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Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

jasonlbaptiste.com

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Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#2
I like the headline idea, but still wonder when you say:

: If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today was not there

I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I can't really imagine my life would have been much different if I hadn't heard about it for a month.

Similarly, location based services - there seems a huge limit to what kinds of software could be much improved by being location aware.

Is this me being unimaginative or are you just picking interesting sounding things and saying they must be futurestack components because they exist?

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#3
Generally good advice - although I would say that there are things that haven't been built today that could have been built yesterday and that could be the building blocks of tomorrow. Facebook and YouTube are two examples that weren't built using state of the art technology, that could have been built a few years earlier. I think their success was in their execution not the conception of the ideas as they weren't actually original ideas but well polished ones.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#4

I like the headline idea, but still wonder when you say: : If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today was not there I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I can't really imagine my life would have b…

Well a few things:

* The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it. * The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #imokay . It wasn't possible to broadcast to all of your friends in a matter of seconds if you were okay in 2001.

*I think we've scratched the surface of how locational context can improve most things. If we can organize and provide context to information in the real world, the same way we have to the digital world, that will be big.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#7
post #3

Generally good advice - although I would say that there are things that haven't been built today that could have been built yesterday and that could be the building blocks of tomorrow. Facebook and YouTube are two examples that weren't built using state of the art technology, that could have been built a few years earlier. I think their success was in their execution not the conception of the ideas as they weren't ac…

YouTube is actually interesting. They attribute their rise to a few building blocks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nssfmTo7SZg

I wouldn't put all of these as some sort of future stack building blocks, but there were enough things there that made something possible, that wasn't possible before: easy video sharing.

1- broadband in the home 2- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 3- proliferation of digital cameras 4- cheap hosting 5- one click upload 6- ability to share embed

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#8

I like the headline idea, but still wonder when you say: : If 9/11 happened in 2010, how much different would it have been? It took forever to know what was going on as the channels of TV and Radio weren’t fast enough. The web wasn’t ubiquitous and the ability to publish as fast as today was not there I was watching it on TV and hanging around on the Ars Technica forum, but I can't really imagine my life would have b…

Well a few things: * The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it. * The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #…

You could imagine twitter not crashing and burning itself after an event like that?

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#9
post #5

Other good building blocks to use are Hadoop (map/reduce) and Lucene/Solr (search). P.S. Great post.

Would you put Hadoop under scaleable to billions?

Yeah, Hadoop is parallelizable by design, so it's just a matter of renting out EC2 clusters. In any case, I'm not talking about competing with Cloudera, but using Hadoop in some new specific vertical. For instance, an ad network that uses Hadoop could mine user/user-clickstream data better and get more clicks. That would be using Hadoop as a building block. You could also use Hadoop to power awesome analytics on, say, an e-commerce platform.

Re: Build What Had Previously Not Been Possible

#10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well a few things: * The tragedy would have been the same. By no means (and i don't think you are implying that I am either) saying tech today would have prevented it. * The zero delay of information flow would have made things a lot less hectic for everyone. At the time the towers fell there was a massive panic of finding where everyone was and if they were okay. I could imagine a popular hashtag emerging such as: #…

You could imagine twitter not crashing and burning itself after an event like that?

Theoretically you would hope it stays up, but past data shows that is iffy. FB might be sluggish, but it would be fine.
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