Scripting News

FriendFeed gets rooms, so does Scripting News

Fri, 23 May 2008 00:57:46 GMT

An interesting but mysterious new feature appeared today in FriendFeed, rooms, and of course we have to try it out.

I created a room for Scripting News. What shall we use it for? I have no clue. Help me figure it out.

Something just jumped out at me. Is this the Digg-in-a-Box that I was asking for many months ago?

These guys always confuse me, in a fun way.

Twitter begins to communicate with their users

Thu, 22 May 2008 23:59:39 GMT

Today Twitter began to communicate with their users, which they are to be commended and congratulated for. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. There's a long road ahead, and everyone's going to learn a lot as we travel down it, and no doubt it's awkard at first. Now we can look back at the first step and think how much we accomplished, and look forward to the second.

There were two posts, one from Jack Dorsey, the CEO and another from Alex Payne, an engineer at "Twitter HQ." Payne, by pointing to a piece that dismisses decentralization and says we don't understand Twitter, thereby shows (sorry to say) that he doesn't understand it. It's like the elephant being described by a million blind men. Each of us sees something different and thinks, incorrectly, that we have the whole picture. In fact, none of us do.

It's easy to prove that Twitter is different for everyone. I'll start with myself. I have 9644 followers on my main account, and I follow 663 people and have updated 7870 times.

I can't keep up all the people I follow. Back when I only followed 100 people, Twitter made it possible for me to learn about the people I followed. It was remarkable. Today I never make it through all 10 pages of history, the rope slips through my hands. This wonderful feature of Twitter, that I reveled in last year this time, is now lost to me. (And some people follow over 20,000. Can you imagine they have any idea what all those people are doing?)

So even with just that one account I already am three or four of the blind men who think they grok Twitter, and each of them sees something different. I could write a 5000 word article for each of them, the experiences would be very different.

Dennis Metzcher lives in New Jersey and describes himself as an "iPhone-toting super-hero." He's updated 216 times, has 36 followers and follows 48. His posts are thoughtful, and he seems to communicate with lots of A-twisters but also quite a few people with a relatively small number of followers. When he goes to Twitter it probably doesn't look like a firehose. I'm sure he sees it very differently from me.

Alex Payne -- the Twitter engineer -- follows 319 people, has 3181 followers and has updated 3430 times.

Cliff Gerrish is a website builder in SF, follows 350 people, is followed by 309 people and has updated 1650 times.

I can't explain how each of these people sees Twitter, but I'm absolutely sure we all see it differently.

To me, Twitter is a publishing medium. I wish it weren't so, I wish I had the bandwidth to really follow 663 people. I have no idea how to thin out the ranks of the people I'm following, and I don't plan to. But to the extent that the company is having trouble scaling it for me, I think they should stop worrying about it. Further, and this is important, most of the things I post are not especially time-sensitive. If it took 1/2 hour to deliver each one to each of my 9644 followers it wouldn't be the end of the world. However, a week ago I had a news scoop, the first report of an earthquake in Falls Church, VA. That was an example of a high priority message.

I have a requirement that many other Twitter users might not have -- I have to stay on the air when Twitter goes down, and this, if you think about it, makes decentralization not an option but an absolute necessity, no matter what the architecture guys may think. I must have a Plan B, because I intend to build a business that depends on this service, or something like it. I want to start that business in the next few weeks (actually I started it quite some time ago, but it's about to evolve).

It won't do any good for any of us blind men to dismiss anyone else's point of view. That's what I would like to get through to the people who run Twitter, who work there, their investors. To me, nothing is so frustrating as people who think they understand better than others when they don't. Please, don't fall into that trap. Remember we're all blind men, you too -- keep in touch with your humility.

I look forward to a long, interesting conversation about this stuff!

PS: A discussion has started on FriendFeed under a post by Fred Wilson.

HRC's historic opportunity

Wed, 21 May 2008 17:49:42 GMT

Hat's off to David Gergen, who until now I thought was just another empty suit talking head. Turns out he's got some guts.

