{ Wednesday, December 22, 2004 }
I noticed when I moved from New York to San Francisco that many of the SF cafes have a kind of 70s wood paneling and spider plant vibe. This is in evidence all over the bay area, but especially in the Haight and in Berkeley. During my very first visit to a San Francisco cafe, a longhaired man came over to my table, and without preamble, began reciting this poem:
If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get?
A soft-bodied dog, a hen
Feathers and fur to begin it again
when the sun goes down and it gets dark
I saw an animal in a park
Bring it home to give it to you
I have seen animals break in two
You were looking for something soft
And loyal and clean and wondrously careful
a form of otherwise vicious habit
could have long ears and be called a rabbit
Dead died will die want
Morning midnight I asked you
If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get?
I don't have a copy of this poem anywhere and so am writing it here from memory, which is notoriously unreliable.
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I posted this from 43 Things, specifically the Crawl the Cafes of San Francisco "thing". 43 Things is social software in which you createa community of like-minded people who share your goals and aspirations, and in the case of this "thing", I was noting that Id already "crawled the cafes of San Francisco" and was deeming it "worth doing". 43 Things is being built by a bunch of smart people, formerly of Amazon, who formed the Robot Co-op in Seattle. These guys came up to visit us a couple months ago, there being a lot of overlapping interests between our two companies, and they really get social software. Last night Stewart told me something that Matt Jones said when asked to define social software. "Social software", Matt said, "is something that gets better the more people are using it." This is a lot harder to achieve than it looks. First, it's really hard to build something that people will not only visit, but return to again and again. And then, once they're there, you find that most web sites get significantly worse the more people that are on it -- think Usenet or Yahoo chat rooms. And then, to look at social software that works, think of Amazon or Craig's List. One thing that both the 43 Things and Flickr teams have done is create a gregarious piece of software: it doesn't wall itself in, but interacts with other software, as evidenced by my ability to post on 43 Things and this blog at the same time, and likewise with photographs on Flickr.
LINK | 8:15 AM | TB