Scripting News

What is Coral8?

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 03:48:40 GMT

Continuing the thread on decentralized Twitter...

I read this story on DBMS2, as part of the initial discussion, that explained there is commercial-grade software used by the financial industry that they believe can handle, reliably, much greater traffic than Twitter is handling now.

The category is called CEP, an acronym for Complex Event Processing.

This evening, a comment from Mark Tsimelzon, the CTO of Coral8, one of the leading companies in this area. He offers a pointer to their developer site, a download of the software, and help when needed.

An interesting turn!

FAQ: Is decentralized Twitter just IRC?

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:30:44 GMT

In the recent vigorous discussion about decentralizing Twitter, a frequently asked question was What's the diff betw that and IRC.

Now I could be missing something, if so, I apologize in advance, but I think the answer is No.

Something that's fascinating about Twitter is that everyone's experience is different. Some people subscribe to 100 people, others 5000, I've even seen people who follow 0 people. No one subscribes to exactly the same people you do. And just because you listen to someone doesn't mean they listen to you, and vice versa. There's a tremendous variety of different experiences. Yet each of us feels as if we're in a chatroom. That's the paradox of Twitter. It kind of feels like IRC while it is nothing like IRC.

What Twitter is most like, imho, is an RSS aggregator. The people who work on Twitter call it a micro-blogging system, because to them, that's what it's like, even if the users don't see it that way. I understand what they're saying, as I think through the possible ways to decentralize it, invariably I'm led down paths I've already walked in implementing blogging software and RSS software.

But IRC is very symmetric -- if I listen to you, then you listen to me. And vice versa. There are ways to block someone in IRC, but it's an opt-out, where in Twitter listening to someone is by default off, and you have to opt-in. Very different experience. In IRC it would be considered a drastic measure to block someone. In Twitter, there's nothing offensive about not subscribing to someone.

Further, you rarely see trolls or flaming in Twitter, because it doesn't work, just as it doesn't work in blogging. Unless you flame someone in an interesting or funny way, you're not going to get many followers. So guys like Loren Feldman, who is funny, gets a lot of followers on Twitter. And the normal grouchy and anonymous trolls who dominate mail lists rarely gain followers on Twitter (or blogs).

Twitter is fascinating, it's like the elephant and we're all blind men feeling our way around unaware that other people see it completely differently.

FlickrFan for iPhone?

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:58:12 GMT

I was talking with Bijan Sabet, an early user of FlickrFan, and he asked a question that I didn't know the answer to.

Bijan: "I'd love a way to have FlickrFan photos on my iPhone."

Early-on, I turned off synching for my iPhone, but it should be possible to synch one or all of the FlickrFan folders with the iPhone. I'll investigate, but I'm interested in knowing what other people think.

A blog post in a comment

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 04:32:25 GMT

Doc Searls: "My main long-term concern is with The Environment."

Decentralized Twitter, day 2

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:15:56 GMT

Interesting comments continue to appear in the thread we started yesterday.

http://www.tribler.org/ sure sounds interesting!

How are you feeling?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:23:37 GMT

Okay, if the mind is powerful, how is your mind making you feel today? It's worth thinking about -- with the stock market down this year, every day worse than the last, many of us are losing lots of money, I know I am, and it's not a good feeling.

I keep arguing with myself, even though I'm losing money at a huge rate, I'm still in good shape financially, I have a nice house, I can pay the bills. But it doesn't help. Inside I feel unsettled, poor, I'm having trouble concentrating.

Does it help that I've been through this before? The crash of 1987 was much worse than this downturn, and then I had no cushion, nothing to fall back on, I wasn't even employed when it happened. I was a lot closer to being broke around the turn of the century, even though the market was doing very well. But it doesn't help. No matter how many times I've been through it, I've always known that it's cyclic, that the outlook will likely improve, but knowing isn't the same as feeling. The feeling is much stronger, it can't be counteracted with logic. I can't reason with the feeling, you might say it's un-reasonable.

Then I heard that a friend of mine, much younger, with a lot less at stake in the market, is having trouble sleeping because of this feeling. I realize I'm not alone, probably millions of people have a heightened sense of insecurity right now. Does that make it better? Not really...

Anyway, I thought, let's post something and find out how others feel about the economy and how much of an impact is it having on our state of mind.

The power of the mind

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:01:23 GMT

I heard a report on NPR a couple of weeks ago, and thought it was very interesting.

A study of a group hotel maids found that even though they lead active lives, get lots of exercise, their health isn't good. High blood pressure, overweight, body-mass index, the usual signs of a sedentary life.

They interviewed them, asking if they were active -- no. Did they get exercise? No. (The correct answer was yes to both.)

So they formed two groups, with one group they did nothing, with the other they had a series of classes where they showed them how doing maid work compared to other forms of exercise. The kept going until they understood that they were active and living a healhty lifestyle.

A few months later they checked blood pressure, weight, BMI and amazingly the group they had educated had become healthy!

FAQ: Why only 20 pics?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:11:39 GMT

When you first subscribe to a feed in FlickrFan you generally will get 20 pictures in the folder for the feed. People wonder why this is and how they can get more.

