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  • Lady Java Video Marks Exact Point Where Geek Culture Jumped The Shark

    Alexia Tsotsis

    Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

    Friday, August 20th, 2010

    Lady Java, whose whiny drone is making me pretty nostalgic for the days when non-developers thought Java was a kind of coffee, is the creation of the supremely dorky folks over at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway. And while you might argue that the Java developer community is still small and tight knit, that thing is currently rounding out 100,000 views on the originally posted YouTube video and countless others on repost.

    “I want to program like they do at Oracle …”

    I personally blame Twitter for killing geek culture. You know who else has a combined love for coding and Lady Gaga? Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who yes, follows her on Twitter. You know how I know that? Yes, again Twitter.

    “Some people prefer other languages, but that’s okay if you’re retarded I guess.”

    In case you’re confused, I don’t mean “jumped the shark” and “killing” in the traditional “lose popularity” sense, just that nerd culture is now officially mass culture with whatever decline in quality that implies.

    But it’s not entirely Twitter’s fault. Hollywood should at least share part of the blame for making nerd life look somewhat glamorous in the hype surrounding David Fincher’s The Social Network and whatever that newest Google movie is. And for letting Ashton Kutcher weigh in on tech news.

    Okay maybe that one is Twitter’s fault.

    Tracing the blame is hard, but tracing the tipping point is not (Hint: It’s this video).

    However smarter people influencing the machinations of mainstream is not entirely a bad thing; Maybe U.S. teens will finally consider engineering cool, and at least nerds know that Lady Gaga is not her actual name.

    Company: Twitter
    Website: twitter.com
    Launch Date: March 21, 2006
    Funding: $1.16B

    Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

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    Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company’s strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. Since coming to Google, Eric has focused on building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. Along with Larry and Sergey, Eric shares responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations. Eric’s Novell...

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