My look at current web apps

I’m going to nerd out for a second right now. 

Like my last written post stated, I have an abundant amount of free time right now. I’m between projects so I’m working on my own projects. These fill my time, let me grow in the current field I’m working in, and lets me fulfill an innate need to create cool shit.

Since my last written post, I built recycle.astillwell.com to help with a project for my friend Norah. She’s trying to get recycling a integral part of the cleaning process at Rice-Eccles Stadium, home of the Utah Utes. The site is going to be transitioned to its own domain name here soon. 

Anyways, the site is simple, but it has a form for a petition. The backend processes it in PHP and MySQL. These programming languages are combined to store data. Pretty fundamental stuff, considering every time you go to a website and it remembers your name, picture, or anything like that, it uses the language.

I had never written in those two languages, but I realized I should probably learn it and the form was easy enough. So, yesterday I spent all day building a copy of twitter. I called it fake twitter. :) It still needs some work, but fundamentally, it has most of the functionality of twitter. I spent a day building it, which by itself should say something. However, I was also learning how to do the basics and I still managed to recreate it in a day. 

I’m really not that good of a programmer, either. It’s not that I’m good that I could create something like that. It’s because that shit is really a simple website. Looking at the websites I use most often, twitter is no exception. Twitter has 300 employees. Facebook has something like 2000. What the hell do these people do all day?

I think the lack of complexity is interesting. Is it simply a lack of creativity? The product is forgotten in the midst of building a company? It’s definitely not because the means of producing really interesting, compelling, complicated shit is because of a lack of ability. Twitter and Facebook will both maintain their relevance due to the numbers of people using the sites. If they don’t continue to “innovate” they will eventually fade, despite their numbers.

Needless to say, my recent endeavors in learning new things has completely shattered the facade of “magic” that I had with a lot of sites. Some sites, such as hunch.com or peerindex.com both seem pretty magical in what they do. I think this will be the inevitable next step, where hard work, creativity and actual thinking are needed to build companies.