News Feed at Launch, and Today
Clive Thompson’s book titled Coders is about the people who write software (aka coders): “Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet… The decisions they make guide our behavior. When they make something easy, we do a lot more of it. If they make it hard or impossible to do something, we do less of it.” In other industries, there would have been some adult supervision. Not so in software, with its startups by kids still at college. Which is why his book delves at length at the amount of influence they increasingly wield on society. And the problems that arise because coders are overwhelmingly engineers. And guys. And white. And young without enough (any?) life experience… We take Facebook’s News Feed for granted today (It’s the name for how info shows up on your Facebook page, one post below another etc). But in 2006, News Feed did not exist. You had to click on each of your friends’ name/page to see if they had posted anything new. Yikes...