Spring Break
It's time to become technology savvy
Bryan Murphy
Issue date: 1/22/09 Section: Commentary
It's been an interesting week for technology news on UConn campus. Our Chief Information Officer is stepping down after his long reign, and our USG president spontaneously quit for the sake of dedicating himself fully to his dotcom start-up. Let's hope both our new CIO and McHardy and his business partner have a firm handle on the new mandate of the Web 2.0 era; not only must would-be technology gurus have a firm handle on how to crunch the numbers these days, but they must have a clear vision of how others will virally embrace their number-crunching. Because unlike the dotcom boom of the early 2000s, much of which was plagued by simply impossible concepts - anyone remember DigiScent.Com, which aimed to give "back to humanity our ability to communicate using scent"? - the key obstacles of our age seems to be sound concepts, correctly programmed, and thoroughly misapplied.
Take Yammer.com, a new business-oriented Web app which takes proven mechanisms - Twitter's "microblogging" and Facebook's Live Feed - and applying it somewhere where it'll probably crash and burn - the business world. Twitter's popularity owes a great deal precisely to its hip impracticality; "MacKid01 is listening to music way too obscure for you to appreciate," "MacKid01 is admiring his Jackson Pollock reproductions," and Facebook Feed's greatest draw is incredible anti-productivity potential it offers. These two ideas lose a great deal of their edge in the transition to the business world - "MacKid01 is doing soul-crushing work he'd rather not be doing to pay off his phone bill," "MacKid01 is wishing he'd gotten a real degree while at college," "MacKid01 and his employer are no longer in a relationship."
Yammer employees take heart, however. Blowing it on the Internet is the hip new fad. Anyone remember the user-interactivity functionality of the McCain campaign? You know, what the Republican party was rolling out to compete with Obama's massive digi-grassroots onslaught? Oh, wait… Joe the Plumber might not have helped McCain's chances, but Joe the Fossil Who Can't Even Use E-Mail certainly didn't help, especially when stacked up against the supremely sexy Techno-bama.
Take Yammer.com, a new business-oriented Web app which takes proven mechanisms - Twitter's "microblogging" and Facebook's Live Feed - and applying it somewhere where it'll probably crash and burn - the business world. Twitter's popularity owes a great deal precisely to its hip impracticality; "MacKid01 is listening to music way too obscure for you to appreciate," "MacKid01 is admiring his Jackson Pollock reproductions," and Facebook Feed's greatest draw is incredible anti-productivity potential it offers. These two ideas lose a great deal of their edge in the transition to the business world - "MacKid01 is doing soul-crushing work he'd rather not be doing to pay off his phone bill," "MacKid01 is wishing he'd gotten a real degree while at college," "MacKid01 and his employer are no longer in a relationship."
Yammer employees take heart, however. Blowing it on the Internet is the hip new fad. Anyone remember the user-interactivity functionality of the McCain campaign? You know, what the Republican party was rolling out to compete with Obama's massive digi-grassroots onslaught? Oh, wait… Joe the Plumber might not have helped McCain's chances, but Joe the Fossil Who Can't Even Use E-Mail certainly didn't help, especially when stacked up against the supremely sexy Techno-bama.
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