Warning: This article contains no useful information, and lacks any cohesive structure or narrative.
I like waffles. There are many who’d still declare that myspace ultimately is better than facebook, or that WordPress falls short of sites like Blogger, or that pancakes are better than waffles. Much of this debate is conjecture, and ultimately, none of it matters. It’s all made-up book-learning’ talk, because let’s face it – if it works for the consumer, then it’s better, right? No. I hope you tied your shoe laces tightly, because your socks are about to get blown right off of your feet.
If you are not wearing socks, please go put some on and come back.
Myspace gained a foothold at a critical and very opportune time. The attempts to clone the micro-blogging interface and functionality of twitter and facebook is too little, too late. Have you seen the UI homescreen on myspace these days? They seem to have given up. Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates did a better job. Facebook is primarily structured for you to communicate with other people, not bombarding every person that has the misfortune of visiting your profile with animated gifs, digi-pets that you feed with sms messages, or the countless other bloated horrors that I have seen.
The hey-day of myspace reminds me of a displaced band of rag-tag carnies, dancing in a loose, wobbling elliptical pattern around a dissonant, aging calliope. Every one of them is getting steam-burns as they pass the flute-stops, and each whistle is a cadaverous, desperate plea for death. It is the only voice the calliope has; one it doesn’t recognize as it’s own. The airy, lilting cadenza it used to be is gone forever. That airy, lilting cadenza, my friends, is America.
Facebook passed the 300 million user mark, and every advertising exec in the nation felt like they got slapped with an exploding airplane covered in barbed-wire and Tabasco sauce. Mass-marketing finally realized just how much clean code and streamlined advertising can appeal to the consumer. Web Two-Point-OhfortheloveofGod was gaining momentum. Today, if Moore’s Law (holding strong since 1965) can be attributed to tele-communication and social-networking software trends, we are well within Web 8.0 as I write this.
At times, I get asked things like…
Well what should I use, Blogger, or WordPress?
Despite my disposition, I admit; there is a part of me that wants to respond by asking:
“That depends, are you an idiot?”
Naturally, I don’t go around doing the late-nineties IT-Nerd stereotype, getting frustrated and fogging up my specks with Cheetoh-laden spittle every time someone forgets to close a tag – I don’t even like Chee-tohs. So, here I am. I am grateful to be involved in so many projects. However, this has nothing to do with what I am alluding to.
I’m not going to get into why Blogger is no comparison for an elegant PHP engine like WordPress, because if you have to ask that question, you either haven’t done your homework, are just making small talk, don’t like waffles, or have no interest in coding, and just want a simple dummy-proof user interface. But I digest. What are we really talking about here? Waffles.
I had a client tell me that his small room of office assistants “could handle all of the things that salesforce.com could offer, without any website or internet stuff” I politely agreed, absconded to the library for their wifi, and put together a nice, custom presentation , explaining politely and in great length and detail exactly what salesforce.com does for CRM. We threw some numbers at a one-year comparison model and he was amazed, and joined. After integrating their products and client database with salesforce, I spent a few weekends training him on the UI, and off you go! That was less than one year ago. As of last week, their company reports a huge decrease in conflict/issue resolution time, and a profit-margin increase of 18 percent. I wish I could say ‘Wow! That’s incredible!’ – but it’s not. Want to run any successful business? Give clients/customers/fans what they want, then give them more.
I am a customer, and I want waffles. I want them right now, because they are delicious, and employ a remarkable, space-age texture and architectural stability that a pancake could never hope to understand. Returning to my original point, I am going to go home, go up the stairs and change, then venture back downstairs, head into my kitchen, open the freezer door, reach inside, take out the box of waffles, remove some waffles from the box, put those waffles in the Waffle-ator, return the box to the freezer, close the freezer door, transfer the temperature-altered waffles to a plate, get a consumption utensil from the rectangle that emerges from the counter, use said utensil to consume the waffles, bring the plate to the feeding disc restoration device, reflect on my good fortune and full belly, and finally; sleep. So yeah, myspace. Computers. You know.