The reason for this is that Flickr keeps the 20 most recent pictures in the feed for each account. So when I post a new picture to my Flickr account, it replaces the oldest picture in my feed. Then, anyone who has subscribed my feed, will get the new picture next time they scan. It works the same way RSS works for blogging or a newspaper -- you only get the last few posts or stories, not all of them, in the feed.

I think this is the right way to do it. You might feel that 20 is too small, but people would probably also want more if they just got 100 pictures.

So the answer is over time you will get more pictures, if the person posts more pictures.

Library of Congress Flickr feed

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:50:10 GMT

Wow, this is really really coooooool.

The Library of Congress is partnering with Flickr, releasing pictures that it believes are not copyrighted, through Flickr.

One of the fantastic side-effects of that is that there's an RSS 2.0 feed of those pictures that connects perfectly to FlickrFan.

If you click on this link on the machine that FlickrFan is running on, you'll automatically subcribe to the Library of Congress feed on Flickr.

This is one of those moments when the standards are working, really well.

PS: If for some reason it doesn't work, try clicking on this link to get the latest update (v0.42), then click on the link above again.

Video for tomorrow?

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:49:53 GMT

I know it's the last minute, but it's worth a try...

A number of people have asked if there will be live or recorded video for tomorrow's FlickrFan demo at Yahoo in SF.

The answer -- yes, if we can find a way to do it.

If you have a camera and laptop and are willing to webcast it tomorrow, please post a note here in the comments, or just show up tomorrow a few minutes early.

A decentralized Twitter?

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:43:27 GMT

Andrew Baron is a smart guy, and he's not a techy, so when he explains technical issues he does it in a way non-technical people can understand.

Dembot: "If you hosted your own Twitter, just like you host your own website, you could put your twitter anywhere."

Twitter is doing us a service, with its lack of stability, in illustrating the dangers of centralized systems. We do need to figure out how to build a Twitter-like system with all the advantages of centralization and none of the disadvantages.

And like Andrew, intuitively, it seems to me we could do it with RSS. Of course RSS is not very nice to edit by hand, so a little bit of software would be needed to handle the editing. We would also need a place to store our RSS (easy and cheap), and a discovery mechanism, but none of this is impossible or even very hard, considering that Twitter already exists. If it didn't, discovery would be a mess. Because it does, discovery would just be inconvenient, and would require foresight -- the kind of foresight that tells you to keep a bunch of bottled water in the garage so you won't die when there's a big earthquake. You do have bottled water in the garage?

The problem is, of course, when Twitter goes down, it's too late to use Twitter to bootstrap the decentralized Twitter-like system. Heh. Just like after the earthquake it's too late to go to Safeway and buy a crate of Aquafina.

Larry Dignan: "Twitter is a classic case of a neat little tool that wasn't built to scale but now has to because it has become a big deal."

Today's links

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:57:43 GMT

Tomorrow in SF: First public demo of FlickrFan.

Congrats to Scoble on his new job at Fast Company.

Gcast: "Record your podcast via a toll-free call from any phone."

New app, day 2

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:03:32 GMT

This landing page is part of the new app that I'm working on, which is a tool for subscribing to and downloading podcasts, otherwise known as a podcatcher.

When you set a pref in this app, links to new podcasts are posted to a Twitter account as they arrive, so that people you know can know what you're listening to, and may choose to listen themselves. There's a place to comment, of course.

The cool thing about it, I think, is that if you share a podcast and I do, they both point to the same landing page, so our communities intermix based on who liked that podcast. Who knows where this goes? But it's interesting, imho.

PS: Just as we had a cooool partner for the launch of the photocatching app, we have a surprise for the podcatching app too, and it's probably not what you think it is.

PPS: We're still hoping and waiting for Payloads for Twitter.

Happy birthday, Martin Luther King

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:44:30 GMT

Mac fatigue

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:14:54 GMT

Initially I wrote in my keynotepost that I'd buy one of the new MacBooks for sure, then a minute later I selected the sentence, hit backspace and save. A commenter asked why.

Mac fatigue. 2007 was a fun year, I spent a lot of money on Mac stuff, and then found at the end of the year that they're a shit company that treated me like shit. Left a really ugly feeling, really sore about that.

So when I thought of all the extra expenses, a second battery (later: ooops, no can do), AppleCare, and then the likelihood that it was going to break, and then I'd be stuck waiting for a repair wondering where my data was going, I thought maybe I won't be so quick this time.

Also the fact that the stock market looks like it's about to crash probably contributed to the feeling. :-(

Steve Jobs keynote

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:21:57 GMT

I'm "watching" it from home.

A few minutes before it started someone on Twitter asked how long before the rate of updates on Twitter brought it down.

Well, it's down now (9:22AM).

I'm watching the updates on Engadget, far from an optimal experience. Somone ought to make live-blogging a bit easier on the reader.

So far he's announced "Time Capsule" -- a hardware device that backs up any Mac in the house over wifi. It's like a router with a hard drive.

The market is down, and so is Apple, almost 4 points at 175 at 9:30AM.

They've sold 4 million iPhones. As an Apple shareholder that makes me happy.

