Friendster fired my friend and former co-worker Joyce because in her weblog she posted things like this:
Finally on Friday we launched a platform rearchitecture based on loose-coupling, web standards, and a move from JSP (via Tomcat) to PHP.
and this:
Jon Udell's latest column mentions Friendster's rewrite. He makes exactly the right point: the programming language itself was not really the issue. It's the combination of decisions -- the “it all adds up” factor -- that makes the difference between a platform which fits the task and one which does not.
She says that she was careful to only post about things that were already public knowledge (and it's not as if seeing every Friendster url change from ending in .jsp to .php didn't already tell you everything you needed to know). I wonder if her now-ex-CEO got freaked out seeing the huge amount of attention her posts sometimes got, which was probably more attention than any official Friendster press release has received up to this point. Maybe he didn't stop to think about why that might be.
Technorati already lists 33 [now 49] [now 63] [now 121] weblogs linking to Joyce's story, including Ross Mayfield, Matt Haughey, Jason Shellen, Anil Dash (“someday i'll get fired from six apart for networking socially”), Jeremy Zawodny, Marc Brown, Joyce's husband, Tim, Jon Udell, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo. I won't be too surprised if it ends up on slashdot and metafilter [and boingboing, CNET and Wired News].
I doubt Joyce is going to have any trouble finding another job.
Posted by jjwiseman at August 31, 2004 09:54 AMFrom her semipermeable blogging paper which I just read:
"Paradoxically, we may be reaching a point where greater expression can only be achieved through greater privacy."
Surprisingly, I just realized that on Monday. I used to make these little writeups of informal lisp meetings, because I felt it was important to increase the amount of lisp litercher. However, there was always someone who asked to make sure I didn't put something they said into a writeup.
Now that I record the talks, it's gotten worse. It makes sense now; these meetings are for people to express what they really can't in daily life. (Because of the wall of uncomprehending resistance.) So my policy is to only release any audio recording if the speaker specifically asks me to; I won't personally ask. Of course, I can also censor the talk since I can edit it, but I don't think speakers want to sit through an hour of hearing themselves talk.
I would also like to get away from using some bulbuous phallic mic and instead use something less obstrusive. But there is a limit to the resources I want to pour into this.
Posted by: Tayssir John Gabbour on September 1, 2004 05:24 AMVery interesting article, thanks for the link!
Posted by: on September 1, 2004 07:27 AM
Did she also wrote "Single, But Not Sorry" ?
Well, that didn't take long:
http://www.google.com/search?q=shitcanned