On CNN on Tuesday night he called on Hillary Clinton to reject racist votes. It would cost her nothing now that the racists have finished voting. She complains of sexism at the same time she's been openly encouraging people to vote for her because she's white.

Gergen says, righteously, that Hillary could say: "If you want to vote against him because he's black, I don't want your vote." Amen brother! (And let's go Hillary.)

Thanks to Culturekitchen for the clue.

Podcasting and RSS at Berkman

Wed, 21 May 2008 16:36:48 GMT

I mentioned here my surprise and pleasure that, at the Berkman\@10 conference, Harvard Law prof Terry Fisher claimed, in his opening remarks, that Berkman played a pioneering role in podcasting. It's very true. And it happened in a number of ways.

1. The first meeting of people interested in the technology took place at the Oct 2003 BloggerCon, hosted at Harvard. You'll see this meeting mentioned prominently in every history of podcasting. A lot of the people working in this area were there and freely exchanged ideas, techniques and enthusiasm. (The Day 2 grid for the first BloggerCon.)

2. It was at Berkman, with the help of Bob Doyle and the talent of my fellow Berkmanite Chris Lydon and the support of John Palfrey and the rest of the Berkman team that we did the first podcast program, a series of interviews of early bloggers, technology leaders and people making news. We distributed these through Chris's blog, and also through, for the first time, an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures.

3. It was also at Berkman, in June 2004 and through the Democratic Convention in Boston that summer that I started Morning Coffee Notes, my own podcast, that broke new ground. It seems that my amateurish but very enthusiastic (and imho creative) efforts served to inspire many others. Where people heard my rough podcasts many thought "Hey I could do that too."

Nothing like podcasting ever takes off like people say things like that do, it's never a big bang, or the "build a better mousetrap" myth. It's always iterative, trial and error. You needed Chuck Berry and many others before the British Invasion could happen and then the Beatles. We're probably still in the early days of the art of podcasting, but there's no doubt that Berkman played a big role in incubating and nuturing the initial seed.

John Palfrey gave an interview to Harvard Law Today where he summed up the story with remarkable economy. If you're interested in the area, the PDF scan is worth a read.

John also talks about the invaluable role Berkman played in stabilizing the RSS 2.0 standard.

PS: A list of topics discussed at all four BloggerCons. I keep looking for this list.

Furious digging happening

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:46:53 GMT

Sorry for the lack of updates here the last few days.

I'm working on a new project I find very interesting. Not sure if it's going to pan out, but I'm having a blast working on it.

Stay tuned.

nytimesriver.com back

Mon, 19 May 2008 23:47:37 GMT

While I was traveling the machine that was generating nytimesriver.com overheated and stopped running the app.

This morning the first thing I did was get it running again, and made a few tweaks and small performance improvements.

http://nytimesriver.com/

Thanks everyone for being so patient.

Nothing from nothing leaves nothing

Mon, 19 May 2008 16:44:27 GMT

Mark Evans asks a provocative question -- are pro bloggers going to be extinct soon?

If you were to ask a pro blogger this question, they would say of course not.

Now if you ask me -- there never was such a thing as a pro blogger. It's a contradiction in terms. It's like calling someone a professional amateur. It's like salty orange juice, a drink whose taste is derived from its acidity. Blogging is an amateur activity. It's users writing about what they do, not professionals writing about what users do.

That pros have tried to hijack the term doesn't somehow evade the old question of what happens to pros in an age where users go direct to each other. They thought they could pull a fast one "Oh we'll just steal their name" and somehow their economic model will start making sense when it didn't before.

Oh lord, you can't buy a Mercedes Benz with that.

Remember this old Doc Searlsism. We make money because we blog not from our blog. We earn because we learn from sharing our experiences with others, not because we let advertisers hitch a ride on our writing for a fee. No one pays attention to the ads, so it doesn't matter if you include them or not.

As Billy Preston once sang, nothing from nothing leaves nothing.

