Why Steve was important
Picture courtesy of Jonathan Mak
Many of you who don’t follow the tech industry will notice that today your Facebook, Twitter and news services have been taken over with news of the death of Apple Co-founder Steve Jobs; who passed away after a battle with cancer earlier today. Many may just associate him with the success that Apple has had in recent years; specifically with the iPod, iPhone and iPad products.
However his influence runs much deeper than that. In fact he has had an impact on the way your interacting with the majority of your personal computing devices, whether they be made by Apple or not.
The following story was told by Steve during a speech he made to Stanford University back in 2005, and goes a long way to explain the way Steve looked at the personal computing world:
“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great…..
…..when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.”
Steve Jobs – June 15th 2005 – Stanford University Commencement Address
In an industry so focused on pushing the technological boundaries of what can be done, Steve was always focused on how technology can appeal to the common person and how to make technology accessible for everyone to use. He wanted to make things beautiful and appealing for all people to enjoy, a legacy what is obvious in the design of Apple products since he returned to the company and became the CEO in 1997.
A large part of why computers are so easy to use today are in part to the vision that Steve had back while developing the Macintosh, whether you're using a Mac or Windows machine now. The same applies to phones and more recently tablets. Like it or not if it wasn’t for the iPhone, competing smartphones platforms from Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 wouldn’t be what they are today.
Hopefully you start to have an idea of the outpouring of condolences that you are seeing today and the impact that this man had on the industry. While I never liked Apple and their products, I always respected the contributions and importance of Apple and Steve to the industry as it is today.
I highly recommend that you read the articles by Mike Elgan and Andy Inhatko which outline Steve’s legacy much better than I can; and to read comments by prominent tech figures such as Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis and Tom Anderson just to name a few.
I will end this post with another quote by Steve from the Stanford speech that we all should aspire to live by. R.I.P Steve.
“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.’
Steve Jobs – June 15th 2005 – Stanford University Commencement Address
Facebook Timeline – Focus moves from the present to past, private to public
Today at the F8 Facebook conference, Mark Zuckerburg announced the next evolution of the social network with Timeline. Timeline is a replacement to your existing Facebook profile page, which is designed to be the story of your life on one page. As Zuckerberg puts it: All your stories, all your apps, and a new way to express who you are.
With the Timeline, you can go back to different years of your life and add photos and events from the past to help build a more complete profile of your life. As many people have already mentioned, think of it as a online scrapbook.
This, along with the other recent changes such as pubic sharing and subscribe features, is a clear indication that Facebook wants to be your online identity. Not just to the people you add as friends, but to the internet as a whole.
There’s no secret as to why this is beneficial to Facebook. The more info of yourself you are willing to share on Facebook, the more information Facebook can sell to advertisers or provide to developers.
Now there are already a bunch of Facebook haters (mainly on Google+) that are already panning the new Timeline update, saying it’s too busy and reminds them of MySpace. However I do think it’s laid out quite nicely. I’m just not sure how useful the Timeline feature will be.
I spend the majority on my time on Facebook within the news feed. I rarely spend any time in my profile let alone other people’s profiles. The only time I visit anyone’s profile is to view old photos, which is done pretty effectively in the existing photos albums interface. For the most part, I use my social networks for keeping up with my present life, not looking back to the past.
There is also the issue of whether people are willing to share anymore information with Facebook. A lot of people I know, even those who are not technically inclined, are choosing to share less details and lock down their profiles to limit visibility to anyone who isn’t a friend. Many see Facebook as a private communication tool between their friends not the public identity service the company wants to be.
This extends to the negative opinion that Facebook has with many of it’s customers. With all the unwanted changes to it’s system and continuing privacy issues, many Facebook users actually hate the company; but feel like they have no other choice but to use it since that’s where all their friends communicate. In short, people don’t trust Facebook.
Timeline is a nice addition to Facebook for those who want to invest the time into their profile, but it’s far from the game changer that certain bloggers have claimed. For a lot of people the addition of the Timeline profile page will not change the way they use the service. Given the outrage with the other recent changes to the news feed, I know those users are breathing a sigh of relief.