Scripting News

Obama's FISA screwup

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:55:07 GMT

First, the conservative pundits who say that Obama turned his back on the extreme left by voting for the new FISA bill have it wrong. He turned his back on people of all persuasions who believe in our form of government.

This was a fight he should have welcomed, one that could have provided substance to this election, instead of playing a superficial game of percentages and gotchas and gaffes, it could have rallied people, brought the revolutionary spirit onto the streets.

If you recall our country was founded in revolution. The problem is we don't recall. Some of us hoped (there's that word again) that Obama would lead us some place worth going.

He was right if he assumed he had our vote. I will not vote for McCain to prove this point. But I'm also not going to give him any more money. I'm going to save that for causes I believe in.

I no longer believe there is a cause to Obama other than getting Obama elected. It's up to him now to prove otherwise. The FISA vote can be undone, but he has to actually do the undoing.

Update: Follow the discussion on FF.

Why I don't like 'crowd sourcing'

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 18:37:50 GMT

On Twitter, Jay Rosen asks why I don't like the term crowdsourcing. (He says hate, but that's way way too harsh.) Anyway, he's right -- I don't like it -- because it betrays a not-useful point of view. I am not part of a crowd, I am an individual, I'm a one man band by the quick lunch stand, playing real good for free. When you mash us all together you miss the point.

I don't like it cause it's cheap, it's always used by people who want something for nothing.

Tell me Jay, how does your wife feel when you tell her she's part of the crowd you were thinking of marrying.

If you want people to like you, and who doesn't, try seduction. Don't tell us about your greed, say how much you love and respect our individuality our originality.

Bottom-line: I don't think of myself as part of a crowd when I write on the Internet. When you describe me that way I don't like it.

I don't like it for the same reason I never liked "The Long Tail." The person using the term is never in the long tail, he or she is the head! It's the rest of us that are in the tail. Well excuse me but I'm riding up front with you. Been locked in the trunk many times by Microsoft, Netscape and Apple. It sucks!

One more reason -- it's not useful because it doesn't actually model what's going on. In the 20th century everything was about mass markets and centralization. You could explain things with concepts like crowds. In this century we're going the other way. The technologies push us there in a positive way, because the cost of communication is so low it doesn't need to be financed by moguls the way printing presses and TV stations were. And in a negative way because while our desire for information is increasing, the ability of professionals to provide it is decreasing. So we have to fill the gaps ourselves.

Hope this helps.

PS: I didn't reply on Twitter cause 140 chars is way too limiting for an idea like this.

PPS: I have even more to say, the industry you cover keeps trying, even clutching desperately to an idea that we can go back to the world they grew up in. It's not going to happen, imho. Better to accept things as they are and try to figure out how to make the best of it, for all of us. My own industry got decimated by the forces at work in publishing, so I've been through it. I'm still here, knock wood. But no one gets to have it easy. And the individuals you want to turn back into a crowd won't go for it, also imho.

Another tale of woe of Apple

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:00:41 GMT

These monolithic, upgrade the world in a day rollouts of Apple may not be such a great idea. And this is a reminder to myself never to be tempted by them.

Lured into the iPhone 2.0 rollout timed to happen the same day as the iPhone 3G rollout and a day after the rollout of the new app store, I decided to updgrade my 1st-gen iPhone (purchased on June 29 last year) and fell into the same brick-hole as have many other iPhone users.

Surprise, the store couldn't handle the traffic. Sound familiar? Same thing happened last year.

Oy. This should the last monolithic shake-the-world rollout Apple does. Apple makes serious products that people use seriously. The idea that so many people lost their phones on the day of the rollout is just plain unacceptable.

Anyway, you can follow my travails here and here.

And I may not be shit-out-of-luck. I forgot I have a trusty and boring Nokia N95 here that should work, its only problem is its battery is run down. I've got it plugged into my wall socket, which thanks to PG&E still works, even though Apple is rolling out its wonderful new world-changing products today.

Update: Persistence pays off. Keep your iPhone plugged in, power it off, power it on, wait for it to fail. If it doesn't you're done. If it does, repeat.

Good afternoon from California

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:04:00 GMT

I'm back in California, feeling pretty good.

Listening to the original version of For Free by Joni Mitchell from Ladies of the Canyon. There's a later version from the live album -- Miles of Aisles, but I like the original better.

The one man band by the quick lunch stand. He was playing real good for free. Nobody stopped to hear him, though he played so sweet and high. They knew he had never been on their TV, so they passed his music by. I meant to go over and ask for a song, maybe put on a harmony. I heard his refrain as the signal changed. He was playing real good for free.

Everyone is so confused about blogging. You don't blog to build an audience or have a conversation. You blog because you have something to say. There's nothing more to it.

I saw the story about the librarian who wasn't allowed to wait for a McCain event because she held a sign with a political message, a subtle one, a thought-provoker. She was playing real good for free, her instrument was our political system, but the cops passed her good music by.

When you put on your plastic lapel pin, you should think about the Government of the People, by the People and for the People -- people playing real good for freedom.

