Scripting News

Integrating multiple apps & services

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 01:41:16 GMT

Fred Wilson: "When will people start building apps/services that sit on top of multiple APIs?"

It's a good question, and the answer is -- we're already doing it. The services are now so reliable and flexible that you almost forget how complex the systems are.

Let's look at a Twittergram scenario:

1. Chris registers with the Twittergram site. That's App #1.

2. She takes out her iPhone and opens the phone app. That's App #2. (Yes, the mobile device is also a computer, it's running an app, with an interface, it can dial a number and transmit audio. It's old fashioned, but it works great.)

2. She calls BlogTalkRadio, 646-716-6000. That's app #3. Records a 30-second message.

3. She hangs up. BlogTalkRadio calls the Twittergram app. App #1, again.

4. Twittergram calls Amazon S3 to store the MP3. App #4.

5. Twittergram calls TInyUrl to create a short URL for the MP3. That's App #5.

5. Twittergram calls Twitter. That's App #6.

So there's a simple application that uses six different apps/services.

Another example, the Flickr-to-Twitter integration, also part of Twittergram.

1. Randy registers with the Twittergram site. That's app #1.

2. He goes to the park, sees a beautiful flower. Takes a picture with his iPhone. That's app #2.

3. He mails the picture to Flickr. That's app #3.

4. Twittergram is monitoring Randy's RSS 2.0 feed on Flickr. Some people might say this is another app, but let's be conservative. App #3, again.

5. It notices a new picture, grabs the URL, calls TinyUrl. That's App #4.

6. Grabs the title of the picture, appends the TInyUrl, sends it to Twitter. That's App #5.

Another app that uses five different apps/services.

We've been doing this stuff for a long time, all the way back to 1998, when XML-RPC first came online. It's always been about delivering functionality, quietly and reliably, to users.

Techmeme is officially a cesspool

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:04:55 GMT

It was intriguing for a day or two, but now it's clear that the Leaderboard was the dumbest idea ever, because now more than ever, people are gaming Techmeme so they can climb the list.

Reminds me of something Ted Turner once said about how the Forbes list of richest people in the world was the worst thing ever for philanthropy. If you're super-rich, now you don't want to give it away because when you do, you move down (or off) the list.

Techmeme was already severely polluted by people saying stupid shit to rise to the top of the page. That was an ephemeral high. Now there's a way to accumulate points toward more persistent rank, and everyone who isn't on the list, wants to be on the list.

I'm thinking of this idiotic post by an idiot who's known for saying idiotic things just to get attention.

Or Scoble, who started on the list near the bottom -- is rapidly rising. How's he doing it? By saying extreme things that people will react to. That's how you get points in the Techmeme universe. Scoble ain't no idiot. If he wants to rise on the list, he rises.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Well, this ain't blogging, and we're still getting ready to start a war with Iran, and the stock market is still acting weird, and there are still big ideas out there to pursue, and now Techmeme isn't even worth reading when the top item on a weekday is guaranteed to be some idiot procliaming himself king of the hill. It's worse than AM talk radio.

PS: A piece I wrote in May offering a vision for "Web 3.0."

PPS: Mike Arrington weighs in. "Gabe sometimes edits stuff like this off of TechMeme to keep it stocked with real news." Hmmm. I'd be surprised if that were true.

My podcatcher is a publishing tool

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:11:57 GMT

I was subscribed to too many podcasts, my old podcatcher was downloading far more than I'd listen to.

So when I started the project to write a new podcatcher, I decided to start with a clean slate, and go for a minimalist set, the ones I really listen to, and add slowly, and make it very easy to remove or suspend a feed.

And as I announced on Tuesday, my podcatcher has a Twitter account, if you're interested in background programming while you twit the day away.

http://twitter.com/podc

And yesterday I took another item off the to-do list, and came up with a public web page that shows my podcatcher's discoveries in reverse-chronologic order.

http://dave.podcatch.com/downloads.html

This will develop of course, what you're seeing is totally pre-alpha, not even 1.0.

