Today's NGL closed abruptly during a discussion on the relative value of Twitter vs. other enterprise applications as a rebuttal to the statement that Twitter is the "most important enterprise application of our time".
A couple of statements indicative of the rationale: "The meta-data is more important than the data." "I'm not looking for data that exists, I'm looking for data that is about to exist." These are statements associated with people looking for the "next" thing. This is a valid activity. It is the source of innovation. BUT it does not physically create anything. Until we transcend the need to interact with our corporeal environment, the physical world remains important and is not served solely by the manipulation of data on the internet. While IT powers major productivity gains, without real product, the gains would be meaningless.
It may be that the primary target of NGL's discussions ARE the webarati. I can accept that as long as the participants in the conversation recognize the scope of their impact. Our ability to abstract functionality to a level above the various physical alternatives is useful for discussion but not sufficient for execution. I believe that the web/IT technologies we discuss can provide advantages for corporeal product based companies and I'm exploring the boundaries of those impacts and ways to express their importance.
And just to be clear, I hold to my apology to the other listeners (ok, and Steve) that I muddied the conversation due to our differing understanding of the scope of the word edgling. I remain firm in my belief that much of our conversation ignores a substantial segment of the working population that has limited access to the technology we discuss (in their work environment), and is therefore incomplete in assessing the technologies' impact on the broader set of businesses and populace.
There is much more to discover here.
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