Kia ora koutou
Anil Dash blogs on how elitist and white-bread we are for building federated networking tools. Ironically, I can't comment on his blog because his comment system only supports FaceBook, Yahoo, AOL, and HotMail:
He also contradicts himself a number of times in this well-meaning but confused posting. For example, he points to App.net as a triumph of "open source" and He also applauds how inclusive FarceBook is, then claims that the user culture of a web startup is set in stone by the beta testers. FarceBook was originally limited to college students, the ultimate country club audience!
Despite this, Dash does made some valid and useful points.
>> Medium made a few
interesting choices early on by featuring content about parenting or
childhood memories - fairly universal topics - instead of obscure Mac
design nerdery as a starting point. Content aside, any of these networks
or services could make a concerted effort to seek out international
voices, users of different social strata, and people from outside the
narrow conventional political spectrum of their current user bases
today. <<
It's good for us to dogfood the software we are developing/ supporting by talking tech, or tech politics, but there's something to be said for actively bring a wider range of people in as beta testers. As long as we make it explicit they are testing beta software, and actively support them when they run into trouble ;)
Na,
Strypey