Would it be news?

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:04:06 GMT

I wonder if it would make news if The New Yorker article by Sy Hersh was the most pointed to page on the web.

Random evening pre-walk nonsense

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 01:23:58 GMT

When John Furrier started Podtech I told him to open a permanent blogger's space with great production facilities South of Market in San Francisco near Moscone. The press room for SF tech bloggers (professional press would be welcome too). He did a strange rendition of the idea, not at all what I had in mind at CES, called Bloghaus. I mention it now, because Loic is doing almost exactly what I asked Furrier for. His place isn't close to Moscone, it's in Potrero Hill, not close enough to BART into the city to visit. But there is parking, and what Loic lacks in location he makes up in charm. There's much more to his story, I hope to get some stock, so I guess I should disclaim that up front.

Sy Hersh's New Yorker article on America's plans for war in Iran. Scary shit. Must read.

The Older link is back in Twitter, along with a surprise, the UI has been spruced up and made to work in Firefox. We are reluctant to complain about Twitter, so it's very nice when they fix problems we never complained about. I'm having lunch next Tuesday in NYC with Fred Wilson, and plan to talk a bit about Twitter then. Fred is the VC with the arrows in his back. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

The playoffs have started. The Mets are resting. I get work done when the Mets aren't in post-season play. The old silver lining thing. Wait till next year!

Communication is vital when there's an outage

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:34:56 GMT

This morning a key element of the Twitter user interface went missing, the "older" link at the bottom of every page. Without it, it's as if there was no past. Unless you're glued to Twitter around the clock, or follow very few people, you're going to miss some of what's happening. I like to keep up with it all. There was lots of speculation about where it went, and whether the disappearance was temporary or permanent.

At some point during the morning, a post appeared on the Twitter weblog explaining: "This is not a permanent change." Okay. That's good news. I was seriously thinking about what life would be like without Twitter, and didn't like the feeling. Now I know at some point the link is coming back, and the functionality behind it (also missing temporarily) and I can relax.

While you're deep in the server logs, and trying to figure out what's going wrong, it's hard to remember that there are people out there wondering what's going on. Over time, the frustration builds, but right now the Twitter community is still in its Happy To Use Something New phase, so everyone took it in stride and with good humor.

Suggestion: There's this perfect space on every user's page where they can communicate with the users. Make it easy for the staff to quickly post a note there, perhaps saying nothing more more that "we're working on it" -- to help keep the users in the loop.

Introducing Loic's new company

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:09:55 GMT

Random evening thoughts

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 05:00:39 GMT

Are we going to start a war with Iran? Listen to the Terry Gross interview with Seymour Hersh. What will Iran do after we attack? The British are evacuating Basra, will Iran invade to fill the vacuum? What will Bush do then? And will Iran move into Afghanistan? They share a long border. Will Pakistan then move into Afghanistan? Hersch says it will be a 20 year war. He can't imagine a President of the US trying everything before going that route, yet, of course, Bush is doing nothing. At this point, knowing what we know about Bush, we are complicit if we do nothing.

Don Park advocates comment gardening.

We have many beautiful streets in Berkeley.

Microsoft announces a new Zune in the NY Times. Okay, but did they seed any bloggers? Feels like they keep going over our heads. I've heard nothing from Microsoft PR. Do I have to buy a Zune to evaluate it? Unless it's an unqualified home run, wouldn't it be smart to first market it to people who might work with them to smooth it out? They say they want to build community. Wouldn't it make sense to use the communities that are already interested in this stuff?? (BTW, it looks like Engadget and Gizmodo didn't get briefed.)

Music is great too

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:53:51 GMT

I love podcasts, I take a walk every day, and listen to whoever Terry Gross is interviewing, or Tim Russert. I love it all, but sometimes there's no substitute for a great schmaltzy song and some of them never seem to get old, they just get better.