McCain could give a speech about that librarian, that would be truly impressive. Here's something he can fix right now. Tell the people who watch the people lining up to let people express their political thoughts, esp those who do it legally and peacefully.

The spirit of America, imho, is not the flag, not the government, not our pride -- rather it's the one man band by the quick lunch stand.

PS: Here's a live version of For Free, performed by Joni Mitchell on the BBC.

Bit.ly launches today

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:14:52 GMT

First, go read Marshall Kirkpatrick's awesome writeup of bit.ly.

I was part of the team that defined the product, the development was done at Betaworks in NY (where I am right now), the team led by John Borthwick, and a bunch of ex-AOLers. Betaworks is also an investor in Summize.

Here's the official blog post.

The idea of bit.ly is that a lot more could be done with url-shorteners. I found I needed to develop my own for the NewsJunk project. They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from.

They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I'm pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we're not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here's the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here's the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.

I'm a minority shareholder in this project, so know that I have a considerable interest in its success. Of course I think it's a great service, and I hope you give it a try.

Over on ReadWriteWeb, Allen Stern asks if there's a way to make money, and there is. We'll hopefully be ready to talk about it in a couple of weeks.

Which way will Twitter go?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 11:46:51 GMT

Biz Stone posted yesterday about the status of services connected to Twitter via their XMPP gateway. We knew about Summize, suspected that FriendFeed had a deal, and learned that there are two others.

We'd like to see Twitter connect their full output to anyone who wants it, but without directly saying so, Stone implies that there are technical reasons they can't.

I am not an expert on XMPP so I have to defer to others who are. They say it would be possible for Summize to allow anyone to subscribe to the flow they receive from Twitter, and this would be transparent to Twitter.

Gnip, a company whose founders I interviewed last week, asked for this arrangement, and even thought Summize was willing to provide them with the flow, Twitter said no.

This is a clear indication that it is an economic issue, not a technical one.

I wrote yesterday that identi.ca changes things, offering a public utility model to compete with Twitter's company-owned model. It is built around the assumption that anyone can hook into the stream of any server, allowing a "federation" where being a citizen of one community means that you're a citizen of every community.

It seems then, long-term, there are three options for Twitter.

1. Open up their XMPP interface to all interested service providers, with the help of the community, so that it has no impact on the scaling of their servers. I'm almost 100 percent sure the developers would rally around such an idea, and help Twitter get this going.

2. Wait, and support the same federation protocol as identi.ca, allowing Twitter users to participate in that community, on equal terms.

3. Build AOL-like barriers around their service, to force users to connect to Twitter users only through their software.

Obviously, from the way I've written it, you can tell that I think #3 is not really an option, not if they want to learn from the experience of instant messaging.

It seems to me that blogging, which came after IM, set the precedent for Twitter-like services, and while the compatibility between blogging services isn't perfect, it's pretty good. Because of RSS (and RDF and Atom), and the two blogging APIs (Blogger and Metaweblog) you have fairly good interop. I wish it had come out better, but it's still early for Twitter-like services, compatibility could still, theoretically, be perfect.

I hope that Ev, Jack and Biz remember this, and build a business we can all respect, not built on locking users in.

How to think about identi.ca

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:26:43 GMT

First, about an hour ago, identi.ca got a major feature, that makes it about a billion percent more useful and a billion percent less shitty.

There's now a Replies tab so you can see who has directly commented on something you've twitted (er identic'd). To see it, log in, click on the Home link in the menu at the top of the page, and you'll see it.

Now Twitter has had that for a long time, so what's the big deal. And there are still a bunch of features that identi.ca will need to bring it to parity, feature-wise, with Twitter.

Yet every step it takes is a victory for users and developers, even if they don't know it is.

Perhaps an analogy will help.

Twitter is to identi.ca as an exclusive country club is to a public swimming pool. We might be denied access to Twitter's platform for whatever reason, stated or unstated. This isn't hypothetical, they actually put it in writing. However, they've said they'll recind it. But then they could rescind the rescinding. It's a lot like Apple's policy with developers for the iPhone which might go something like: "We can't let just anyone develop for this."

identi.ca is different, like the Internet itself, no one gets to say whether or not you can develop for the platform. Sure one particluar instance of identi.ca might block your app, but they can't all block it. (Not entirely true, by the way -- just a lot less likely. Email, an open protocol, does effectively block some spammers from dumping mail through open relays. The real world sometimes forces across-the-board restrictions.)

To understand where we're at, remember that software is a process, you can't judge it by where it is today, you have start with that, and judge how it's evolving. Twitter is struggling with finding a happy scaling place and a business model that sustains it after venture capital. As a corporation, they have incentives that an open source project doesn't have. They're more likely to pay attention to users' needs than an open source project that's more likely to tell you to fix it yourself. Though the lack of a business model has made it less likely that the company views its users as customers. They've been polite, even playful, but the service has been pretty awful.

I believe we need both. Single-party systems suck, I like (at a minimum) two parties. Everyone benefits from competition, users, developers, even the entities providing the service or product.

