I know lot of us are going to find this difficult to believe but here is something that might just need all of us to change the way we develop software , this concept is called situated software ..what is it? - "the rise of software that works because it isn't intended to scale"

Well on this topic I went on to read a piece by clay..man was it interesting...

well for those of you who are wondering what is it that I am talking about well here goes, today most software development irrelevant to the context of the development is built with the premise that they will need to be complete, general & scalable, this is referred to as the Web School of development, but by focusing on/prevailing value of "scale", web school based applications put other kinds of value, particularly social value, out of reach.

When you give it some thought you realize that it is true, the guiding principals for development is that it should be scalable to take and a sea of growth of users, but the fact is most applications will never reach that number of users. But we still go on to build such huge capacities...IDLE CAPACITIES.

But this whole thought process didn't come into being with out any basis..The basis for this whole line of thinking is "expense of adequate hardware", "the rarity of programming talent" and "the sparse distribution of potential users".

but these are no longer constraints any more and we need to view the whole process of development in new light/with new lenses.

The idea is that application should be built to take advantage of social infrastructure or context sensitive information. There should be a keen focus on "Communal Attention", "Group Capabilities"

I strongly recommend everybody who is interested in software development should read this article

http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
HATS OFF TO MR.CLAY....