Tag Archives: psychology

Oh Web, Where Art Thou?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
2

It’s the 4th of July and there’s no one online to celebrate. Overnight, the web has become a ghost town as humans (seemingly all of them) ritualistically leave their online abodes once a year to perform certain offline activities. (Which is a shame, seeing as we released our first program ever on the 4th of July too!) So where do the people go? Why isn’t anyone online, celebrating?

It seems that the internet, with all its superficial relationships on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and dozens more just can’t keep up with the fireworks display, Independence Day Sales, and other activities that people cherish – seemingly more than the internet!

But more importantly, is the web so America-centric that a holiday shared by only the inhabitants of a single country causes the entire internet to come to a screeching halt? Sure, if you go to region-specific websites, it is business as normal – but what about the rest of the (generic) web?

On this one day where all of America turns its computers off, there is less activity than on Christmas and New Years were a (large) percentage of people from all around the globe leave their online identities aside and go to visit family and friends (and party 24/7).

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“Spare Cycles” or Selfless Souls?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
17

Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine, The Long Tail) posted an interesting article yesterday, comparing bored humans to spare CPU cycles – and more importantly, just how much they can accomplish. But while the article – as a whole – was really interesting and scientific and is a topic that has been discussed in scientific forums, dozens of publications, and is the basis for a lot of research, there was one paragraph that stood out:

Who knew there was so much untapped energy all around us, just waiting for a catalyst to become productive? But of course there was. People are bored, and they’d rather not be. [……]

That sheriff is watching a movie because he has spare cycles. Spare cycles are the most powerful fuel on the planet.  It’s what Web 2.0 is made up of. User generated content? Spare cycles. Open source? Spare cycles.1 MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life? Spare cycles. They’re the Soylent Green of the web.

While we’re sure that Chris probably didn’t mean anything by it and it was just a passing reference made without much thought, it does beg the question: do people actually believe that open source exists only because we [the developers, the contributors, the testers, the documenters, and just about everyone else involved in the process] are too bored and have nothing better to be doing?!

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  1. Emphasis added. ↩