Here here! This morning I

Luigi Montanez — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:44:05 -0700

Here here! This morning I really got in a tizzy when I read this post, where the author was bold enough to recommend how Twitter could solve their problems in a few bullet points. I left him an earful in the comments.

The Web 2.0/Silicon Valley chattering class is really no better than DC's.

If you want to know what's wrong with our industry

Tom — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:59:17 -0700

...look no further than the comments on this TechCrunch post. Reacting to the scoop that Twitter is dumping Ruby on Rails (which almost immediately turned out to be wrong), more than 150 people decided to chime in about what Twitter's scaling problems are and how their own preferred web framework never would have encountered them. A whopping one person managed to refer to Twitter's custom message queueing software by name.

The rest presumably just like the (drag & drop HTML creation in Visual Studio|error detection in Zend|Google-enabled buzz surrounding Python), and have read "Rails doesn't scale" somewhere. I suppose their prattling is still slightly more meaningful than the yammerings of the web's legions of widget evangelists, social network triumphalists and self-proclaimed "SEO experts". But not by much.

At any rate, I think this is a good reminder of the signal:noise ratio facing our clients as they attempt to find technical help in a crowded marketplace. If you're not a technical person it's genuinely hard to tell the difference between someone who knows what they're talking about and someone who's simply regurgitating buzzwords. My rule of thumb when encountering bold pronouncements like the ones in that TC thread: ask "why?", then count the number of unexplained acronyms and buzzwords in the answer.

EchoDitto Labs - If you want to know what's wrong with our industry - Comments

Here here! This morning I

If you want to know what's wrong with our industry