One of those songs is You and Me Babe, from the Ringo album. I've said it before, this album is really the last Beatles album, all four of the Beatles write, produce and perform. To me, a Beatles fan since I was a Mets fan, it's a beautiful album, there are reprises from some of the great post-Beatles music of McCartney, Harrison and Lennon. And I love it even more because it's all got the Little Help From My Friends spirit that RIngo embodied.

I dare you to listen to that song without smiling.

Can iTunes do this? :-)

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 14:33:48 GMT

My podcatcher has its own Twitter account, which everyone can follow.

http://twitter.com/podc

Right now it doesn't subscribe to very many feeds, just the ones I try to stay current on. You'll get at most one or two podcasts a day, except Sunday, when you'll get at least four, Murphy-willing: Meet the Press, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Face the Nation and 60 Minutes.

Of course you don't have to listen to any of them, but you can, with a single mouse click. And you're notified within an hour of when they're available.

BTW, this is a feature of my podcatcher, when it's released. Heh heh *cough* tease *cough* heh heh.

What is Google doing?

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:58:03 GMT

I use Google for a lot of things. I trust them not to screw with my data. I trust them to keep their hands off things they shouldn't touch and their eyes out of places they don't belong.

For example, I have confidential conversations using Gmail with execs at companies that compete with Google. At one time, when I ran UserLand and they owned Blogger, I actually competed with them myself. The fact that I continue to use Gmail shows that I have a lot of trust in the ethics of the people who work at Google.

I also use Google Analytics to monitor the traffic on my site. I allow them to run ads on a few sites that I run as a community service, to compensate me for hosting costs. From time to time, I run ads myself. I keep financial data in Google's spreadsheet.

If things were different I might use Feedburner. Especially on weekday mornings it's amazing how much traffic one file, my RSS 2.0 feed, gets. So it occurs to me that I could streamline things simply by offloading that file to Google. Now that they own Feedburner, this is something I might do, if they take a pledge not to break aggregators that depend on the format of my feed not changing. If someday my feed were to change format and break just one person reading it, I would consider that a serious support issue. It's not something I want to take a chance with. Some people trust me in this way. Not so many people as Google, but to me, they're very important. Could I delegate that trust to Google? No, not at this time.

There's another side to it. Even though I don't choose to use Feedburner, because I subscribe to the feeds of people who do, I am effected when they change the format of their feeds. When Google does this they inevitably break products that compete with theirs, the most obvious being Google Reader, but there are also server-side products that compete with Google's that depend on being able to read RSS feeds. If all of a sudden a large number of those feeds become invisible to them, people would find their services less useful, and therefore less competitive. This is exactly the kind of behavoir that made Microsoft such a bad corporate citizen in the 90s as they tried to suffocate the web to protect Windows and Office.

Now, amazingly, it seems as if Google may be doing this. I've seen it myself, files that mysteriously change format and break apps and users, and I've heard about it from a couple of developers. No one has said anything publicly, that I know of.

So, as a responsible corporation, it seems that Google should say something. What's their policy about breaking users of Feedburner, and people who read their feeds? Is this something they will do quietly, a sort of "silent data loss," or do they feel the need to be public about such policies? And what other products will they mess with this way. Will someday I look in my spreadsheet files and find that Google has changed the numbers? Or will emails from execs at Yahoo contain racial slurs or outright lies? See how much damage Google can do because we trust them?

I honestly don't know what they're doing, and I don't want to guess. I'd like them to come forward and explain.

Seth E: "Someone asked me yesterday to sign a petition to have remove JewWatch, a anti-semitic weblist of powerful Jews, removed from Google¹s search-engine."

Nice to be #1 at something

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:28:07 GMT

Fred Wilson noticed that on the new TechMeme list, his blog is the sixth written by a person. Mine is first.

Ben Metcalfe raised a similar question earlier today, noting that TechMeme didn't differentiate between professional publications like the NY Times, Reuters and CNET and TechCrunch, Engadget and GigaOm. It's not clear what the distinction is. I don't see any of those pubs as being blogs, so I think Gabe did the right thing, just lump them all together and let god (or mashups) sort them out.

