by Twitter is as crack is to the cocaine of an always on broadband connection and good feed reader. Some people need to take a step back and get some perspective.

Having said that, I can see how this is potentially game changing.  The way that Microsoft's Live Mesh is moving things to the next level of connectivity is going to be useful for a vast majority of people.  I have already used Live Mesh in my first 3 days of being signed up to ease the transfer of data and information for both work and personal needs.  Twitter, on the other hand, requires either an established community requiring such real-time connection and/or a perceived need to be able to follow and be part of specific conversations surrounding specific topics. It's not for the masses...yet.

The problems that Steve Gilmour references in his article are specific to the current user base, but they do not address what I believe will be necessary to make it useful to the population at large.  I'll try to refrain from further social commentary here, but thinking out loud on the topic produces a few ideas on how to make it so.

To make the 'platform' useful to the general population (considering the technical limitations that Twitter has experienced) it will indeed need to be decentralized.  Gilmour speaks of namespace issues and he is correct in doing so, but with the increasing adoption of OpenID, I believe his fears may be unfounded.  It comes back to control of an online identity (or several), and that is precisely the problem that OpenID is intended to solve.  Critical mass of the size required to take it mainstream might easily be found by tapping the existing userbase of IM networks.  

What if...one were to create an OpenID based login that could simultaneously publish to multiple IM networks with a simple tick box to include a comment into the Twitter network. OpenID providers could be convinced to offer Twitter message hosting as a feature/incentive, thus obviating the need for a central network and thus avoid the outages recently experienced. Include a multiple network client such as Pidgin and you have a ready-made solution based on existing technology. 

With the level of adoption this expansion could foster, we might very well introduce the benefits of this kind of communication across the Internet as a whole and bring whole new sets of users into the conversation.  Then, I could see the appeal - as would millions of others.