5 million Leopards. He quotes quotemills, Mossberg and Pogue.

Twitter is still down at 9:37AM.

Maybe they took the system down so they could demo it at Moscone without any load?

http://www.macrumorslive.com/ -- much better! Thanks!!

Movies on iTunes, this is what Netflix was worried about. Lots of questions. Only 1000 titles. 30 days after release on DVD. What's the quality? HD? I don't think Netflix has much to worry about, they have much more than 1000 titles (I think I've probably already watched 1000 movies on my Netflix account) and they get them the day they come out on DVD, and ahem, I have to say this, so does BitTorrent. Hollywood is still scared of the net. They didn't give a great deal to Steve, or so it seems.

Ahhh -- AppleTV 2.0. No need to synch with a desktop or laptop. Why don't they just sell the Mac Mini. Perfect product for the living room.

Community movie features. Just like Netflix.

Just checked Twitter at 9:52AM -- it's up.

More stuff about AppleTV. It's a software upgrade. Does pictures from Flickr and .Mac. That's good everybody, good. RSS everywhere.

At 10:05AM, Twitter is dead again.

I see they came out with a thin sub-notebook, MacBook Air.

drop.io/tradesecrets

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:36:50 GMT

Eleven days ago I wrote a blog post describing a call-in service that I'd like to use to create a podcast with my friend and fellow blogger Robert Scoble.

A new service (or one that I just became aware of) comes achingly close to doing what I want. Maybe it goes all the way there, but I've not seen how to do it.

First, here's how it works.

1. Call 646-495-9201 x 49763.

2. Talk.

3. Hangup.

There will be a new recording here.

http://drop.io/tradesecrets

Looks good!

But there are two problems.

1. The RSS feed doesn't have an enclosure, and even if you were willing to scrape the HTML there's no pointer to an MP3 file.

2. There's no pointer to an MP3 file on the landing page, although there appears to be one if you don't look at the HTML source. Tricky. It was enough to get Mike Arrington at Techcrunch to think it was there. I have a call into Mike to discuss.

A caveat, I am also in touch with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I want this service, and we're close to having it now. drop.io doesn't go quite far enough, they clearly want to drive traffic to their site, and appear unwilling to let the MP3 out into the wild.

Interesting stuff!!

Update: I did a podcast with Robert and Patrick Scoble using drop.io. I was able to download the MP3, although it pretty well hidden, and upload it to my S3 account.

About to ship a new app

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:40:58 GMT

Once you ship a product you immediately start getting feedback, and if you're paying attention you can easily find the trends.

One of the big pieces of feedback about FlickrFan relates to branding. When you download the app and mount the disk image, where's FlickrFan? It isn't until after you figure out that you need to open the folder and click on the OPML app that you see FlickrFan. (I need to add a Readme file that makes this much more obvious.)

I knew this would be confusing. I could have renamed everything FlickrFan, it wouldn't have taken much work, or testing, and the chance for breakage was nil, since it was a new product.

I didn't do it for a simple reason, the engine that runs FlickrFan will run other apps, and I knew I would be shipping one such app within a matter of weeks. Once there's a second app running in the same engine, it may still be confusing. But there will be more after that.

Maybe there won't be millions of users, but my goal is to bootstrap a community of networked living rooms. For that I don't need more than a couple hundred households who want to play and I already have that.

I will soon tell you more about the new app, and if you're paying attention on my Twitter feed, you'll get a pretty clear idea of where this is going. It's all about communities, social features and big media. FlickrFan is about beautiful pictures on high def TV. The next one is about...

Stay tuned!

East coast snow pics

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:22:01 GMT

It's snowing in Boston (where else?).

Here are some pictures from my friends on Twitter.

CKelly in Cambridge, MA.

Brad Searles in Allston, MA.

Colin Grady found these pics, unknown location.

Ethan Bodnar has snow pics from Connecticut.

Corey Goldberg from Back Bay, Boston.

Heh. It's snowing in Italy too.

If you have snow pictures or stories, please post a comment below.

The place on the Net for Flix

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 01:19:09 GMT

They are running for the hills but the end of the trail is Little Big Horn, where Custer made his last stand, and lost his life. Of course the Indians didn't do too well either.

AP: "Girding for a potential threat from Apple Inc., online DVD rental service Netflix Inc. is lifting its limits on how long most subscribers can watch movies and television shows over high-speed Internet connections."

Please oh Netflix strategy gods, get a copy of Marketing Warfare and read it.

Netflix owns what used to be a great hill, for some it might still be one, the movies-by-mail hill.

They obviously feel they need to be in the Internet movie business, and in that they have a huge head start that they aren't using. They are being too damned fair to their competitors.

Give the users the ability to grant other sites access to their movie ratings. Build Netflix into the social network of movies. You're already there, but you need to make every other social network connect up to Netflix. You need to be the hub for movie-watching on the net. You're lucky that so far that's what you are. But soon you will have to fight for that too, and then it will be too late to try to force your competitors to connect to your site. They will have data that you want. Then the nature of the negotiating will change. Right now you have the data. Use that power!

Make the ~~users~~ everyone think of Netflix as the place on the Net for Flix.