A pragmatic question for people who want to follow the TechMeme LeaderBoard -- it's clearly not practical to look at it as frequently as it could change, every 20 minutes.

So what kind of tool do we need to tell us about change? Email notification? An RSS feed for each site? I'm interested in knowing what people think.

Speaking of being #1, this blog is first on MSN for bricked iPhone. Needless to say it's generating some traffic.

Optimizing Flickr RSS reads

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:16:40 GMT

There's a lot you can do with the Flickr API, I've pretty much mastered it, and it may look a bit intimidating at first, but it's well designed, and once you learn how to do one set of calls you pretty much know how to do the others. I would have relied more heavily on XML-RPC encoding for uploading pictures, but now that I've been uploading pictures for a couple of months, the pain of developing that glue is fading.

BTW, I've got glue for the OPML Editor, it should work well in Radio or Frontier. I've exported a snapshot of the system.verbs.apps.Flickr, for all to use. It may be included in any distribution. (To be clear, OPML Editor users don't need this, it's already in the update stream, just choose Update opml.root from the File menu.)

Anyway, I want to expand the Flickr/Twitter experiment, but before I do that I wanted to check with the Flickr folk because this service does a lot of polling of their RSS feeds. I suggested it might make sense to create a service that would allow a caller to find out which of the feeds its interested in have changed since the last time it checked.

They responded with a simpler feature, they implemented a Last-Modified header on the RSS feeds, so that you could skip processing if a feed you're interested in hadn't changed. I've now updated my code so it does that, and everything seems to work. You'll find the script at Flickr.readFeed. Here's a text listing of the script.

A new top 100?

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:43:39 GMT

12PM: The TechMeme Leaderboard site is live.

Like almost everyone else, I keep track of who's pointing to me in Technorati, a service that was created in a Thanksgiving programming binge by David Sifry, based on the output of (my own labor of love) weblogs.com.

Technorati grew to become a blog search engine, and much more, but as Mike Arrington points out on TechCrunch, their unique position has been whittled down by other blog search engines who are doing a better job technically. Not hard, since Technorati is famously unreliable.

Technorati is also famous for its top 100 list, ranking blogs according to the number of in-bound links. Scripting News started out as the #1 blog on Technorati, and occupied a top 10 slot for a long time, until they changed the algorithm to place less weight on long-term links, so Technorati's list became a measure of recent popularity. News sites, that aren't actually blogs (imho) became the mainstay of Technorati's list. Today, Scripting News is solidly in the second 100 on Technorati.

Last night Mike Arrington got a scoop, as he so often does, that there's a new list coming soon, from TechMeme, that ranks the sites based on some other measure, which is not (yet) understood in detail. Mike also has a screen shot, which teases, by showing that TechCrunch is number 1 (all those scoops make a diff) followed by Engadget and the New York Times. The Techmeme list doesn't pretend to know what is a blog or isn't they rate all sites regardless or race, creed or color.

But Mike's screen shot teases, stopping at #30. What about the rest of the list? There are a hundred or more bloggers who want to know if they made the list, and if so, where they are. Brilliant marketing by Gabe, and damn you Mike.

So I begged Gabe for the list, and he relented, and sent me an OPML file containing the data which I then turned into the list below. Enjoy!

