Reboot 8 Themes III: Good Enough

This is a multi-part story about the themes I picked up at the Reboot 8 conference in Copenhagen, June 1st and 2nd.

Good Enough
Jacob Boetter brought this to daylight for me over dinner on Saturday. All of these new web apps are built to be good enough. Not perfect.

I always accepted the fact that the net is inherently messy, just like human behaviour is messy. People thrive on messy, because it challenges them, causes coincidental connections, associations and serendipity. In my mind though new web apps were primarily decentral, catering to the edges, where old apps were primarily centralised catering to command and control.

Good enough however is not just about that. It is also about accepting that you cannot predict the future, and mostly don't need high precision info to be able to navigate the world. This means you don't need to script all possibilities into your technology, and don't need military precision for a lot of your info. I don't need to know where exactly you are, as long as I can find out if you are near to me, so we can meet up, for instance. A lot of the web apps we saw at Reboot take the messiness of human behaviour as given, don't try to put it in a straightjacket, but use it as a feature rather than a bug.

All parts in this story:
I Renaissance
II Diversity
III Good Enough
IV Privacy and Ownership
V Relationships, Visualization, Contactivity

Tags: reboot8, goodenough

Photo's: Target by David M under Creative Commons license.

Permalink
(posted by Ton Zijlstra at June 10, 2006 09:58 PM)