Social Media Midterm: Question 4

Who is Jamie Zawinski? How is the role he played & design principals he helped spread important to you?

Jamie Zawinski, commonly known as jwz, is a former American computer programmer/hacker turned nightclub owner. He can be credited for his significant contributions to the creation of free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs. Currently he actively blogs and is very popular. Zawinski’s contribution to the creation of Mozilla is important to me because I am writing this while on Mozilla Firefox right now.

Besides that, his role in social media and program design is important because his opinions of social media dilution. Zawinski emphasizes the idea that social media needs to be adaptable or it will be replaced. If applications are not flexible and open to changes, they will be replaced or loose users. This is important in terms of providing free software and applications. Personally, I enjoy free Internet software and social media sites. If a site is not free, chances are a will not use it or will torrent it.

If your application is not adaptable, it is not sustainable. As an active social media user, I want to work with social media that has staying power. Zawinski helped create the programming that is required for an application to have staying power. But most importantly, his work is allowing me to browse the Internet using Firefox very quickly.