David Chartier on Shit work and technocentrism
Zach Holman:
The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.
I disagree with almost everything in this piece. It’s based entirely on one core assumption that is wrong in so many ways, I told Siri to set a timer for how long I can take to respond to this.
Holman hates managing Twitter lists, Google+ circles, email folders, and task priorities, and leans on a couple anecdotes and process-alergic indie contractor Merlin Mann to argue that no one actually gets any value out of doing these things. That’s fine for the people who don’t really get these things, or those who don’t work in an environment where they are ever necessary. But a lot of people do get value from these processes in a variety of ways, from simple entertainment, to maintaining privacy while sharing online (which Holman shrugs off), to staying on top of crazy work schedules and informed on current events. Aside from the inevitable edge case examples, developers aren’t spending all this time on features no one asked for.
One of Holman’s punching bags is Twitter lists. He doesn’t like them, doesn’t see the point, and doesn’t know anyone who thinks otherwise. I love and increasingly use Twitter lists, and I personally know a bunch of people who do as well. Stepping beyond my single anecdote, though, you don’t have to spend much time to find plenty of others who do as well. I also found great Twitter clients that do good things with lists and make them easy to use, and isn’t that half the challenge almost any work imaginable? If your tools suck, doing the work will likely suck.
I don’t need to trudge through every one of Holman’s “shit work” examples for you to get the picture. Just because you or like Merlin Mann doesn’t get or like a process doesn’t mean there’s no value in it, or that it’s “shit work.” Plus, leaning on a couple anecdotes to judge the big picture is just plain lazy. Writing these processes off because you don’t get them or don’t work in an environment where they can be useful is arrogant and ethnocentric.
I read the post by Mr. Holman and I came to a similar conclusion. If Mr. Holman doesn’t like those tools, fine, but writing them off because of it, is self-centered punditry that we can do without.
It’s black-and-white thinking of the highest (lowest?) order: “If a tools isn’t perfect from the get-go, the way I want it, it is shit altogether and nobody should even try to make it useful for them!”
To be clear: I don’t cherish the fact that I sometimes have to sit down and sort people into Twitter or Facebook lists. But the 15 minutes I spend doing this increase the value of both tools immensly for me. Same goes for RSS feeds; fairly regularly I weed through them, checking which ones are still worth reading and which aren’t.
Here are two examples:
- Twitter lists: While I don’t follow many people, I have a few key lists set-up. One of those is a list of friends and people whose opinion I value. Using this list in Tweetbot, I can quickly catch-up on recent happenings and discussions when I don’t want to go through 10 hours of my timeline.
Mr. Holman might object by saying that this isn’t the way to use Twitter. Who in their right mind will spend time reading tweets so far back? Well, I sometimes do. - Facebook’s new subscription feature: This is one of the most welcome additions to the service for me so far, because it allows me to select whose updates appear in my timeline. There’s a number of people I am friends with on Facebook, that I simply keep there to have a means of getting into contact without giving them my email address, but I don’t need to see every update of.
Dribbble Blog: Dribbble is ... Fan-tastic
Dribbble, a site I’ve been keeping an eye on for quite some time now, has introduced spectator accounts, which allow people who don’t want to post art, but admire it and give feedback.
Anybody who’s interested in interface design and digital art, should take a look.
Dilbert evades profiling
This had me kind of impressed and genuinely made me laugh out loud.
Dilbert does not leave a trail on social networks, thus avoids being profiled and filed-away by those who rely on these tools.
A break from Twitter
For almost two years now I’ve been using Twitter.
As soon as I switched on my Mac, a Twitter client was activated; on my iPhone Twitterrific was a fixture on my first screen.
This service is many things to me;
- a means of reading stuff by interesting people
- a tool to connect to friends, people and companies
- a means of telling people what I think
At every moment of using this service I’ve been aware that it is essentially screaming into a large valley atop a hill, hoping someone will hear me, but it was fun.
Recently though, it has become a distraction to what I have to do; study.
So now I scream into this seemingly empty void:
For the following months I’m not going to be on Twitter very often, or Facebook for that matter. I’m going to keep writing on my blog, should I see something I want to share and I’m going to continue reading the sites of — and interacting with — those interesting people and friends.
And Facebook is nowhere on Ping, either. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.
When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions went nowhere.The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”
Kara Swisher on All Things Digital.
I wouldn’t have agreed to a deal with Facebook, if I had been in Mr. Jobs’s position either. Facebook likes to own all the data they collect from users and its partners and do with it as they please.
Given that Ping will quickly become popular among the 160 Mio. credit card equipped iTunes users, it’ll give Apple terabytes of data on the listening preferences of its customers, which Apple’s marketing division will surely put to good use for the company.
It might even give Apple an edge — though probably not a necessarily long-lived one — over its biggest competitor in the field of digital music distribution, especially in negotiations with content providers.
Compelling alternative for Facebook in the making
Lately Facebook has taken a lot of flack — and rightfully so — for its abysmal approach to customer privacy. Left and right pundits are advising people to quit Facebook …without naming alternatives.
All of this might change if the guys behind Diaspora* get their project off the ground.
Their decentralised approach to creating social networks could be the thing people are waiting for.
I’m certainly intrigued by their ideas and will keep an eye on what their doing.
via Jenna Wortham