  1. TechCrunch

  2. Engadget

  3. New York Times

  4. Ars Technica

  5. CNET News.com

  6. Read/WriteWeb

  7. GigaOM

  8. BBC

  9. InfoWorld

10. Wall Street Journal

11. The Register

12. Reuters

13. Silicon Alley Insider

14. paidContent.org

15. Between the Lines

16. Gizmodo

17. Google Operating System

18. eWEEK.com

19. Search Engine Land

20. Computerworld

21. Crave: The gadget blog

22. Associated Press

23. TorrentFreak

24. Webware.com

25. VentureBeat

26. The Unofficial Apple Weblog

27. Business Week

28. CrunchGear

29. Business Wire

30. Google Blogoscoped

31. Techdirt

32. Microsoft

33. Bits

34. Rough Type

35. DailyTech

36. Scripting News

37. mathewingram.com/work

38. PR Newswire

39. CenterNetworks

40. The Boy Genius Report

41. ZDNet

42. Guardian

43. All about Microsoft

44. PC World

45. Wired News

46. Inquirer

47. AppleInsider

48. Epicenter

49. Tech Trader Daily

50. Washington Post

51. Forbes

52. Bloomberg

53. Times of London

54. Apple

55. BoomTown

56. InformationWeek

57. Publishing 2.0

58. Scobleizer

59. A VC

60. iLounge

61. Download Squad

62. All Facebook

63. Financial Times

64. Boston Globe

65. Electronista

66. Yodel Anecdotal

67. apophenia

68. Official Google Blog

69. Google Public Policy Blog

70. USA Today

71. Compete Blog

72. AdAge

73. Apple 2.0

74. WebProNews

75. Mashable!

76. New York Post

77. Googling Google

78. iPhone Central

79. Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog

80. NEWS.com.au

81. DigiTimes

82. Digital Daily

83. BuzzMachine

84. comScore

85. Security Fix

86. CNN

87. Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim

88. NewTeeVee

89. istartedsomething

90. Think Secret

91. ProBlogger Blog Tips

92. Reflections of a Newsosaur

93. GNUCITIZEN

94. O'Reilly Radar

95. MediaShift

96. ipodminusitunes

97. Doc Searls Weblog

98. Kotaku

99. Valleywag

100. Los Angeles Times

PS. This is a snapshot taken last night. The list is fairly volatile, according to Gabe, and will change quickly as stories move up and down the ladder at TechMeme.

PPS. The existence of this list will probably make getting stories on TechMeme even more highly valued than before, if this list is taken as gospel, as Technorati's was, even with its flaws and skews. There was no correlation, for example, between flow and rank, a site with very high flow could have very low rank on Technorati, if it didn't get many inbound pointers. It was just one measure, as TechMeme is just one measure.

The end of the road for Office?

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:42:40 GMT

Since the re-rollout of Office in 1996, it's been really clear why Microsoft was so hell-bent at first owning and then suffocating the web browser, along with the web.

Tim Berners-Lee understood, before there was a Mozilla and a Netscape, he said the web was inherently a two-way medium. We struggled against the inadequacies of MSIE as a writing environment when blogging was booting up in the late 90s and early 00s. The air was mighty thin, which was no accident, Microsoft deliberately tried to keep us from breathing. Because for them, writing was not something that would be done in a web browser, if they improved their browser as a writing tool, that would be the end of Word, and with it, a big reason for using Office.

Synopsis: Microsoft wouldn't let MSIE become a decent writing tool, because they were protecting Office.

That eventually had to run its course, they couldn't hold back the inevitable forever. Sooner or later the web would route around their roadblock, and we'd be writing on the web, as we are today. It didn't happen the way I wanted it to happen, with decent writing software built into the browser, rather through the ingenuity and peseverence of programmers who managed to make HTML and Javascript approximate the user interface of a desktop app closely enough to make simple writing tasks work inside the web browser. It probably helps that today's computers have gigabytes of internal memory and several gigahertz of processing power. If instead, Microsoft had embraced the web, and with it the shift in their product line and economics, in 1995, we'd have a much richer writing environment today. Blogging would have happened sooner, in a bigger way. It's hard to imagine how much the sins of Microsoft cost all of us.

I won't shed a tear for Office. Good riddance, I say.

I use Google spreadsheet happily, even though it doesn't have anywhere near the features of Excel, and is way slower. Every sacrifice I make there is something I'm giving back to the web to heal the Microsoft wound.

However, we traded one monster for another. It seems there must always be a certain amount of evil in the tech business. The Java Wars are behind us, as are the Browser Wars. No one is going to fight Google in the next war, I doubt if many will even protest.