Hopefully that answers the question Mr. Evans asked.

Sites that trust their users

Mon, 19 May 2008 12:44:08 GMT

I've been writing about locking users in by holding their data for a long time from a number of different angles.

1. Sites that have my data, but won't let me use as I'd like to. Example -- movie ratings data locked up by Netflix and Yahoo. Why, when I rate a movie at Netflix can't I let Yahoo have that data and vice versa. And if you'd like to link movie ratings to a dating profile on match.com or Jdate, why not let users arrange that?

2. I've always believed that blogging and RSS tools should export their data so users can switch tools and the products at UserLand all did this. As a result, there's a tradition among RSS readers that they import and export OPML subscription lists. It happened because Radio UserLand, the early market leader, did.

3. Interestingly, this is another example of "People return to sites that send them away," a long-held belief here on Scripting News. For background see this post.

Now, what more can we do?

In an email exchange on this subject, Fred Wilson said: "I still use last.fm because I use at least a half dozen services actively that suck in my last.fm feed," he said.

Vendors, pay attention --> Fred Wilson may be a bleeding edge user, but he is a user, and if he figured it out, others are sure to follow.

Which led me to this new idea...

Let's reward companies who trust us with our data by giving them awards, a seal of approval they can boast about, a way of identifying those services that will survive the purge that's certainly coming.

Eventually we will abandon our data and start anew, this time with the requirement that we can take our data with us.

Lock people in with price, performance and features, not a deadbolt.

Lock users in with love, not force.

Sting sang it: If you love someone set them free. A paradox only if you think you can force someone to love you.

Back in California

Mon, 19 May 2008 03:49:38 GMT

When I get back to California I always queue up this Beach Boys song. Puts a smile on my face and gets me back in the spirit. It's a great song cause it's not just a great California song it also says how great the whole USA is. I love this country, north, south, east and west, but coming home is getting back to the great weather, clear sunshine, warm days and cool people with the attitude and politics I'm so comfortable with. Don't get me wrong, Boston and New York are great too, but home is in California.

Here are some pics and videos from the New York/Boston trip.

Didn't get a chance to talk with 1/2 the people I wanted to.

It was mostly a busdev trip. To start working face to face with the SwitchABit team. And to plot out the next projects after that.

On Thursday we announced what SwitchABit is -- a platform for wiring together the apps that are rising up, all with APIs that allow them to be combined in itneresting ways, by more technical users, so we all can learn, and do more cool stuff and then who knows what.

Question -- Did you switch over to the new flickr.twittergram.com? How's it working? Any feedback for the team? We're dying to know if it's working for you. Did you push any pics through the engine over the weekend? Did they get through quickly and accurately?

iTunes is now playing Hotel California. I've got it playing all California tunes. Hah. Wonder what's next.

Gillmor Gang food fight

Mon, 19 May 2008 04:31:00 GMT

Finally broke down and listened to the latest Gillmor Gang on the michegas with Facebook and Google and Plaxo. These guys are fucking crazy. Steve Gillmor is still hung up on BigCo's as is Marc Canter. These guys are old enough to know better, and Marc I'm sure does. Arrington is a complete lawyer, using every trick lawyers use to piss people off and Scoble takes the bait hook line and sinker. There's not much light in that show, just a lot of people elbowing each other and saying ouch.

About the substance of it all, see this recent blog post.

The answer is not the BigCo's -- they will have to catch up with what the market decides on. Some little guy will pop in at exactly the moment a sufficient number of users are ready to be free and it will look like they are visionaries when in fact they were at the right place at the right time. Little guys are always entering the market. Every day. It's like roulette. One of them will be the next big guy, but will get there by taking advantage of paralysis caused by the bigness of the current big guys.

But it's hardly the first time I've written about it.

