Jamie Zawinski is the creator of Mozilla Firefox and other free software projects. He also worked on programming for the earliest versions of Netscape.
He also came up with the idea of software bloat. Basically, he says that internet sites start off as great, small applications that do something really well. Attitudes and the founders try to expand the sites and they become bigger, but not better.
Zawinksi is also important because of what he tried to do with Mozilla. He opened the program’s code up to the public. Users could then make improvements on the program they are using.
Zawinski's opinion of software bloat, in a way, explains social media. The design principle that applications are at their best when they are on a smaller scale. I believe in this, a site like buzzword, which has one major application, is more useful to me than Myspace, which does a lot of things, but none of them particularly well.
Social media can also be judged on this type of principle. Hugely popular sites like Facebook begin as something small and grow into behemouths. This can have a negative effect on user satisfaction and it often convinces its consumers to look use different applications.
Zawinksi also gave the consumers access to the product, and they brought forward the ideas that shaped it. In public relations, practitioners will soon have to work directly with consumers because the consumer is gaining more control over the market every day. Zawinski is a pioneer of the idea that things can be improved if they are put in the hands of the people that use them.
It’s also interesting that his drive to make everyone able to modify source code led to his eventual disillusionment with the computer industry.He gave it all up to open a night club. Zawinski also serves as an example of the problems that can occur when too many people have too much of an opportunity to contribute.
Aside from that, without this guy, I wouldn't be able to post my answers on Squidoo.
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