Buzzwords

Overheard: Feature lust can be a bad thing

Look, I fully understand being enamored with a new feature or a new technology. I have succumbed to that siren song more times than I can count.And we, as vendors, don’t make the situation any better, do we? But I’ve learned — the hard way — that “outcome lust” is a far better thing than “feature lust”. Chuck Hollis, Feature Lust By Storage People

And then the truth came out … they were severely under the gun to cut IT expenses (who isn’t?) and thought that thin (virtual) provisioning might be a great way to do it.

As IT battens down for rough seas, this is the kind of guy I’d want captaining our ship. I salute you, Chuck Hollis.

Overheard: The New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year for 2007 is “locavore”

The New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year for 2007 is “locavore.” What the heck?

“Locavore” was coined two years ago by a group of four women in San Francisco who proposed that local residents should try to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius.

Runners-up for the 2007 Word of the Year that made more sense to me:

bacn: email notifications you sign up for but probably leave in your inbox unread

cloudware: online applications, such as Adobe Buzzword

social graph: the network of one’s friends and connections on social websites such as Facebook and Myspace

Overheard: Social graph is just geekspeak for social network

So if you don’t want to sound like an idiot, call a “social graph” a “social network” and stand up for your right to understand technology — and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated. Dave Winer, How to avoid sounding like an monkey

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg says that “News Feed” is not just a feature on Facebook. It’s the infrastructure for what he calls the “social graph.” Other people, including Dave Winer, think social graph is confusing and we should just say “social network.”

I kind of prefer the term “social map.” We’re going to need a map once Facebook’s Beacon starts to change the advertising model as we know it.