Clay Shirky describes a new term —
situated software— in his latest
essay, released to the Net this evening.
Shirky says “situated
software” is “designed in and for a particular social situation or
context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I'll call
the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where
scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues . . .
The biggest difference this creates relative to classic web
applications is that it becomes easy to build applications to be used
by dozens of users, an absurd target population in current design
practice.”
It's a neat essay. Clay describes some applications created by some of
the students he teaches under this 'situated software' paradigm.