Payloads for Twitter, round two

Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:09:59 GMT

On Friday evening I wrote a piece about integrating images, audio and perhaps other types with Twitter. There's been a bit of reaction, not too much, I think because most of the people who are adversarial about this kind of stuff either don't use Twitter, or because it's the weekend.

Most of the reaction was either puzzled or negative. An example of puzzlement. Isn't that what Pownce does? Yes, but... Two things: 1. Pownce is still invite-only and 2. Pownce doesn't have an API, so it's inherently not as interesting to me, as a developer, because I can't build things on it.

I like Twitter because it's open to anyone to use, without an invitation, and lots of people use it, people I care about, and it has a very nice API. Further, as I've gotten to know the people involved, I've learned that the API is of supreme importance to them. So our interests are in-line there. I see Twitter as a framework to build things on, a platform, like a big Christmas tree we can all hang ornaments on. I could build nicer ornaments with a few extra wires on the network that connects all the ornaments. In fact, I've already built two of them, and we use them all the time. But I couldn't ask too many people to use them because they're too ugly. What I've proposed is a way to make them pretty, to make them work the way people expect them to.

Now another form of pushback is, well why don't you just build your own framework, different from Twitter, that does what you want, and leave Twitter alone. To which I say, I can't do anything to Twitter, other than talk about it. Whether to build the interfaces or not is up to the people at Twitter. I can have an opinion, yet ultimately the decision, and responsibility is theirs. Now, why don't I clone it? Well that's something I'm just not going to do. I have relaxed lifestyle these days. I'm beyond the point where I feel the need to prove anything through my work. I like to play and try out new ideas, just for the pleasure of it. If I were 20 years younger, I probably would be approaching this differently, but I'm not 20 years younger.

No doubt there are people, lurking in the shadows, who would like to share some of Twitter's success. The idea is so good that we're just at the beginning of its adoption. Maybe there are as many as 50,000 people regularly using Twitter. I think in a few years there will be millions, using Twitter, or something very much like it.

But we're at a unique place in the evolution of this stuff, which in some ways is very good. Suppose there were 20 Twitter-like systems out there, and we wanted to add a feature to all of them. Forget it! Developers just don't like working with each other enough to overcome their competitive urge. But right now, with one player in the market, we could make 10 times the progress we'll be able to make when there are 2 or 3. And a million times the amount in a market with 20 Twitter-alikes.

Further, the richer the API is, and the more broadly supported it is, the greater the incentive for newcomers to be compatible with Twitter. I don't get the warm fuzzies from Pownce that they are willing to follow anyone's lead, even though they don't yet have an API. But if anyone out there is brewing another entrant, and reading this, please please be compatible with the Twitter API. Not just the spirit, but the letter. Make sure that all the tools built for Twitter run without modification on your system.

So these are just some of the additional thoughts. Evolution of APIs is an art, not a science. I've learned a lot about it before the Internet, and then in XML-based formats and protocols. We're at a sweet moment right now, and if the Twitter guys want to lead, and if the rest of us are willing to be led (I am) then we can really build something wonderful.

Will the US bomb Iran? Soon?

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:31:54 GMT

There is a lot of random speculation in my aggregator today about "surgical" strikes by the US in Iran. It's unthinkable that the same process that led to the disastrous occupation of Iraq could stand, uncorrected, and get us into a much more serious conflict with Iran, one which we won't "win," (Bush's plan for Iraq, ludicrous) no matter what we do. When will we take control of our government and stop this?

Google search for "surgical strikes Iran."

The Mets on the last day of the regular season

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 17:35:25 GMT

I tuned in the Mets game a few minutes late, and they're already down 5-0 in the top of the first. Ooops. It's now 7-0.

The Mets don't have to win to make it to the postseason, if the Phillies lose. If that happens, they'd be tied, and would play a tie-breaker, winner-take-all game (I think tomorrow).

