Who is Jamie Zawinski? How is the role he played & are design principals he helped spread important to you?
Jamie W. Zawinski, also known as jwz is a former professional American computer programmer. He is known for his significant work on the free software projects, Mozilla and XEmacs, as well as the early versions of Netscape Navigator. Jamie has now left the computer programing world and is proprietor of a nightclub in San Francisco.
Jamie's principals included taking the internet out of the hands of the rich and making it easy free and accessible to all. He also believed that if we do not expand software and improve on it, it will be taken over by something else, or in his case be re-written. "Zawinski was a major proponent of opening the source code of the Mozilla browser, but became disillusioned with the project when others decided to rewrite the code instead of incrementally improving it. He resigned from Netscape Communications Corporation on April 1, 1999."
His principals are important to me in relation to social media. Jamie wanted to make software easy, free and available to everyone. For any social media application, if it is hard to navigate and will cost money, people are less likely to sign up for it. His principle of expand or get taken over is also relevant to social media. These days anything on the internet can be outdated in a matter of days. Everyone is competing for consumer attention. Facebook for example, use to be about social networking but now they have added all kinds of applications in order to keep them in line with other competing social media. If Facebook was still just wall posts and messages do you think it would still be number one? Personally because of the expansions it has made MSN obsolete, as there is now Facebook chat.
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