The Null Device

jwz on what's wrong with the idea of groupware, and how a focus on groupware (imposed from above by management) killed Netscape:

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy. When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

¶ groupware marketing sex snafu social software tech 0

The meetup.com database of venues is getting progressively more bizarre. One of the three choices for the Melbourne bOING bOING Meetup* was "Putters Adventure Golf, 10 Main Rd, Hobart". Compared to this, the network deathmatch centre in Lilydale or wherever that kept cropping up is almost sensible.

* Not that it matters; it's unlikely that there'll be a quorum for this one any time soon.

¶ boing boing geography hobart meetup melbourne snafu wtf 0

Airport arrival display malfunctions, displaying HTML source. It looks like those things run on an embedded UNIX system of some sort, with a HTML-based rendering engine (though presumably not a web browser in kiosk mode). Curious... (via 1.0)

(Malfunctioning information displays can be interesting, because the nature of the malfunction often reveals something about how the system works. Witness things like news/advertising billboards displaying Windows error dialogs, or in-flight entertainment consoles showing Linux kernel messages as they reboot or whatever.)

¶ airport html photos snafu unix 1

The New Year's Eve public transport débâcle in pictures, courtesy of the troublemakers at Indymedia. Pictures of small trams packed to a crush whilst larger ones stood idle, the police directing people to find other ways to get home, and lawbreakers riding between carriages. All makes you wonder whether it's pure incompetence or, perhaps, whether a smoothly-running public transport system would not have been in the interests of someone in a position of influence. (via Alex)

¶ melbourne new year's eve public transport snafu 4

Anti-porn Internet filtering system, installed in US libraries by government order, blocks all references to the city of Scunthorpe Toppenish. (Why? Look carefully at its name.) (via Techdirt)

¶ bizarre censorship fail snafu usa wtf 1