To paraphrase Leonard Nimoy from the Simpsons [1]:
The following article is true and by "true" I mean "false". It's all lies but they're entertaining lies and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is "no".
We geeks seem to often be susceptible to hype and hyperbole. Someone is really in love with Github and thinks it's the greatest thing ever and it's going to change the world. It's easy to get caught up in your own excitement. I get it. That's fine.
But I have to admit to having some Github fatigue. We've gone through a spate in the last year of "Github is the new resume", "Github will change engineer recruiting" and now "Github is the most important social network ever".
In many cases I don't believe the author is being deliberately "linkbaity" but that's ultimately what it is.
Part of the problem too is that you get a certain about of "bubble thinking" in tech circles. You see this when VCs get excited about Quora thinking it's going to be the Next Big Thing [tm] because "everyone" is using it (meaning "lots of other people in the Valley"). That's what I mean by "bubble".
I play boardgames a lot and it's much like "groupthink" there (an isolated group of players will evolve a play style and view on strategy very different from other such groups).
In all of the above cases the cure is just to get out of the bubble and expose yourself to different influences and views because the end of the road for this kind of thinking is simply stagnation and becoming out of touch.
Github is great. Their engineers are great. Source control is important. Some will be able to use it to demonstrate their work ([2] really resonates with me). All of this is true but let's not go overboard.
Misguided title as it may be, article (successfully) really suggests that GitHub is ignored in studies of social networks and group collaboration, and it shouldn't be, given its productive capacity, as opposed to time-wasting alternatives.
Many sociological and even political models could reference it in their development and study.
Not disagreeing with you, but here are some ideas on how github could take things to the next level.
0. Get Junio Hamano from Google and several of the top git-core contributors, so they can start releasing open source patches to git that support github's long term roadmap.
1. Come up with efficient custom diff functions for a variety of common file types, not just image diffs but also dbdiffs, mp4diffs, and the like. Github has already done some work in this area, and a little known fact is that git already has some support for custom diffs in .gitconfig:
2. Next, integrate git-annex for storing huge files in git into git core, maybe with a configurable option for where to place the files (perhaps on a github-customized API to S3).
http://git-annex.branchable.com
3. Now, with some thought and work, you could start supporting diff-based workflows in a wide variety of disciplines, including movie, image, and document editing.
4. You might also start expanding the range of github to start including db versioning capabilities. I am convinced that the successor to Postgres will include schema versioning as a first class capability. One way to do this is to allow every table to have a list of historical schemas s_i each associated with the instances v_j that were populated when that schema was in effect. Then all you need are functions that map from s_i to s_{i+1} to migrate historical data forward in time.
Well, that's cool. However, these are just incremental improvements and really don't serve any ideal of github being the most important social network. This would be more for a thread like "What are some bugs we should fix on Github?"
Which is too bad, I imagine that some version control even in it's simplest form could be good for everybody. At least I know a couple of non-tech types that could use it.
The following article is true and by "true" I mean "false". It's all lies but they're entertaining lies and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is "no".
We geeks seem to often be susceptible to hype and hyperbole. Someone is really in love with Github and thinks it's the greatest thing ever and it's going to change the world. It's easy to get caught up in your own excitement. I get it. That's fine.
But I have to admit to having some Github fatigue. We've gone through a spate in the last year of "Github is the new resume", "Github will change engineer recruiting" and now "Github is the most important social network ever".
In many cases I don't believe the author is being deliberately "linkbaity" but that's ultimately what it is.
Part of the problem too is that you get a certain about of "bubble thinking" in tech circles. You see this when VCs get excited about Quora thinking it's going to be the Next Big Thing [tm] because "everyone" is using it (meaning "lots of other people in the Valley"). That's what I mean by "bubble".
I play boardgames a lot and it's much like "groupthink" there (an isolated group of players will evolve a play style and view on strategy very different from other such groups).
In all of the above cases the cure is just to get out of the bubble and expose yourself to different influences and views because the end of the road for this kind of thinking is simply stagnation and becoming out of touch.
Github is great. Their engineers are great. Source control is important. Some will be able to use it to demonstrate their work ([2] really resonates with me). All of this is true but let's not go overboard.
[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701263/quotes?qt=qt0332688
[2]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244420