joshualastdon

My first inclination seeing the title of this post even before I read the article was to comment, "are you a fortune teller?"

But seriously, to put it mildly my friend, I don't agree with you. Google determined that the best thing to do was to kill it and they did. They continue building other stuff; life continues.

Facebook already proved that a social network where real identity was encouraged could succeed. So saying that Tumblr wouldn't be as popular if it made users use real names would be misleading. I don't think the popularity of Tumblr was because they allowed users to not use their real identities.

Let use an analogy in education:

A professor in college might allow the class have an open book exam, however you still see a number of people who might not pass that exam. Why? Well, there were two kinds of people in that class:

1. The smart ones who actually know the material. 2. The others who know nothing about what had been taught so far in the class.

The students in the first category will pass the exam but the second crowd perform poorly, because even though the book is in front of them, they don't know what to look for, especially in a timed test.

So the way I see this is that googling will help those who already have knowledge of the programming concepts, not those who have no idea of what they are trying to implement at all. In reality those who can use google to get what they want can also figure it out without google, even though it might take longer of course.