I'm picturing myself running a massive company pretty much via correspondence. I'm this mysterious CEO who nobody knows but who cranks out basically books of instructions for a crack team of programmers, marketing people, server operators, finance people, legal eagles, plus customers, reporters, supporters, and whoever. I've been reading about systems development as a management approach. It's fascinating because that's called Level 3, and I've been calling my project Level 1 for a couple of days now. In Level 3, the ongoing progress of the company does not depend on that one person running it. The whole team is engaged and empowered, and the whole team runs the company, which is good for everyone and in every way.
The Game naturally subdivides into its own three levels. It's a game. It has levels. I won't go into what the three levels are here. I'll say they make sense in all sorts of ways. They guide the user through a learning trajectory, that's both technical and theoretical, while providing an incremental basis for development. I'll also say that Level 1 (the first of the three levels, as well as the name of the project) looks like basic standard CMS, though I think it might not be. As I wrote earlier, I'm not an expert on CMS. I don't know what the products do, the advanced ones. I don't fully understand the ones I am using, like Blogger, and Facebook. The fact that I have no clue is evidence that I am correct. There are things that the industry isn't seeing because they're so simple and basic. Advanced CMS is targeted at advanced users, and the industry seems to think that makes sense. The novice user can't access them. The novice user won't access them, because of things like installation or even just creating accounts. By the way, Facebook and Blogger have very well defined account creation options, and Twitter does ... all the really great ones do. Even then, it could be better. And, beyond that, all of these that I just mentioned place very strict limits on the user. You can type in this box, and that's pretty much what you can do. The boxes all get stacked up this way, and that's pretty much that. It's extremely one dimensional, this approach, that is taking the Web by storm, has been, all the more today, probably because of its simplicity, but the primacy of that is an illusion. What I see is an entire untouched infinity of possibilities just infinitesimally behind (and before) this plane that we're all always looking at. Breaking out into that is almost a zero energy thing, just a shift in perspective.
Level 1 is standard enough stuff. That's not to say there isn't a whole huge list of challenging problems to tackle. Hiring a team of programmers and managers eager to launch into a massive, massive development program. I've read some about it. Everyone has to write a lot, and what they get is maximum fun, excellent pay, perks galore. Getting the ad component right is crucial from the getgo, and there's a lot to that, more than just anybody might think. I mean, the whole Google model revolves around analyzing customer data. The whole issue of user accounts and controls is also very, very important. We'll want to innovate in that arena. And there are also larger questions about what kind of growth we're facilitating in the community of users, sort of.
I love to write, and I'm also an eager reader. Let me hear from you.
