Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009 - (Page 48)

d02flam_p1db 12/12/08 7:21 AM Page 48 Swaine’s Flames by Michael Swaine Cockroaches AI, CUCARACHA. Here comes another press release extolling the subtle virtues of tweeting. I’ll say they’re subtle. I mean if Twitter is so great, why do they have to promote it by e-mail? But hold it, Mike. Stop right there, Mister Snarky. You don’t want to be that guy. In the Obama Era, we all have to be polite and drama-free. Whatever. The thing is, I just don’t get Twitter. And if there’s one thing I really hate, it’s not getting something. Except for opera, I’m cool with not getting opera. And professional wrestling. Somehow, to me, those two cultural phenomena seem related. And I don’t get them. Oh, and “Friends,” I’m fine with having been utterly blind to the mysterious appeal of rossandrachel. But technological trends, cutting-edge stuff, the next Next Big Thing, the lure of the White Whale or the White Russian, Dude, whatever: When I don’t get that kind of razzmatazz, it seems like professional malfeasance. Seriously, I have to work this out. I’ve written three columns in the past two years in which I’ve at least mentioned my issues with Twitter. I need a tweeting intervention. Okay, this is me intervening. And here’s what I get: I’m an e-mail guy. Yeah, that’s it. E-mail is cool. E-mail is good for segmented conversations. E-mail is respectful of the recipient’s time. E-mail keeps a record. And that’s why e-mail is better than…phone calls. Right. This has nothing to do with Twitter, does it? That’s it, I’ve had it with interventions. Interventions are dumb. Scuttering through the tubes of the Internets, I come upon an article that may provide all the answers. A posting on ReadWriteWeb lays it all out, complete with a 2x2x2 grid of the communication ecosystem. There’s slow and lengthy versus quick and compact. There’s one-to-one versus broadcast. There’s old versus new. E-mail and blogs are the new slow and lengthy communication modalities, corresponding to the old mail and newspaper media. E-mail is one-to-one and a blog is broadcast. Then you have instant messaging and Twitter, both quick and compact, with IM being one-to-one and Twitter being broadcast. IM corresponds to the phone and Twitter maybe to CB. Okay so far. Twitter is quick and compact, broadcast, and electronic. So what do I have to say that is immediate, brief, and needs to be broadcast to a large audience? Um, how about: stopped using e-mail altogether. Well, he said he had people who do it for him. He admitted that wasn’t a scalable option. It only works if you have a staff. And you are willing to abuse them by forcing them to read your e-mail. And you are willing for them to read your e-mail. I dunno, were spam filters just so much worse back then? I get tons of e-mail, but it only takes me a few minutes a day to cull the junk. It’s generally obvious. I have a couple of levels of spam filtering, but I set the bar low and check the rejects occasionally to be sure that the filters aren’t generating false positives. Oh, and I use a Mac, so the executables don’t execute. But even so, it’s not that big a deal. But maybe I’m not crazy after all. Crocker says just what I’d say about spam: Spam is a syndrome, not a disease. It’s multiple diseases, not a single disease. I think that spam is a permanent condition. And so we need to look for multiple ways to control it, just as we need multiple ways to control cockroaches. We need good infrastructure, proper hygiene, and good chemicals to deal with infestations. Help! I Don’t Understand Twitter. Maybe I don’t have a Twitter issue, maybe it’s e-mail after all. Maybe I have an email fetish. I know I’m supposed to gripe about spam and lament the death of email, but I use it more or less happily every day. Maybe that’s my problem: I don’t realize that I have a problem. And sure enough, here’s a web posting to help me see that I have a problem. “E-mail Is Broken,” says a really old article at Salon.com. The article wondered if it could be saved. Since that was five years ago and nothing mentioned in the article has changed and most people haven’t quit using e-mail, I wonder if the concern wasn’t overstated, but let’s see how bad it was back in 2003. Internet pioneers Dave Farber and Dave Crocker, EFF’s Brad Templeton, and usability expert Jakob Nielsen all agreed that e-mail was a mess, bogged down with bestiality videos and Nigerian scams and software-eating executables and general spam. They told horror stories of users who had given up. Nielsen said he had Or, I guess we could use Twitter. Michael Swaine Editor-at-Large mike@swaine.com 48 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l February 2009 http://www.Salon.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Conversations Computing in the Clouds Software Development in the Cloud Videos and Oracle Forms 10g Parallel LINQ Decoupling C Header Files Effective Concurrency Disciplined Agility Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009

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