The devolution of social networking into a kind of bizarre connectivity fetish has been garnering a lot of attention in the media lately. Somehow, people have grown more connected and less connected; more outspoken and less insightful. It’s all very confusing and contradictory if not undeniably and utterly true.

Picture this: heads bowed around the table, air laden with the staccato of eager thumbs crushing tiny, plastic buttons. Periodically, someone will look up, cram a forkful of wagon wheel pasta into his mouth, and dive right back into that liquid crystal pool — utterly detached from those around him. How many of you are living this right now?

The social networks (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and so on) have honed in on an innate compulsion so powerful that treatment centers are springing up just about everywhere to assist so-called “internet addicts”. Some optimists have attributed this most recent outburst of sharing, feeling, and TMI to a sort of webby renaissance. After reading pages upon pages of Tumblr posts and Facebook notes to prepare for this article, I’m inclined to believe that we’ve instead stumbled into something far worse. Or at least significantly more pointless:

Our posts — the same ones we sacrifice real human connection for — are completely banal and, simply put, boring.

I should have suspected as much: personally, I’m no longer capable of entering a public library without “checking in” on foursquare, twittering about how odd libraries smell, and then taking frequent microbreaks to candidly upvote pictures of narwhals on social bookmarking site reddit. Sure, I may not be as bad as the girls who turned to Facebook instead of emergency services for help — but that’s not saying much.

Kicking this habit isn’t going to be easy. We might try banning social networking outright — but then I wouldn’t be able to find pictures of other people’s cats doing cute things. Another idea would be to ship Mark Zuckerberg off to prison. Come to think of it, that might work.

In the end, however, pointing fingers will only get you so far. After all, your time is your own personal responsibility — show moderation and self-restraint, and you’ll be golden. Give into every impulse and you’ll be Perez Hilton.

If this seems like a strange perspective to find on a blog associated with a service named SocialKey, well — you’re right: it is strange. At the same time, it’s also a principle that we take very, very seriously; SocialKey has been designed not to absorb your life, but to grow it — a topic we’ll save for a future blog post.

As for this article, I think John Lennon (almost) put it best: “Life is what happens to you while you’re [not tweeting about something stupid].” Guard life’s little moments jealously; don’t trade the opportunity to live for a few dozen snippets of text or a couple sarcastic comments from your friends. It’s just not worth it — unless, of course, you’re trying to launch a business. Then you’re screwed.

Boy does it suck to be a designer.

Not that I’m a designer myself — it’s just that I happen to know a few. Me? I’m a programmer. If I glue functions to procedures, drop in a few classes, and dress my frankencode in a halfway decent UI (i.e., the spray-and-pray method of development) there’s a fighting chance that the customer won’t notice for at least a week. Maybe even two.

A designer, on the other hand, has no choice but to be awesome 24/7. While bad software can lurk unnoticed beneath wafers of green silicon (ready to pounce at a moments notice) a designer’s work stands proudly and loudly at the front lines, charging headlong into the cruel hands of the merciless dictator that is The User. What’s more, a designer must face that inscrutable master of the Interwebs — known far and wide for a propensity to rend icons, stylesheets, and typography alike — armed with little more than an army of pixels and a cup of overpriced Chai tea.

The lucky ones are the developers who can weave their web of abstraction and linger in the vasty deep of the processor’s registers and execution units. Code karma, of course, will catch up to you eventually: put junk in, get junk out. Some try to delay the inevitable by burying poor implementation in a sugary, sophisticated design — but shoddy software can’t float a boat forever, and the fail whale will surely strike someday. Even without a candy shell, it takes months if not years of training to understand software well enough to remark knowingly about its quality and character (though many less experienced programmers would have you think otherwise).

Meanwhile, it doesn’t take more than a pair of eyes and a big mouth to criticize design. It’s something anyone can do, and often will. Appreciating design, quite incongruously, is extraordinarily difficult — hence the existence of sites fully implemented in flash as well as every myspace page, ever.

The greatest tragedy of all, though, is that good design tends to work so well that you hardly even notice it. This, in a nutshell, is the core tenant of Stephen Krug’s famous usability tome, Don’t Make Me Think: the best interfaces are seamless and work the way you do. If you’re noticing it, chances are it’s because it sucks.

