150 karma · joined June 8, 2010
Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't be run from a single room for up to three days with minimal staff.
Also, if say, Facebook Profiles breaks down, the profiles don't eat the users.
Similarly, most people go out of their way to thank transit drivers, and everyone holds doors. Perhaps an American could share some insight.
Although the page itself is defensible IP for 37signals, the chances of them taking legal action on it (see above) is so remotely slim that it puts this whole thing into the realm of creative and professional courtesy rather than copyright infringement.
It's more like a stranger coming into the town saloon, getting drunk, and spilling his beer on the local bad-ass.
The rest of us working on our sites, platforms, apps and what-have-you usually only see anything resembling math when dealing with things like UI and Interaction models, or typically soft-math areas like rating systems and segmentation.
Possibly inflammatory, but perhaps a better question would be: why do most programmers work so hard at pretending they're engineers?
There's a wealth of information here: http://picostormlabs.tumblr.com/post/11977896983/for-the-las... and the UI was recently featured on YankoDesign and you can see here: http://picostormlabs.com/alpha
I do consider the interactive planner to be novel, as with currents which share the name as google currents.
More so than this, we have developed a system for identity management called Personas which we demo'd in Beijing a couple of months ago. All signs point to google releasing this system in the very near future despite claiming they wouldn't. I predict it will have the same name also.
The core of the project is a personal content relevancy engine, an ergonomic intergace and a unique personas system.
All this time railing against other languages could be spent making awesome things, rather getting the proverbial tape measure out (yet again).