Specialization is for insects

Heinlein - Specialization is for Insects

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

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Similarly, in my view :

An engineer in an internet company should be able to think of ideas, build prototypes, translate feature specs (or discussions) into workable components, design architecture, write good code, review code, monitor servers, scale applications, analyze logs, plan capacity, design databases, implement and use caching efficiently , tweak web servers, tweak databases, build fast, release faster..

Will Google+ spoil the Facebok IPO party ?

Google has been highly successful in creating a tremendous amount of buzz (not wave !) around Google+, it's social networking product.At least my view is that the gates were only semi-opened for users to create this hype.
While the Google variant of social networking too would ride on vanity and time-kill capabilities that users can harness like Facebook, in a bunch of ways, it is different - Circles and Hangouts.
Basically, the biggest gaps in FB were unwanted wall flooding and unintentional network expansion - the former being a function of the latter.
With Circles. Google+ brings in the opportunity for people to recreate their networks with the right people and separate them into water-tight rooms for selective information dissemination.
Which is cool because that's how it is in real life.
Hangouts is another capability which lends from real to virtual .. it's a morphed incarnation of groups and only better, because one can create dynamic groups with different set of people, on the fly.

So,will these be strong differentiators for Google+ to eat up a sizable chunk of the FB share and take the sheen out of their IPO plans ?
It's highly likely. Because of the hype that Google has created, complimented by the fatigue that some users have started to feel in FB.
Have a look at this, when FB was launched, it's traffic was a reciprocal of what Orkut went through :
Can Google+ give it back to FB in the same way ?
I just looked at Google trends to see if there's a decent number of searches being done for Google+ and check this out, the trend in the bottom reflects FB and + in reciprocal trends !



It will be an interesting battle to witness..