It's time to become technology savvy

It's been an interesting week for technology news on UConn campus. Our Chief Information Officer is stepping down after his long reign, and our USG president spontaneously quit for the sake of dedicating himself fully to his dotcom start-up. Let's hope both our new CIO and McHardy and his business partner have a firm handle on the new mandate of the Web 2.0 era; not only must would-be technology gurus have a firm handle on how to crunch the numbers these days, but they must have a clear vision of how others will virally embrace their number-crunching. Because unlike the dotcom boom of the early 2000s, much of which was plagued by simply impossible concepts - anyone remember DigiScent.Com, which aimed to give "back to humanity our ability to communicate using scent"? - the key obstacles of our age seems to be sound concepts, correctly programmed, and thoroughly misapplied.

Take Yammer.com, a new business-oriented Web app which takes proven mechanisms - Twitter's "microblogging" and Facebook's Live Feed - and applying it somewhere where it'll probably crash and burn - the business world. Twitter's popularity owes a great deal precisely to its hip impracticality; "MacKid01 is listening to music way too obscure for you to appreciate," "MacKid01 is admiring his Jackson Pollock reproductions," and Facebook Feed's greatest draw is incredible anti-productivity potential it offers. These two ideas lose a great deal of their edge in the transition to the business world - "MacKid01 is doing soul-crushing work he'd rather not be doing to pay off his phone bill," "MacKid01 is wishing he'd gotten a real degree while at college," "MacKid01 and his employer are no longer in a relationship."

Yammer employees take heart, however. Blowing it on the Internet is the hip new fad. Anyone remember the user-interactivity functionality of the McCain campaign? You know, what the Republican party was rolling out to compete with Obama's massive digi-grassroots onslaught? Oh, wait… Joe the Plumber might not have helped McCain's chances, but Joe the Fossil Who Can't Even Use E-Mail certainly didn't help, especially when stacked up against the supremely sexy Techno-bama.

(Incidentally, anyone who visited Whitehouse.gov regularly will be amused to notice how it seemingly leaped from 1999 to 2009 in a single hour. Funny, that!)

Even Israel has been managing to fumble things considerably, digital-wise, in the last few weeks, which is surprising - for all its distressing taste for mass murder and icy genocide, one has to admit that Israel does tend to stay on the cutting (and bull-dozing, and school-bombing) edge. Israel's insistence that it didn't use white phosphorous against Gaza residents was given a blackly comic tinge not only when some of the chemical agent hit a UN headquarters, but when a live Webcam feed from a Gazan's apartment clearly showed, in real-time, the white phosphorous shells bursting in air. It's sort of the international version of the Facebook rule; don't tag pictures on Facebook you don't want potential employers to see, don't commit war crimes on web cam that you don't want potential human-rights advocates to record, etc.

It's not all bad news, though, I suppose. One could argue that the world's techno-savvy is getting better all the time. Israel's opening an investigation into the white phosphorous thing, for example, and the technological illiteracy of the Republican Party is less of a problem than ever, now that the Democrats have become Masters of the Universe. Even University Information Technology Services deserves some credit (for once!) for their new student page, and for the new StudentAdmin system, which is very useful.

Of course, of course, more could be done. It'd be nice if HuskyMail still didn't trip the phishing filters of most major Web browsers, for example. And Obama's computer-savvy is pretty cool, but it'd be even cooler if he'd stop spamming my Facebook inbox. But then again, perhaps after eight years of radio silence, maybe having to check my Facebook messages more frequently isn't the worst thing that could happen.