As a child, my parents’ friends asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “Race car driver.” As I grew older, my parents would ask the same question, with a little more concern. “Race car driver.” Through my teens, the answer remained the same. “But it’s dangerous”, they would reply. As parents, time was running out. I was about to go off to college. My Dad came up with the best lines. “When I was your age, I really wanted to be an electrical engineer. My Dad wanted me to be a doctor, but I didn’t want to be one. Now I wonder if I should have listened to him. I really think you should consider being an electrical engineer.”

February, 2001. I watched my childhood hero slam in to a wall in Daytona, Florida. His name was Dale Earnhardt and he was a race car driver. Going three wide in to the final laps of the Daytona 500, the black #3 inexplicably veered off the embankment and then shot back up in to the retaining wall at 160mph. “Race car driver.” That Fall I embarked in pursuit of my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.

As an adult, I am known somewhat by my Apple fanaticism. My first computer was a Mac. It was an Apple IIe passed on by a family friend on which I played Chess and occasionally used the word processor. After years of tinkering with custom built PCs, I returned to the fold with a black MacBook. I got sick of the finance world I ended up in, so I took a job as a professional web developer. iMac. And I love my job so much I do it in what most would consider their “spare time”. MacBook Air.

Today, I watched my Facebook feed fill with mourning, respect, and snide remarks for a man I deeply respected. Today, the world lost one of it’s most brilliant visionaries, innovators, personalities, and… salesmen. A one in a billion type of person that died of a one in a million type of disease.

In their lifetimes, my personal heroes both held a few things in common. They both wore black. All the time. Both of their spheres of influence loved to hate them, but still respected and revered who they were. They both earned notoriety for their fearless passion (or perhaps their passionate fearlessness). And ultimately, they both died… doing what they loved.

May we all be so lucky.

Thank you, Steve. Thank you for teaching us, in your death, what it means to live. And for reminding us, in the oft quoted words of Stewart Brand, to “stay hungry” and “stay foolish”.

It would be hard to argue that Google isn’t successful. Starting as a Stanford research project and ballooning to a $163B market cap that is taking on every imaginable competitor that it can, you might think that there’s no space that Google can’t compete reasonably well in.

But the internet giant seems to lack success in a key area of the internet: social media. First there was Google Wave. TechCrunch called it “part email, part Twitter, and part instant messaging.” Users called it completely confusing, as it seemed like no one really knew what the hell you were supposed to do with it.

Then there was/is Google Buzz. Buzz was supposed to a brilliant way with sharing things with people you actually wanted to share them with. But it’s launch was marred by privacy concerns, lawsuits, and an eventual drop off in “buzz” as people slowly disabled the feature as it added too much noise to their Inboxes.

Google+

So with Wave and Buzz lessons in hand, Google has rolled out +Pistevo to my Google menu bar. Think of it as Facebook, but done the Google way. It’s Buzz, except it has some added features like “Hangout” where you can awkwardly group video chat. Group management is handled by what Google+ calls “Circles”. It is pretty well thought-out, though Google had the advantage here of rolling this feature out at launch, unlike Facebook. So rest assured, you can happily block Aunt Sally from your drunken rampage last Saturday night. But unfortunately you have to add Aunt Sally individually and all your other 1000 Facebook friends because it currently doesn’t integrate other services. Overall Google+ looks a lot like Facebook, feels a lot like Facebook, and acts a lot like Facebook.

Google’s “Anti-Social” UI

So everyone wants to know… is it as good as Facebook? Kind of. Google+ is a clone of Facebook, except branded with Google’s “New” UI. Google has been letting their designers do a lot of the legwork the past few months. They added a new menu bar up top, gave Maps a makeover (NICE WORK EVELYN!!!!), reskinned Gmail, and made a bunch of other tidy visual touches to its flagship search.

Google has made a lot of money on one thing: search advertising. They are quite good at it. And I am quite certain they are good at designing for it. Get users to search quickly and get them off the page quickly to drive pageviews and click traffic. That is Google’s bread and butter, and if Google+ runs on the same Google mentality it is destined to fail.

Social networks have the inherent need to be social. You hang out on Facebook because your friends/ex-lovers/creepy co-workers are all on Facebook and you spend an inordinate amount of time stalking people, you creeper. You get in, and stay in. The problem with Google+ IS that it is Googley. It fits in completely with Google’s new branding. Developed by brilliant engineers and a brilliant designer who made it perfectly Google.  The more I use Google+ the more I find that I want to leave it. Get in, get out with a revenue-generating click. That’s the essence of Google. And that’s why Google just doesn’t get social.

I’ve been thinking lately about the vagaries of the average church vision statement. Mission, vision, something that staff and layleaders and parishioners slave over. Is the wording right? Does this get the message across? Is this what we believe?

So as not to pick on any church, I will pick on all, because your vision statement likely suffers from one, if not all three, of these points.

1. Your vision statement is too long: seriously, I’m not going to memorize point 2, subpoint 4.
2. Your vision is vague: it’s a nice idea, but what are we going to do exactly to see this through.
3. Your vision is fluffy: “devoted to”, “passion for”, “pursuit of”. Do you talk like that to your mother? Do you talk like that to your Dad? see item #2.

If I started a church, it necessarily, would have a Vision Statement. I mean, you have to have content for the snazzy website, yeah?

Well here it is:

Jesus.

Concise. Focused. There is nothing you can add to that vision that would make it better. And if you really want to subtract something from it, can you call yourself a gospel-focused church?

This is not meant as complaining or even really critiquing, but a reminder.  We rightly think about what we are doing, we pray about where we are going, and we seek and run after God’s heart. But are we letting our vision get in the way of God’s vision?

“And this wise man asked me to stop. He said, Stop asking God to bless what you’re doing. Get involved in what God is doing — because it’s already blessed.”
- Paul “Bono Vox” Hewitt, U2

Jesus, be Thou my vision. Peace.