In the dawn of time–before blogging, before social networking, when under construction pages ruled the web, there was IRC. Internet Relay Chat was an amazing place where you could talk to anyone about anything. Of course cybersex and software piracy were the dominant topics, but in this primordial soup were the beginnings of true Internet communities. IRC channels offered people a way to socialize around a particular topic, even if this was taken rather loosely. Often plagued by trolls and script kiddies, channel operators would act as police, kicking out the unwelcome elements to make life better for everyone else. On IRC, it was not uncommon to share cool links, talk about new ideas, get help from the most knowledgeable people, or just goof around and waste time.

Looking back on those days now, I took a guess that the userbase of IRC must have been in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. It seemed like the whole world was online. Of course, the Internet being so new then, I should have realized that I was one of just a couple million people online, and just a tiny sliver of those new netizens had enough know-how to run an IRC client. IRC was an echo chamber of geeks, nerds, and wizards. As it turns out, one of the larger networks (EFNet) boasted a userbase of only 50,000 people by the year 2000.

By that time, I was already off of IRC, visiting only occasionally to tap specific user groups for help. Devastated by DDOS attacks, political squabbles, and the skyrocketing popularity of the Web, IRC servers began to go the way of the dinosaur. While IRC channels still survive today, their tiny userbase is eclipsed by the many forms of socializing happening predominantly on the web.

Enter twitter. Because you choose who you follow on twitter, you create a channel for yourself that doesn’t contain any of the trolls, bots, spammers, and script kiddies that plagued IRC. You can even create custom ‘channels’ by subscribing to keyword feeds on services like summize and tweetscan.

Having only 140 characters to express yourself forces you to write creatively and concisely, leading to a higher quality of content than most other forms of communication. It’s limiting, but it’s also liberating. There’s also a sense of responsibility that comes with having followers. While IRC was a room where anyone could shout random nonsense, knowing that my update will be delivered to hundreds of people who follow me, I now feel responsible to produce something worthwhile and valuable to retain my followers and gain new ones. And followers are the name of the game. Whether it’s building a network that can get you out of jail or simply having people to poll or bounce new ideas off of, creating social capital is increasingly important in today’s Internet-driven society.

So twitter is my new IRC. I’ve been hanging out on twitter more and more. I’ve got a desktop client (twhirl) fetching the latest tweets from people I’m following, and I’m actively participating in conversations. Because twitter is still a very small early adopter minority, the quality of thoughts and ideas expressed can be very high, if you can figure out who to follow (this is where things like summize, hashtags and twellow can be useful). And even though twitter adoption is still a tiny minority of the Internet population, it’s growing rapidly and is already much bigger than IRC. It’s going to be interesting to watch the twitter community transform as it gains mainstream adoption.

Want to join the conversation? follow @skwp on twitter

What’s nice about GitHub is that first, it gives you an easy way to fork anyone’s codebase. The key feature of GitHub is fork network tracking, which lets you see everyone else who’s cloned a particular repo, and what changes they have made. The big benefit is that this prevents you from re-inventing the wheel when you see that someone is already working on the same feature you’re trying to submit. Instead of going and doing your own thing, you fork off of them and work with them. You might even fork off of a grandchild of the original project just because it has some feature that you need. It’s like the long tail of open source..you no longer have to wait for the original author to implement your obscure changes. Just find what you want out there and work with it.

The reciprocal benefit of this, of course, is that the original author can actually watch your changes as you’re making them. Instead of some disjointed patches, he sees your commits as you add them to your own line and can follow your progress visually. At some point, if the author likes your work he can merge your branch back into his code. And GitHub will show this on the network, so everyone else who is following the project can benefit. They’ve made it easy to notify the author that you have some good changes as well, with the pull request.

This very simple idea of tracking the forking network of a particular project, and doing it well, is why GitHub has made a radically cool contribution to the opensource community. Every day, more and more projects are added to the hub. And it’s viral…people who want to contribute to projects request that the project be put on GitHub because it’s the easiest way to track your contributions. Kudos to GitHub!

Essentially, designers become able to produce any of their ideas without having to look for a factory to do limited production runs, which can be extremely expensive if at all possible. Democratization of the means of production has already created many interesting new ‘long tail’ genres (the overphotoshopped but interesting flickr photo, the silly viral video, etc). I wonder what kind of interesting long tail products will come out of the ability for anyone to be a product manufacturer. There already quite a few interesting ones in the ponoko showroom.

Even cooler, some designs can be made open, which means other users can download and modify your design and improve or tweak it to create their own products. Open source product design, how about that.

In a startup you know when your money is going to run out. In a startup, you are responsible for the existence of own job position. By this, I mean that in a team of ten, you know that slacking off is not an option. You know that the work you do will directly result in business for your company, investment, and hence the ability of the company to pay you. Your own contribution carries a high proportional weight, which means you have a very real effect on whether your position is still available tomorrow.

A big company is an entity with a life of its own. The average employee does not have a sense of their own impact on company growth or business. Hiring and firing decisions are made on a level far enough removed from the average worker that they feel such decisions are arbitrary and unjustified. Employees talk in hushed whispers about looming layoffs without understanding why they are necessary. After all, they are just doing their jobs!

In a bigger company, layoffs due to a downturn in business or the economy are not only possible but probable. In a startup, they are unaffordable; A team of ten that loses one person loses 10% of their workforce, and faces a huge challenge in bringing a replacement up to speed in such a fast paced environment. A company of thousands can lay off handfuls of people here and there in a heartbeat in order to course-correct.

So – which is more secure? Sure you can look at a big blue chip company and say – they haven’t laid anyone off in ten years. But do you know for a fact that they won’t lay you off tomorrow because of factors you can’t even control? Think about that when deciding on your next job, and choose to work in a startup, where you are responsible for your own success (and failure).