I logged on to www.facebook.com today and noticed something called “smart lists”. Upon closer inspection this feature is a mechanism to group friends and view only their feeds. Nice, so now you can isolate the feeds you want to see as opposed to having to sift through endless notifications from apps your friends are using that they need “an axe to chop down trees” or a neighbour “has found your long lost gold fish” or any other arbitrary rubbish that gets pushed to your news feed trying to get you to consume the application. So, yeah neat and original idea. Oh wait, it is not original! Doesn’t Google+ circles offer the same functionality? Well I suppose it does, I mean after all if it looks like a circle and acts like a circle it must be a circle “symbol crash”.
Upon seeing this I remembered that www.facebook.com was suing someone over a very similar infringement of their beloved news feed.
So after reading an interesting article about who is suing who in the mobile space I thought I would see who www.facebook.com is suing (Google Search Results) I almost wet myself laughing when I viewed the results. So I thought, why not see who else is suing who. My next stop was who is Google suing (Results). The more I went on the more I started realising that software not only makes business supposedly run better but it is currently, single handed, funding law firms. With so much effort being pushed into suing people to get money that they feel is theirs no wonder there has been no significant break through since world war 2.
Let me validate that statement. World war 2 saw the discovery and implementation of:
Jet aircraft
Fuel injected engines
Ballistic missiles
Nuclear Fission
Assault Rifles
Radar
Sonar
Precursors to the computer
Devices used in household appliances
Multi track recording
Synthetic rubber
and the list goes on and on. So tell me, what have we discovered since world war 2? Asides from making computers small and more powerful? Asides from increasing the capacity of previous discoveries? What have we done in the 66 years after world war 2? Well in my estimation, squat. Argue all you want but provide me with proof. All we have done is create a society based on rampant consumerism, technological devices get upgraded and upgraded and upgraded, even though we are using less than 50% of the actual capacity of the machines.
Anyways this isn’t supposed to be a rant about society, it is just a pointer to how incredibly backwards we have everything. Perhaps I should do an article about creating opportunities for innovation in this space. Maybe I will if I get time. In the mean time, let carry on suing everyone because at the end of the day surely no one in the worlds population of ~6,775,235,700 people could possibly have the same idea as me. I mean, I am just that special!