The Most Important Social Network: GitHub

To paraphrase Leonard Nimoy from the Simpsons [1]:<p><i>The following article is true and by "true" I mean "false". It's all lies but they're entertaining lies and in the end isn't that the real truth? The answer is "no".</i><p>We geeks seem to often be susceptible to hype and hyperbole. Someone is really in love with Github and thinks it's the greatest thing ever and it's going to change the world. It's easy to get caught up in your own excitement. I get it. That's fine.<p>But I have to admit to having some Github fatigue. We've gone through a spate in the last year of "Github is the new resume", "Github will change engineer recruiting" and now "Github is the most important social network ever".<p>In many cases I don't believe the author is being deliberately "linkbaity" but that's ultimately what it is.<p>Part of the problem too is that you get a certain about of "bubble thinking" in tech circles. You see this when VCs get excited about Quora thinking it's going to be the Next Big Thing [tm] because "everyone" is using it (meaning "lots of other people in the Valley"). That's what I mean by "bubble".<p>I play boardgames a lot and it's much like "groupthink" there (an isolated group of players will evolve a play style and view on strategy very different from other such groups).<p>In all of the above cases the cure is just to get out of the bubble and expose yourself to different influences and views because the end of the road for this kind of thinking is simply stagnation and becoming out of touch.<p>Github is great. Their engineers are great. Source control is important. Some will be able to use it to demonstrate their work ([2] really resonates with me). All of this is true but let's not go overboard.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701263/quotes?qt=qt0332688" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0701263/quotes?qt=qt0332688</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244420" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4244420</a>

What's the point of claiming that GitHub is 'The Most Important Social Network'? How can anyone make that claim? I feel silly thinking in the back of my head "But facebook is approaching 1 billion users, how is GitHub even comparable?".<p>Twitter gets credit for facilitating the arab spring. Facebook has 1000X as many users. Even if we want to be 'work' specific, Yammer is used by over 200k companies for what I assume must be business purposes.<p>This must be hyperbole. That would make sense.

If you were a designer, you would claim Dribbble instead of Github.<p>Either way, you would be delusional. Social is just a useful paradigm on the web. More and more products would use it as default. Just like every site now has a search box. Github also has a search box. It is not the most important search engine.

Reading this post I get a nice feeling of joy for belonging to the software community.<p>Being so entrenched in the software world it becomes easy to gloss over these details. The outside perspective of this article really shines a light on how well the software community collaborates and shares.<p>I can't think of a single community that even comes close to the level of collaboration we have in software.

"Facebook! Twitter! LinkedIn! VK! Renren! These are among the most famous and largest social networking platforms in the world. But are they important? Of course they are. They’ve changed the way humans interact. But let me challenge you and ask: Have they changed the way we work and think? I do think they have, to some extent."<p>"To some extent" is comically naive. These platforms have played a considerable part in the youth of internet/earth.<p>Perhaps the author suggests that github is part of the next phase, which is more credible.

Well it all comes down to what metrics you use to decide the importance of social networks, doesn't it.<p>If you're judging by the ability to interact with your real life contacts online then facebook is probably the best social network(gah!)<p>If you think that meeting like minded people &#38; having awesome interactions with them is more important, then maybe Google+ is the most important social network.<p>If you agree with Jane McGonigal that games can help make the world a better place, then WoW is probably the most important social network.<p>But if you think that collaboration on software is more important(and facebook &#38; WoW are softwares), then GitHub is probably the most important social network. It all depends on what you rate higher.<p>And putting myself in the shoes of the writer, I think it's the end product that comes out of social networks, is the metric he's pointing to. While other social networks directly affect the lives of more people, much much more than GitHub can ever hope to, the products coming out of GitHub are, or would soon affect more people than any single social network could hope to do.<p>Someone out there is building the next facebook, the next WoW, the next Linux, or maybe the next Google and it's likely that GitHub will play a part in it.<p>Keeping that in mind, I'd say that yes, GitHub is maybe the most important social network on the internet.

