Twitter this, Twitter that II.

I found about Michael Jackson's death last night, via Twitter. RIP King of Pop. Even though I never was a proper fan, I think he's been a major factor in the culture of late 20th century. The music will live on.

Suddenly it became a bit clearer what is the magic of Twitter, for me. Information comes to me, I do not actively come to it. I have no idea what I'm going to see each time I open TweetDeck.

This is also known as the Hollywood Principle and IOC . It's used heavily in the software world and the main benefit is the removal of coupling among systems, computers, components, classes or files. One part of system doesn't assume anything about others, it declares its capabilities and lets others use it. The less coupling, the less assumptions, the less plumbing, the cleaner and simpler designs and lesser potential for mistakes. It makes it easier to develop great software. It also makes it easy to understand.

IOC has caused a shift in the software development paradigms and it's also changing the way we digest information in general. Applications like Twitter are trully Inverting the Control of Information flow from "browse and search" to "publish and subscribe".

Twitter may come and go, but it has moved the paradigm shift along a bit. It didn't start the shift, either, there's been bss and newsgroups and rss feeds long before it. I used to think rss is the greatest, just like I do about Twitter, now. Rss reader is still one of the most heavily utilized applications on my smart phone. Twitter is simpler, faster and more engaging. Search results from search.twitter.com are great complement to Google search.

Any (web) application needs to be aware of this shift. Information access needs to be simplified, simplified, simplified. It is not that there's too much of information, it is that it's too tedious to get to. If it's not simple, I'm not interested - and I'll never know how great a product you might have.

What's for lunch

That's a reccuring question, every day I forget to "brown bag it". I wish there was a simple way I could be suggested what is the current soup du jour by local eateries. I don't want to perform an extensive (re)search, just recieve short notification that "Wednesday Wings are 20c each @ Lawrence Wings". I wish to receive such notification only on Wednesdays, and only if I'm in the vicinity of Lawrence Wings. Just that and not much else. Sounds both simple enough and exciting to do. Bit of RoR for the web front end, android extension for mobile , Twitter API for the broadcast ... . Why don't I do it?

There are many applications centered on food industry - Urban Spoon, Open Table, Yelp, Menu Palace ... and it's still a hedeache to order pizza online in Toronto (except from PizzaHut, if you are into it). Lot of great apps, but I feel that each is trying to do too many things at once, forgetting to satisfy the ONE need, first and foremost. My need is to find What's for lunch. Period.

I find myself to have lower threshold for the amount of information I'm willing to digest, than I used to have. I want to find what I'm looking for, not much more. I don't browse around much anymore, I search and I'm gone. The one way to make me stick around (and eventually monetize on me) is to give me what I'm looking for first, than weave a web of distraction around it.