So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?... "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software)

Yes, such toys are ``unprofessional.'' I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

If I had come here five years ago and told you I was going to make an entire encyclopedia by putting up a bunch of web pages that anyone could edit, you would have been able to raise a thousand objections: It will get filled with vandalism! The content will be unreliable! No one will do that work for free!

And you would have been right to. These were completely reasonable expectations at the time. But here's the funny thing: it worked anyway.

Mel didn't approve of compilers."If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?"

XYZ fit the installed base of web browsers we were targeting, and worked well in an awareness space.

"Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field."

"A what?"

"A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules