Digital SOMA

I’ve had these pictures stuck in my head for the last few weeks.  The left is a sketch Jack Dorsey made of his concept for Twitter back in 2006, and the right (if you don’t remember) is what Facebook looked like in 2005 when it was essentially a sloppy version of Friendster for students of a particular Ivy League college.  When something hits such immense scale, it can be difficult to remember that it once existed as  such a fleetingly simple, unmitigated idea.  Some of the sharpest people the industry could muster (along with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars) have been bought to bear to cultivate these technologies into their present forms.  But those are effects, not causes.

Think about that the next time you sketch something on the back of an envelope. (via gtmcknight:kevintwohy)