If you haven’t read Rands in Repose before – now’s a good time. He’s got a particularly good article up today:
The lesson of the Holy Shit is that when you stumble upon a truly revolutionary idea, you have the ability to recognize it. There are lots of people who, when they first saw a web page, thought, ‘I can order pizza on the phone with a live person. Why would I do it on the computer via, what’d you call it? A browser? Also, why is that text blinking?’
You didn’t see pizza. You didn’t even see the blinking text. In fact, you saw nothing in particular; you just had a gut feeling. There was no logic or strategy behind the gut feeling, it was a sense of deep potential. Your amorphous thought was, ‘I can’t think of anything I won’t be able to do on the web.’
A Holy Shit is the instant of instinctually recognizing massive potential.
He goes on to talk about FriendDA, which is something that has been implicitly used among a lot of tech geeks that I know for a number of years. The concept has been incredibly prevalent among iPhone developers even prior to the notification that Apple was rescinding that too-fucking-long-lasting NDA. Thursday nights at Luau, after Xcoders, there’s bound to be all sorts of talk. It shouldn’t be a surprise that iPhone’s get whipped out and running sample code passed around. “Yeah? How’d you do that…” comes up frequently thereafter and the conversation takes another left turn and riffs on some technical content for a while until the next round of beer shows up and shuts people up again for a bit.
Rhonabwy 