• Typical social networks have been built around ideas like who you already know (Facebook) and where you’ve worked (LinkedIn).

• We’ve made Twitter into a tool that allows us to connect with and interact with people based on the kinds of stuff we share.

  ~A new kind of network, by David Aron Levine

David Aron Levine further wrote: “However, it wasn’t built around this concept exactly. It was really built around the idea of making it easy to share quick updates with people we know. (Remember: the concept of a “re-tweet”, an @ reply, and “hashtags” came from the community). The fact that we’ve collectively hacked it for the purpose of sharing and connecting with a new group of people might say more about our demands than it does about the service itself.”

Yes, there was a demand, but the main question still exists: how did it happen? The answer is … characters’ limitation.

We can’t express ourselves by more than 140 per twit. As Charles IX wrote in this context about half thousand years ago, “horses and poets should be fed not fattened“.

In other words, the Twitter’s basic feature – that David Aron Levine is discussing – appeared as one of the side effects of the above meant technical limitation.

The most important legal factor is the California State ban on Non Compete Law:

… a very special law was enacted in California in 1872. The law in question declared null and void any contract between a business owner and employee if said contract in any way restricted the employee’s freedom to change employers, even if that meant joining the former employer’s competition.

In other words, any previously signed agreements—for example, an employee contract signed upon hiring—that could in any way limit the employee’s right to freely choose his or her place of work were deemed unenforceable in this 1872 law. More specifically, those clauses that were in conflict with this law were deemed unenforceable.

This law was initially ratified in 1872 as part of California’s Civil Code. It is now listed under California Code – Section 16600, also known as CAL. BPC. CODE § 16600, and reads:

Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.


As a result of this cascade of direct and indirect consequences from the application of this law in Silicon Valley, today a number of generally operating U.S. legal standards, including some of the most important, are practically blocked (“de facto” canceled). Read more: From the Gold Mines of El Dorado to the “Golden” Startups of Silicon Valley

The above California law was recently tested during the Hewlett-Packard special experimental research: NDA Experiment Set up by Mark Hurd.

The most important among Silicon Valley startups motivation factors is the “not afraid to fail” attitude:

Perhaps one of the first practical application of this attitude was formulated about 22 centuries ago.
“A mistake in choosing the right way of actions should be punished less than omission”
~ Roman army, 200 BC

 

Two thousands years later people still continue to look for some of the alternative approaches that can bring the positive results as well:

“When teachers tried to motivate students with scare tactics that reminded them of the negative consequences of failing, this backfired and resulted in poorer performance in high-stakes exams”.
~ School Psychology Quarterly. American Psychological Association Press Release.


See also, a bit more detailed description of the same phenomenon:
“Our results indicated that the frequency of omission increases when punishment is possible. We conclude that people choose omissions to avoid condemnation and that the omission effect is best understood not as a bias, but as a strategy”.
~ The Omission Strategy. Peter DeScioli, Brandeis University, Departments of Psychology and Economics

Sixty-eight percent of people responding to a survey say that they’d put themselves at risk of physical harm if it meant retrieving a stolen smartphone … Only 10 percent of people have had a phone stolen, but, as the San Francisco Examiner noted, 50 percent of robberies in the city focused on phones as the target. And with the loss of a phone comes the loss of pictures, contacts and banking information.

Read more: http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/tech/Study-Over-23-Of-Americans-Would-Go-After-Mobile-Device-Thieves-258336661.html

Police arrested 27-year-old Yoshitomo Imura, a university official from Kawasaki City, after he posted a video of himself firing a 3D-printed six shooter called the Zig Zag revolver. Imura was employed at the Shonan Institute of Technology and owned a $500 home 3D printer.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/08/japanese-man-arrested-for-printing-his-own-revolvers/

National Safety Council’s annual report found 26 percent of all crashes are tied to phone use … headsets do not reduce drive distraction.

Read more: http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/03/27/survey-more-than-1-in-4-car-crashes-involve-cellphone-use/