At yesterday’s Future Summit 2011 (#TFS11) in Brussels, Mike Walsh told the audience a pretty remarkable story.
There is a room in Indonesia where all internet cables come together. All cables look the same. However, all cables are labeled: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. And there is one single guy managing this room. When Mike visited him, the guy showed him around and even asked Mike if he should take down Twitter in Indonesia for 5 minutes by unplugging the Twitter-labeled cable. Wouldn’t that be fun?!
I really even don’t care if it’s true or not.
My learning? With all of us taking technology more and more for granted, we shouldn’t take technology for granted.
Single people can take out complete services and some of the technology we’re building upon is buggy, unsafe or just crappy technology or products.
Single people can take out complete services and some of the technology we’re building upon is buggy, unsafe or just crappy technology or products.
I’m not saying we should stop doing things. Or stop experimenting. Or stop building new apps upon API’s that combine other API’s possibilities that aggregate content from different sources.
The more complicated layers build upon technology, the more we should invest in the fundaments of everything we build.
We’re now aggregating content, curating content and building layer upon layer and meta layer upon meta layer. The more we curate content, aggregate content and mine it, the more we should invest in the sheer quality of the original foundation and content.
Let’s spend as much time retweeting as we are creating original content. Let’s spend as much time building upon API’s as improving the original service.
Let’s not take technology for granted.
