

Letter to hackers frm a non-hacker: Quit your "wow" app and build us something useful. - rokhayakebe

First of I am not a hacker, so I can clearly see things you guys can't (vis versa). Stop building cool things and  build something useful for the 95% of us who don't know how to. Your web (yes the one you help build) is unstructured and there is so much data that I am sure we will never be able to organize it. But what we can organize is our individual data. BUILD  (us) MY OWN API. I don't want to go to 20 different sites a day to do the 20 things I want. Facebook's, Digg's and all this other APIs don't really matter, what matters is mine. Let me rephrase this, APIs are great, but you guys have been  going the wrong way about this. It should be the other way around. Services shouldn't have an API (ok they should) but I should be able to gather all my data into one place and let services I want plug into it and do the work. I am tired of supplying similar infos to one million different startups. I want to simply click "ADD" (the Facebook way) and give the service an access level. That is it. I dont even want to know your URL. And when I click delete,  give me back my data collected. I want a place where it all comes together. And please do not tell me (us) about your webOS project. I (we) want something helpful not a copy of the desktop.
That's it. Sorry if I offended you guys, don't take it personally. 
======
plinkplonk
"First of I am not a hacker, so I can clearly see things you guys can't (vis
versa). Stop building cool things and build something useful for the 95% of us
who don't know how to."

I am a hacker.

I am also an adult and therefore I actively choose what to do with my time and
what to build, and whether to build something cool, useful, both or neither.

What I really don't need is inarticulate people who haven't demonstrated any
particular expertise in anything giving me advice on what to build and how I
should spend <b>my</b> time and resources.

Now go away and do something useful.

As you said, "Sorry if I offended you .. , don't take it personally."

~~~
rokhayakebe
Listen "adult" the way I see it is very simple. If you are offended you are
probably one of those hackers I am talking about. If I made a similar
statement and said that NBA players need to play better, I am sure Steve Nash
wouldn't feel offended, the ones who will (like you) are probably the other
80% who quite frankly are just above mediocre. Now, Prove me wrong and show us
what you have that is sooooo useful.

~~~
plinkplonk
I am not offended. I just think you are just wasting everybody's time and have
a misplaced sense of entitlement.

Why should I spend time on "proving you wrong" or "showing you what I have"?

Who are you to judge what is useful or not, how other people should spend
their time and resources? If you are not a hacker that is fine. Just "prove to
us" you are good at something (anything!) before making such outlandish
requests asking other people to change how they work to satisfy _your_ notions
of what is proper.

If a hacker wants to work on a webOS (to use your example) it is no one's
business but his own. If you have some inchoate desires on how you'd like the
internet to function, and you can't do anything about it and are not willing
to pay anyone to do it, its just too bad.

"hey Wall Street Investment Bankers, I don't think you provide any value to me
by working on exotic derivatives. I don't understand how they work or why you
spend time on them. Please stop what you are doing and work on balancing my
bank account and pay my credit card bills for me and persuade my bank to give
me more money"

Bozo alert! Other people don't exist to satisfy your desires or work towards
your vision of what the world should be. You might be able to get other people
to work towards what you want _if_ you offer something in exchange - money,
skills etc. In the absence of having anything to exchange, you are just
babbling into the wind.

Demanding that someone work in a style that seems perfect to _you_ (when you
admittedly know nothing about what they are working on or what the issues are)
seems to be .... suboptimal.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Edited: PP. I could ask people to all follow a new religion named "Zigajaga",
but they probably won't. I am not demanding you. I don't know you, and
honestly after today, your username won't remind me much, but all I was doing
was asking you guys to help. Now you can look at the first layer and say "Oh
just another ignorant one", or you can say "What can I learn from this post"?
The answer will be "Am I doing something useful?" or "Do I really need to
write a script that reads a post and knows to send it to me or trash it or
block the username forvever?" and that would be building what I ask you to?
Not Demand, Not Forced, But asked. At the end, seriously, I got love for all
hackers. I trully do, but if that means I can't be honest and straight with
you guys then it certainly means I was wrong in the first place.

------
gibsonf1
I see what you're getting at - the user owns the data and access permissions
(stored on the web), and the services work from that. With S3, this is a much
more realistic idea. The problem is that many services will not allow your
information out, such as facebook. The question is, is this something alot of
people want? I know what I would like is to be able to always export my data
out into a common format (like xml) so I can use it somewhere else.

If there were big demand for this kind of service, a startup could launch that
became MyWebApps.com - a place where your data is stored and which has
interfaces to the key other apps that you use and allow data to come out and
possibly synchronizes etc. Your portal to the web where you always go first.
This is a pretty ambitious idea with countless lines of code involved for
getting all the different systems to speak the same language, but if it were
pulled off, it could be big.

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myoung8
No one cares what YOU want, we care about creating something useful, be it for
ourselves or for a larger group of people. Further, utility can, in fact, be
derived from "wow" apps. You wouldn't understand because, as you've said,
you're not a hacker. You should try it though, because building something
yourself is a lot of fun and very rewarding.

Regarding the "personal API," I think it's a good idea if properly implemented
(read: incredibly easy to use). Obvioulsy you haven't done much research
because there are people working on this already. Someone below mentioned
OAuth, and OpenID is another effort in this direction.

You'd get a lot farther if you simply just asked the community if someone was
working on this and/or pointed out that it's a good, useful idea.

------
staunch
Your post is as disoriented and unfocused as the kinds of work you're railing
against. If you can't even discuss the idea in a succinct and compelling way
how can you condemn others for not creating it?

Fear not though, the problem your discussing is probably the trendiest of all
trendy ideas anyone is working on right now. It will be solved, by people who
can articulate it in terms users can understand _and_ create it.

~~~
rokhayakebe
staunch. Blaming the way I express myself is not gonna get us anywhere today.
The fact of the matter is you understood it, now let's do something useful
plz.

~~~
jkush
Blaming entrepreneurs and hackers for how they express themselves through what
they build isn't going to help either.

------
corentin
I'm sorry to say that but what you're looking for is called the desktop (not
that it's a bad idea). Unless you really like ads, privacy issues, slow
applications and inconsistent user interfaces.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I am sorry to say that but I want mobility. I dont want to drag a laptop or PC
around.

------
henning
I have no idea what you're talking about so I don't even understand what itch
you want to have scratched.

------
dhbradshaw
I like it. It sounds like you want to center the data on individuals, not on
the applications they use.

------
blader
You make great points. I think good hackers who are interested in doing a
startup really should pay attention - what we think is interesting is useful
is often not anything people want. Great if you're just hacking, but not so
much if you want to build a business.

------
dyu
I think a problem is that either all the APIs have to agree, so new sites can
be added without manual coding, or every startup has to agree on something,
which could get hard. Also, the sites without APIs will not be included in
this app?

------
joshwa
<http://oauth.net/>

~~~
rokhayakebe
Thank you. Now we are getting somewhere.

------
adrianwaj
You don't get it, Cool is Useful.