Of all the people on the show Scoble is the most right, but of course no one listens to Scoble. Arrington was out of his mind with self-admiration before he won the Time 100, now he's completely lost it. But he actually made some good points, and I liked the way he called Canter on his bullshit, even though he was giving Scoble shit just for the sake of winding him up and getting him to spin around, which Scoble did, to an amazing extent. I thought there was a good chance he'd explode at one point. That's what I don't like about Arrington. Like most Republican lawyers he's just in it to make people look stupid, not trying to actually improve things. If you think Arrington doesn't deserve this, just listen to the podcast.

Congrats to Gillmor on the theater (pretty sure that's what he's in it for) and with the new TechCrunch label, he's being listened to more than ever. Let's just hope at some point these guys work a little harder to get to the bottom of it.

PS: For the 180th time, wouldn't it be great if Netflix let the users have their movie rating metadata for use in dating sites, for example. Why try to hit a home run when it would be just as good to get on base. Also don't forget Amazon is building up quite a profile on each of their millions of customers and could offer an interface to it through their developer services. Just a thought. It's a big world out there, don't just focus on three "players" -- the world is much bigger and more interesting.

Switching to SwitchABit

Thu, 15 May 2008 15:50:39 GMT

The SwitchABit platform was developed because we noticed that an ever more complex flow of ideas and information is being facilitated by editorial systems and aggregators such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Seesmic, Qik, Ustream, YouTube, BlogTalkRadio, Disqus, Wordpress, Tumblr, TypePad, Blogger, etc. And it's not likely to get any simpler over time, rather people are going to want to connect more apps together, with more flexibility and therefore more complexity.

So we developed a platform to make it easy to set up these complex relationships. The focus has been on power with maximum ease of use. It's called SwitchABit, and it will go to private beta sometime in the next couple of weeks. We'll have a signup page where you can let us know you want to work with us on getting it smoothed out and ready for massive consumption.

In the meantime, to prove that it's working, we've adapted two of my early Twitter-related apps, both on the Twittergram domain, to run on the SwitchABit platform. The first of these is ready for people to use -- the Flickr-to-Twitter functionality. If you're already a Twittergram user, you can go to the original setup page, and look for the yellow box with the picture of the friendly postman, and click on the link to be taken to the new site. Fill in the form, validate your account, and give it a whirl.

It should be every bit as reliable as the original service (maybe more so) and quite a bit faster. It's also designed to scale to work for hundreds of thousands of users, Murphy-willing.

Anyway -- wish us luck -- the journey begins today. We hope you come along for the ride!

Twitter status? Yeah it's down. Again.

Thu, 15 May 2008 21:18:53 GMT

What are you doing now?

There's no words there!!!

Fill in the appropriate four letter word.

Berkman @ 10

Thu, 15 May 2008 13:09:31 GMT

Today I'm at the Berkman @ 10 conference in Austin Hall on the Harvard Law School campus. It's a reunion of sorts, of people who have been part of or interested in Berkman Center. I was a fellow there between 2003 and 2005 and worked on getting blogs to be part of the Harvard culture.

Just took a bunch of pics. Going to upload a few now. The wifi here seems pretty good. Doc Searls just walked by don't think he saw me. Someone just took my pic. I always make a face as they get their camera focused. Can't keep a smile on my face for more than a second or two before I start feeling silly.

Video of the schmoozing before the opening of the conference.

Listening to Elena Kagan, Dean of Harvard Law School, listing Berkman accomplishments of the faculty. No mention of the fellows. John Palfrey is becoming the Dean in charge of the Harvard Law Library. Amazing job. Hope he does interesting things with it.

Terry Fisher, listing Berkman's accomplishments, said the first podcast was done at Berkman. Can't tell you how pleased I am to hear him take credit for this (no sarcasm).

Some. Professors. Speak. Slowly. And. Deliberately.

Jon Zittrain is thinking of going to Stanford, and they want him to come back to Berkman. They're really schmoozing him up in front of everyone.

Video: Jon Zittrain explains the Internet.

Comcast is a very strange company

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:33:00 GMT

They just announced that they bought rolodex company Plaxo.

Price rumored to be betw $100 and $200 million.

Media sharing? Comcast? You gotta be kidding.