I think the term "social" is being overused here in the context of a startup, and was probably stuck in the tagline like many buzzwords, with an eye on marketing. The whole internet is social to a point. I think the term collaborative is more apt. The words that tended to jump out to me in the article were collaborative and commentary. He says "GitHub puts the social exchange at the very center", and I disagree. At the center with my view I see a strong tool to manage code that enables great collaboration. When you see a getting started tutorial with Github, the communication aspects are rarely mentioned. In the few projects I have seen getting popular there are usually external forces at work (i.e. Hacker News, Blogs, Large Corporate Support). It may be nice if Github was better at marketing your project. I suspect they may have to be better at it now and the product will undergo many changes in the coming year. That substantial portion of that 100m will likely all go to marketing efforts, not more engineers, which I think is a good thing.

I believe there are opportunities for many <i>Githubs For {insert_industry}</i>

The article focuses on blending communication &#38; code. While it's great to build tools that blend them, we can't pretend that other channels and mechanisms won't be used. Hopefully github will see the importance of doing that rather than forcing everyone to live inside a github world. Back in 2004 I did a class project called Open Sources [1] at MIT that looked at blending public mailing lists with public CVS archives (no github at the time). Years later I see some of these ideas becoming more popular in coding tools -- my take is that visualization of group history and individual contribution will become critical as catalysts of open-based works. These top-down summaries provide a map &#38; narration rather than autistic reverse chronological fine-grain lists, as well as giving a broader overview as to who an individual is and what they have achieved.<p>[1]: <a href="http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/OpenSources" rel="nofollow">http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/OpenSources</a>

I would submit that the term "social network" has lost almost all distinctive value.<p>Github <i>isn't</i> a social network in the way that traditional online social networks have been viewed – it isn't <i>just</i> about "connecting" and communicating the way that friendster, facebook and twitter all are.<p>Instead, it's an online code repository that has social <i>features</i> – in other words, it's the next step in making our online selves a more effective extension of our off-line selves, doing work, building things, but doing it in the context of a social group – just like we do in the off-line world, more often than not.<p>This is an example of a niche concept becoming widespread enough that it almost becomes table stakes rather than a notable feature.<p>That's still pretty cool – but again, I think it means that the term "social network" is losing its distinctiveness.

I don't really agree with the claim, but I'd love to see Github enter other areas of science like Physics, Maths, Chemistry, etc. Not just programming and computer science. That would be great, Github could work as a center of science all around the world.

I would argue that 10 million+ people have gotten jobs through LinkedIn [1]. And getting a job equates to at least $40,000 a year in income, and a direct improvement to people's lives. The existence of LinkedIn has been a part of ~$400 billion a year to the world's economy. I think Github is a tiny tiny tiny fraction of that in terms of its real-world effect on peoples lives.<p>[1] LinkedIn has 161 million user accounts, and assuming 5% of them have gotten jobs through the services which could be low. Around 4 billion candidate searches a month are done there. <a href="http://press.linkedin.com/about" rel="nofollow">http://press.linkedin.com/about</a>

While I'm sure Andreessen Horowitz feels some tech-world pride in this investment, they are still a venture capital firm. This article is a bit too sensational, self-loving to really portray the importance of the investment.<p>I think TechCrunch nailed it in their article today, where they wrote, "Think of it as a filing system for every draft of a document." Github right now is limited to code-sharing. But it's potential is so incredibly huge. Like the article stated, imagine applying it to PSDs, Word Docs, Excel sheets, any document imaginable. IMO that would be THE killer enterprise prodcut.

If Github can figure out how to serve customers who want to do version control on cat pictures, then I think the link title would have some merit.

The most important social network: GitHub ... (as long as you're a developer)<p>Clearly my mom has no reason to know github even exists.

I believe the thrust here is that Source Code Management has given us a template for Source Content Management.