I watched a pretty cool new movie called August a few hours ago. The movie doesn’t come out in select theaters until next month, but for those of you with the relevant knowhow you can grab it here. The movie stars Josh Hartnett as a co-founder of a DotCom in the summer of 2001 who finds his company slipping away as the stock market bubble bursts. You can check out the rest of the info on its IMDB page, or simply watch the movie trailer right here. If you guys ever get the chance I recommend you check the film out.

The movie was good in its own right, but for me it carried the added bonus of sending my afterthoughts in a specific direction. I am extremely susceptible to this sort of thing.

Watching A Beautiful Mind makes me want to solve math problems and scribble on windows.
Watching Finding Forrester always makes me want to write.
Watching Antitrust, and now August, makes me want to write code.

I originally planned to watch the movie and the go to bed, but it is pushing 6am right now and I feel wide awake. I am buzzing with energy and a desire to build but at the moment I have nowhere to spend it. Instead, I sat down and drilled through a few dozen pages of Wikipedia reading about Web 2.0 and the various technologies and information models currently being used.

I consider myself a fairly talented programmer, but my single greatest fault is my lack of knowledge concerning new technologies. I never had any need for it at NetStudy or Hubbard, but more than that I frankly don’t find the specifics of those sorts of things all that interesting. I know a lot of people who get jazzed over the latest betas of obscure languages and platforms, but I have never been one of them. I am extremely curious about their applications, but I could care less about the specific machinery.

In college I explored a lot of different languages and applied them towards a lot of different ends. I spent a lot of time on theory and often worried about practical implementations only to the extent that it was absolutely required. Essentially, I love the way that systems are put together but am bored when it comes to actually building them.

After graduation I accidentally fell into web development, a field that I had only casually explored while in school. It was all rather simple and boring at first, but as I learned more about it I found that internet programming has a much more fascinating side to it. The only problem is that it is a side that is even now still largely unexplored. Traditional “Web Development” has a very deserved stigma attached to it. Building a web page is mind-numbingly simple, and even when you use a technology like PHP or ASP it is nothing worth bragging about. Web 1.0 – as this variety of internet usage is called – is all about providing information and delivering basic services to the user (standard e-commerce). That stuff was cool at the turn of the century, but by the time I graduated college, and even more so right now, Web 1.0 had become obsolescent.

Whereas Web 1.0 was about delivering information to the user Web 2.0 is about collaboration. In the new view the true power of the internet is not found in a person’s access to information, but about a person’s access to everybody else. Basically, it’s about people. Social networking sites, blogs, and wikis are the popular flag bearers here.

For me the biggest personal issue that I had while working at both NetStudy and Hubbard was that while the work I was doing was practical it felt incomplete. Having spent so much of my education developing computer theory it really bothered me to know that there was so much possibility being ignored. I was trapped doing the grunt work to facilitate cookie cutter e-commerce sites. The value of my work existed only because these companies had found specific niches. As a perhaps unfair analogy, it felt as if I worked at a grocery store. Sure our store made money – maybe because we specialized in organic foods or had stumbled upon a good location – but there is nothing special about selling groceries. If I did my job really well we might be able to sell a lot of groceries, or maybe someday open a bigger store, but at the end of the day – at the end of my career – I would still be selling groceries.

Hopefully that makes a little bit of sense.

Anyways, my problem at looking for a new job is that I don’t want to just find another grocery store. It is very hard for me to generate any real measure of excitement at the prospect of building more websites based on the established standards. I do, however, get all antsy in my pantsies to imagine the true power of the internet and its developing technologies. I truly believe that all meaningful progress in computer application will be based around the internet. Traditional software development – the kind that you buy packaged in a box off a shelf at Best Buy – will be largely nonexistent within the next ten years. I have no interest in doing any of that.

I also have no interest in working as a consultant. I don’t want to spend my time fixing somebody else’s business. If I can run your business… why wouldn’t I just run my own?

If anything I would like to create a small internet-based company of my own. The trick of course is discovering what exactly that company would do. Just as I don’t want to sell groceries – even if I happen to own the store – I am not looking to merely find a niche in a well established universe. I want to do something that pushes our current understanding of what the internet can do. I want to design a business model that hasn’t yet been thought of, not merely replicate the ones that worked ten years ago. Whether you believe me or not it actually happens most days that I ask myself, “What is it that we should be doing with the internet, but currently are not?” I never spend much time on the question and obviously haven’t yet come up with an answer.

But hopefully one of these days I will.