Maybe they can share the rolodex of the people they just bought and try to work with creative media technology people instead of threatening to fire them as customers.

Just sayin.

Edwards endorses Obama

Thu, 15 May 2008 01:18:32 GMT

And fucking Twitter is fucking down.

Fuck!

$1000 reward

Wed, 14 May 2008 19:59:49 GMT

See also: Interview with Nicco Mele, the man behind the $1000 reward.

Seesmic and Disqus sittin in a tree

Wed, 14 May 2008 13:29:27 GMT

I like video comments, didn't think I would but I do. I think people are more responsible and throughtful when their words are backed by their voice and face.

So when Daniel at Disqus and Loic at Seesmic asked if I would let them use Scripting News as one of the places they rolled out their new partnership I said Yes and I would be honored (I said it weeeth ze Franch agzent).

I thought they were going to roll it out at 11AM Eastern, but I see Fred Wilson has already posted on it.

We already have some video comments (Scoble was first, of course, followed by Steve Garfield) so here we go, a new era in conversational blogging.

And congrats to the good folk at Disqus and Seesmic for making this a reality.

PS: A disadvantage of video comments -- it's hard to hear them in a crowded terminal waiting for a plane to Boston.

PPS: Why do people talk so quietly when they're leaving video comments? Sounds like they don't want to wake someone up.

Photos/Videos from NY/Boston trip

Wed, 14 May 2008 03:11:16 GMT

I'm accumulating a photo log of my east coast trip on Flickr.

There's a puzzle on one of the pics. Why are bus signs so high off the ground? Hint: It has nothing to do with snow.

Tuesday political notes

Wed, 14 May 2008 02:26:15 GMT

Tuesdays bring political news and today is no different.

First, an op-ed in today's New York TImes from 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. I worked for McGovern, he was the last candidate before Obama that I believed in, this was when there was a draft and a war, and I was draft age, but not old enough to vote.

Something I didn't know -- Hubert Humphrey led a challenge to the California delegation that made McGovern and his staff fight for the nomination through the convention, and according to McG this led to his defeat in November. This was news to me.

McGovern wrote: "After winning the California primary in June, I thought I had the nomination in hand. But a desperate slash-and-burn effort was pressed against me by the candidates I had defeated. California's delegates that year were allocated under a winner-take-all system, but my opponents -- led by Senator Hubert Humphrey, my lifelong friend -- began clamoring to change the rules and to assign the state's delegates proportionally."

The whole story is good reading. Also division in the Democratic Party led to the election of Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980.

Key takeaway -- HRC is playing with fire when they hold out the possibility of fighting Obama's nomination all the way to the convention.

She won as expected tonight in West Virginia. Her speech was not in any way a concession, she's not looking to land the plane. Her advocates are talking dangerous election-losing talk.

Meanwhile, as Mickeleh says on Twitter, the really big news of the night -- the Dems won a special election in Mississippi, a district that the Republicans fought hard for. Mississippi is deep in the heart of Republican territory. Olbermann said it's as if the Dems lost a seat in Brooklyn. It's serious and very positive news for change.

Poor Huckabee was on MSNBC when the news of the Childers win came in. He didn't spin, came right out and said the news was every bit as bad for Republicans as it appears. Russert gave him credit for saying openly what Republicans had been saying privately.

Meanwhile President Bush predictably, desperately threw FUD at the process, warning that if Obama is elected there could be another major terrorist attack on US soil. Thanks for the terrorism, Mr. President.

Demo of Firefly

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:41:52 GMT

I'm at the offices of Betaworks in New York, meeting with CEO John Borthwick who I know for many years from AOL.

They have built a product called Firefly which is rolling out tonight at the Tech Meetup in New York.

He just gave me a demo and my first reaction was "You can't do that," then I asked if I could put a demo of it on Scripting News today and he said (to my surprise) Yes.

It's so weird it's practically illegal. You can watch people's mouse move around the page, and then chat with them. Go ahead and give it a try.