Background
Over the past few years there has been a spurt in the social networking sites. I have received many request from various friends to join their preferred social networking forum. So far I have joined some of them like
Orkut,
Twitter,
Facebook,
Linkedin. Prior to these social networking sites people had to rely on various community sites and user groups. I have been part of ASP.NET community and also some of the yahoo groups and user group like
BDotNet. Each of these have their pros and cons. I am just trying to summarize my thoughts about the impact of social networking as it stands today on the developer community.
Impact of social networking on developer community
As developers we need to constantly keep ourselves updated with various tools and technologies. The rate at which technology stack is getting upgraded is very fast compared to previous 2 decades. I would say people who were developing software in the 80’s and 90’s had very little choice. There were very few programming languages to choose from. May be C and C++ were frontline languages. There were very few books to refer to and the internet hadn’t taken it off so much.
I think starting with 90’s it all started to change. Lot of information started getting published on the internet and many new programming languages were introduced. Since the millennium the pace at which frameworks are getting introduced is frenetic. Who would have imagined that Microsoft will release DotNet frameworks 1, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5 and 4.0 all in space of 10 years. Which means about 1 framework every 2 years.
How I try to keep up with fast paced changes
Few years back I used to bookmark my favorites in the browser. But this became a maintenance headache as the number of links and their categories increased. Also when I had to change the machine or in worst cases change the job I had to backup my favorites and zip them to my personal mail accounts. Following are some of the techniques I have used personally to keep upbeat with ever changing technology :-
1. RSS Reader
With RSS came a set of RSS readers. I found
Google Reader to be very useful to keep up with the latest blog posts from the various experts in the preferred technologies. Still the problem was that after I had finished reading the blog post, there was very little I could do to preserve it for further reading as a bookmark. I used to email those posts to myself until I stumbled upon
Delicious.
2. Online Bookmarking Service
Delicious is an online bookmarking service. The best part I like about this service is the tagging feature which allows us to give various tags for each link that we bookmark. Now I don’t have to worry about my browser favorites.
3. Micro-blogging
Many of the famous bloggers all over the world have taken to the Micro- blogging in big way. It is not like they have changed loyalties and started Micro-blogging. But its the simplicity of one of the most commonly used micro-blogging site Twitter which fascinates almost everybody who uses it. The fact that the content of a Tweet is limited to 140 characters makes it very simple to use. Instead of somebody writing a paragraph about what they found interesting, twitter can be used to provide same information in a very concise manner. Apart from the limited characters in tweets, I also like the tinyurl facility. I have seen many times url which are embedded in emails which are very lengthy spanning across multiple lines. Some of the email clients like outlook have problems rendering these contents at times because of the way lines are interpreted in outlook.
You can shrink the whole url into a tiny bit and send it as a normal link. The tag cloud feature is another plus point of Twitter. We can easily annotate our tweets with a # symbol and a tag which can help while searching for specific category of tweets. For E.g. we can tweet a good link about ASP.NET MVC and annotate it with #ASPNETMVC. If you like something which was shared with you by one of the person you follow and you wish to share it with other, you can use the concept of re-tweet which sends the same message to all the people who follow you in twitter.
Although I find it irritating at times when people start tweeting about minutest things in their personal life like going to bathroom, just out of bed, having coffee etc. But most importantly from a developer point of view i have found some of the best links over tweets and re-tweets. Thanks to the guy who invented Twitter for such a wonderful concept.
The whole concept of Twitter as a service is what makes it work. You are not just limited to the web page as an interface to the Twitter. There are so many free Twitter clients which are available. I use TweetDeck as a windows client. It gives a notification when there are updates to the tweets from the people I follow. It also integrates nicely with Facebook. That helps me to get a consolidated view.
Twitter and Facebook are so popular that there are clients available for mobile devices like cell phones. i have used Twitter client on a Nokia handset in one of the most remote places in India while travelling in a train.
Professional network
I use a service called Linkedin which helps people to update their professional history. I have found many ex-colleagues over linked in. But I think the concept hasn’t made it that big.
Social networks
I have been using Orkut for almost 4 years now. Overall its a good site to share photos and videos with the friends. It has other features like scraps which are personalized messages to friends and contacts. There are also communities in Orkut. I personally feel Orkut is more famous in India.
Recently I have started using Facebook and find it lot more competitive as compared to Orkut. Some of the features like instant notifications, personal wall, like / unlike and share with others are features which are much more intuitive. Both these sites are good for sharing information with friends and to have some fun online.
Social network related to Technology
It was almost a year back that I came across a site called StackOverflow. Even in my wildest dreams, I didn’t imagine that it will have such an impact on the developer community in such a short span of time. Its been a week or so since I became an active member of StackOverflow community. Previously I had been an active member of ASP.NET community. These community sites are kind of dedicated user groups and newsgroups which help developers to share information. People ask questions and receive answers and suggestions form others.
The place where StackOverflow differs is the way it treats the questions. It is driven by the community. Members can give votes to questions. For example if somebody asked a very good question you can give a thumbs up to that question and the person who asked the question gets some points. Similarly for the answers members can vote up or down based on how good or bad the answer is. I already experienced this when my first answer was voted down twice before someone accepted my other answer.
Another very good feature in Stackoverflow is the tagging of questions and topics. You can search questions based on tags like C# or ASP.NET etc. Based on the activity of the person they can have different badges like gold, bronze and silver.
There is also a wonderful concept in StackOverflow which is called reputation. With the number of points that you accumulate you get a reputation. Based on the reputation the access level keeps increasing to the features available in StackOverflow. For e.g. until you have about 20 points you cannot vote up or down a question or a answer. Until you have accumulated 100 reputation points you cannot post more that 2 questions within a span of 20 minutes.
There is also restriction on the number of links you can include in you answers up to certain number of reputation points. All this proves that it is all community driven.
Conclusion
With advances in mobile technologies and devices like iPhone and Windows phones more and more information will be available on the web which can be accessed from numerous devices. It will be a real challenge to keep up with technology. I am sure there will be next generation services and devices already in the pipeline.
For the time being its Twitter, Google Reader, StackOverflow and Delicious which are helping me keep up the heat. i am sure if I look back at this same post 12 months down the line there would have been lot more changes.
Social networking sites like Orkut and Facebook are good for keeping in touch with friends and relatives. As developers what we need is a much more focused interaction around the topics which might not interest every individual having some sort of identity on the Internet. And that is where StackOverflow works is my firm belief.
There might be many more things similar to what I have mentioned above. I would love to hear about them from the readers of this blog.
Until next time Happy Programming :)
