Oops, my bad...or location, location, location.

I've spent some more time clicking around the 37signals part of the blogosphere, and have realized that I accidentally stumbled into an area that's more or less focused on web development, social networking, game theory, etc.. It's not actually meant to apply to us humble, fuddy-duddy IT folks. After all, I am significantly older than 15. More importantly, every single one of my users is, as well.

Which bring me to my next pet peeve about the internet:

Location.

In time as well as space.

You see, people tend to see things from their own perspective (duh). This includes their physical location, and the current point in time - the "here and now". The Internets (and software, by extension [actually, abstractions, by further extension]) exist outside of that little bubble we affectionately call "reality".

But people forget that. Or they don't really grok it to begin with, I don't know. Doesn't matter. The end result is that I go to google, say, a small-time band I haven't seen or thought about in a while, and I find their site, and on that site is a link entitled "News" or "Gigs" or somesuch. Often the link betrays the underlying problem by declaring itself "Upcoming Gigs". That should be the tip-off right there. But it isn't. [heavy sigh] It never is.

You know what happens next. You click on the link (emboldened by the sudden, unexpected shift into 2nd person), and he gets (just kidding), rather, you get some text that delightfully informs you that Bill Blender and the Purees will be performing on April 17th at Bobos on 4th street.

Great, now if they'd only specified April 17th of which year??? Or, indeed, 4th street in which city?

When they're publishing this information, they're thinking about things from where they are today. April 17th is next month, and 4th street is near that place with the really cheap Turkish food. They are not thinking about the information staying around long after it's exhausted its usefulness, which it undoubtably will.

Nor are they thinking about the fact that some people will find their site via a link on some other site and, prior to this chance electronic encounter, may not even know the band's name. Whaddayamean, which town? Kalamazoo, of course.

This problem is not limited to drug-addled, rock star wannabes. It's not even limited to web pages. It occurs any time information has a scope wider than a single conversation.

If you work in IT, you've probably got permanent ridges in your forehead from banging your head against this particular issue over and over again. The bright side is that as long as people continue to fail to grasp this, they will also continue to fail to dispense with our jobs.

So, exactly what does this have to do with 37signals? Well, I started this little rant a few posts ago, when I stumbled upon one of their posts about the uselessness of functional specs. I railed on (in my own quaint way) for a bit about that before realizing they weren't actually talking to me. The Web's funny like that, innit?

I assume all this will be resolved in Web 2.0, right?

Right?

[tee hee]