When Mets fans get a sense of entitlement, they break your heart. The Yankess are the entitled ones. The Mets are hapless.

"The nightmare is over for the Mets," says the announcer at the end of the Marlins at-bat. No, it's not over until it's over. A big lesson in the philosophy of baseball.

In all my years following the Mets I don't think I've ever seen them win easily. For that matter, I don't think I've ever seen them lose easily either.

As the Mets score their first run of the day, I'm reminded of Tug McGraw, an early Mets philosopher, who said "Ya Gotta Believe." I believe this is one of those moments when believing might make a difference.

Final: Mets lost, Phillies won. No joy in mudville tonight. :-(

Notes on the N800

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 02:11:22 GMT

I still didn't have the N800 working reliably on my home network, but it worked everywhere else I tried it, so I was determined to figure out what was wrong. I heard about a program called Kismac that helps you debug wifi, and it was a little bit of help. But the tide turned when I decided to turn off wifi routers (I had four running) and see if the N800 would start working. Well, one of my two Airport Extremes made the difference, when I turned it off, the N800 started working. So after a bit I tried turning it back on, and the N800 still worked. No explanation, but knock wood, it's still working an hour later.

One nice side-effect of having Flash on the N800 is that YouTube works. I was able to watch the great MoveOn ad about Senator Mitch McConnell. It looked great on the N800.

Now I'm looking for a VNC client. I'd also like to play old TV shows on it, but the video player doesn't have the rich set of codecs baked into VLC which has spoiled me.

Battery life on this thing is outstanding.

Payloads for Twitter

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 21:49:04 GMT

Back in 2001, I wrote a document called Payloads for RSS that explained how you could attach something to a RSS item. I didn't explain how a RSS app would display or play one of these things, that would come later.

Today, we may be at a similar place with Twitter.

Sometimes I want to answer Twitter's question, "What are you doing?" with a picture, or a bit of audio. Some people want to send videos. It's easy to imagine in the future that along with a Twit, I might also want to automatically send my location (obviously a preference), and maybe some other status information.

It seems that four bits of data are stored with each post: 1. the person who posted it, 2. the time it was posted, 3. how the post came to Twitter (web, Hahlo, Twiku, txt, twitterrific, twittergram are some examples) and 4. who it's in reply to (if it is).

Now suppose I wanted to allow for payloads, as RSS 2.0 does. The problem is a bit more complicated, because not only do we have to specify how the data is communicated, we also have to say how it's displayed.

Caveat: This is just a proposal, there are many ways to do it, this is just one way.

First, the "update" routine, as specified by the Twitter API, would add 2 optional parameters: 1. the url of a picture that's a thumb for the enclosed data and 2. the url of the data.

A couple of examples...

1. For Twittergrams, which are audible tweets, recorded on a cell phone, the image would be a small speaker, . The second paramter would point to the MP3 file.

2. For a Flickr pic, the image would be a tiny thumbnail of the picture, and the second paramter would point to the Flickr page.

Discussion...

I thought the whole thing could be shrunk down to one paramter, a pointer to a bit of text that Twitter would trustingly display, but that's the problem, you have to trust the app not to break Twitter, and we all know that wouldn't last. Even a well-intentioned delveloper can forget to close a table properly, and that would leave the Twitter display in disarray.

I also thought we might register data types with Twitter, but that's a likely black hole. Apple went down that path, so did Microsoft and the IETF. It's a lot of work to make those systems work, and it's just a matter of time before they break down in chaos.

I think that Twitter should probably handle two or three types specially because they are so common and useful. Those are pictures, audio and possibly video. But that's potentially a lot of work, and can be done later.

Some will object that this only makes sense in the web, and that Twitter is designed for SMS. To that I say two things: 1. Degrade gracefully. 2. You already have features that make sense only in the web, e.g. the pictures next to posts that show iconically who's saying what. That's a nice thing to have in the environments that can display pictures, and its presence there does nothing to diminish the experience for the environments (e.g. SMS) that can't.