It’s not too surprising, then, that excellent design is taken for granted not just by users, but also by developers and business teams. All too often, the brutal war waged from the cold, steely metal of a designer’s MacBook Pro against all that is serifed and non-reflective goes unacknowledged. Therefore, this hacker would like to extend his gratitude on behalf of all developers for allowing us to dress our software– fortunes and follies alike– in your luxurious, gradient-laden robes.

Designers: we salute you.

Company culture is one of those things that really gets CEOs hot and bothered. Yes, I know — a hot and bothered CEO is about as rare as a pair of extra tight jeans in the East Village of Manhattan. The unusual thing about culture is that it might actually be worth frothing at the mouth over.

Although culture is trendy and sometimes a source of considerable personal embarrassment (that you may choose to hide in a younger sibling’s pants drawer), culture is first and foremost a critical piece of the entrepreneurial puzzle. A business’ character and its personality are communicated through its culture, enabling the company to market itself. Unsurprisingly, a great culture can mean the difference between an okay business and an awesome one. Meanwhile, a flawed culture can bring a strong company crashing down to its (non skinny-jeaned) knees.

For those of you puking in the back row, (a) please stop puking in the back row (we are unfunded and can’t afford carpet cleaner), but also (b) I feel your pain — I’ve done some puking myself. There’s a certain fluffiness inherent to words like “culture” that just doesn’t seem, well, kosher.

As a hacker, I’ve taken the time to understand and appreciate the basic tenets of software engineering:

• Thou shalt not blindly throw more programmers onto thy team.
• Thou shalt not hacketh all at once but instead incrementally.
• Thou shalt not eat fast food more than thrice a week.
• Something about mythical man months. Yeah, definitely that.

How and why these techniques make one more productive is as transparent as glass. Culture, on the other hand, is about as transparent as a block of lead coated in tar.

Over the years, I’ve worked at companies that make Office Space look like a brilliant exposé and companies that make beer bashes an integral part of the working environment. I’ve even worked at companies that have absolutely no culture at all. The most interesting bit to me, however, is that while the work has been mostly the same and the skills required to perform the work have been mostly the same, my enthusiasm and efficiency has been utterly not the same.

Case in point — at one company, I’d spend hours after the close of business writing code, solving problems, and networking with colleagues. At another company, I’d pay more attention to the clock’s ticking than the complex and comparably interesting software that I was tasked to build. Aside from a few footnotes, the biggest difference between Company X and Company Y was purely cultural: whereas one culture encouraged personal growth, put failure into perspective, and embraced the humanity of its employees, the other treated employees like Borg slaves with resistance being very much futile.

Culture isn’t solely reserved for the old and ornery, either. While a mature company will often make culture an explicit practice of its business (occasionally going so far as to provide literature documenting the ins and outs of their particular culture — often a warning sign of a boring company), at a startup shop, good culture is far more implicit. In this setting, culture boils down to maintaining a respectful, friendly rapport with your peers while simultaneously ensuring that everyone involved in the company remains passionate and excited about a shared vision. In other words:

Be cool and have fun.

In my experience, it’s often sufficient to lead by example — genuine optimism can spread like swine flu on an airplane. Be the co-worker who brings the 7-foot-tall inflatable Tiki statue to work, or the co-worker who hosts a geeky movie night once a week, or even the co-worker who sounds the office fog horn whenever a major bug is quashed and/or pizza arrives. Startup culture starts at the individual and grows outward, like some kind of weird cultural weed.

That said, bridging the gap from little to big (or, in the parlance of our time, “scaling culture”) is a real sticky wicket. It is, in fact, one of the key challenges of turning a tiny venture into a decidedly less tiny one. Difficult questions abound: how does one preserve an eccentric culture in a company with tens or even hundreds or thousands of employees? Which parts of the culture must be sacrificed to achieve scale? Which preserved? How does one maintain a engineering-driven culture while acknowledging the sales-driven realities of business? What distinguishes a culture of selling from a culture of building? Answering these questions correctly is only slightly less difficult than understanding the tax code.

Any way you cut it, culture is hugely important. It’s something that shouldn’t be overlooked when running a business, big or small. If you’ve worked at companies that hit the culture nail on the head– or suffered unduly thanks to a particularly sucky culture– we’d love to hear about it. Feel free to share your juicy stories in the comments, below.