Why FriendFeed is growing faster than Twitter

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:35:33 GMT

The tech blogosphere loves to study itself in a herd-like fashion.

Back in the old days we used to call this "Watching us watch them watch us watch me watch you watch them watch us watch ourselves watch everything."

It's a big house of mirrors.

A chorus of fooles and puppets.

Today the alpha bloggers woke up and realized a lot of people are following them on FriendFeed. From that some of them conclude that FF is better than Twitter. There's another possible explanation.

First, let me tell you a story.

I was a laggard when I started using Twitter. A lot of people started using it before I did. I figured I'd forever be lagging behind them, but it didn't work out that way because as soon as I started blogging about it here, my subscriber numbers over there zoomed past others whose blogs have fewer readers.

Also, the same thing happened when Mike Arrington discovered Twitter, even though he didn't use it much, he had more followers than I did because his blog has more readers. Today he has twice as many followers as I do on Twitter.

And FriendFeed is tacking in the draft behind Twitter, it's growing faster than Twitter did in its early days because people are talking about it not only on their blogs (as they did with Twitter) but also on Twitter itself. It's bootstrapping off Twitter. Same with identi.ca.

It's the coral reef thing I was talking about last year.

We noticed this with the growth of podcasting in 2004 into 2005. Once we had the right combination of features and content, it grew like a weed, growing in four months what it had taken the blogosphere four years to do (probably more, depending on what you want to call the start of blogging). It's all part of the same bootstrap. Blogging, podcasting, twittering, friendfeeding, and whatever "ing" comes next.

It's all part of one cosmos (not a mere sphere), and there will come a day (I hope) when it all is unified, otherwise we're forever going to be chasing our news from place to place as it gets replicated in ever more awkward ways.

Announcing Tech.NewsJunk.Com

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:25:56 GMT

There's a new site on the net today:

http://tech.newsjunk.com/

It's the counterpart to the political NewsJunk, which is focused on news of the 2008 presidential campaign. The Tech site is focused on technology product news.

I created the site because I wasn't getting enough news about products. It's that simple. I'm interested in the other stuff too, the finance, trends, parties, puppets -- but that's adequately covered on TechMeme. What wasn't getting through is the stuff I, as a product developer, care the most about -- news about products. And the interesting new products I'd find wouldn't make it onto the bus. If it got bought by Google or Microsoft, that would likely show up on TM, or if a VC invested a lot of money in it. But I like to find out when things are small, before other people invest.

It's important to note that the Tech NewsJunk, like the political one, does not have original content, it just points to the sites that are producing the relevant stories.

I did it so I could learn, and in the spirit of the web of course I wanted to share and hopefully people will forward me links to product news that isn't already on TechJunk (please, no press releases) and even better, pointers to feeds of sites that regularly review products.

A couple of notes. I'm not just interested in new products, I'm also interested in how the products evolve. So if Flickr were to (for example) add a bunch of new features tomorrow, we would defintely link to that.

I also want to hear about products from the people who design and implement them. Their point of view is very important to not only understanding their work, but to understanding the market.

I expect and hope other people will compete with this site, so we can focus more attention on products, so maybe there will be more products that fit user's needs better.

Now, as with the political "junk" site, there are many ways to consume the flow.

1. The old-fashioned way -- you can refresh the site manually.

2. There's a feed, of course, for your reader, or aggregator, or whatever.

3. You can follow it on FriendFeed.

4. Or on Twitter.

5. Or read the mobile version on your iPhone or Blackberry.

And soon you will be able to follow it on identi.ca (as soon as we figure out how to do it). And there will also be an email interface.

PS: One of the great things about this site is that I learn which sites are providing the best product coverage. So far they are (in no special order): ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and Webware. This is just my opinion of course, and it could change. I wish some of the sites would cut down on the cuteness and add more hard info.

PPS: The counts page is getting interesting.

Independence Day

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:01:32 GMT

It's the day when we say we're not dependent on Great Britain.

Of course that part of the holiday long ago lost its meaning. But maybe the whole thing, maybe the concept of America has lost its meaning. Matthew Yglesias, a surprisingly young blogger with a lot of influence yesterday wondered if the US really had more integrity in 1974 when our outrage forced Richard Nixon from office. Not just Democratic outrage, but Republican outrage too. I was alive then, Yglesias says he was not, and I remember, as a college student, how remarkable it was. But it's sad if it's true that today's America cares less about its ideals than that one did, because that one didn't care enough to stop the outrage from happening, we only cared when it was too late.

As we learn more about our current President and Vice-President, it's never been more clear that we sold ourselves out -- for nothing -- to a handful of people who are raping not only Iraq for its oil, but our own country's treasury and integrity. They say they're not raising taxes, instead the dollar keeps declining relative to a barrel of oil. In just one week the price of gas at the pump has gone up 10 percent at the local station where I took the picture last Sunday. 10 percent! This is an unbelievable tax that hits everyone equally, which is to say it hits people just barely making it the hardest. And it's going to effect the cost of everything as the increase ripples through the economy, the cost of food, clothing, medicine, keeping our houses warm.

Then comes the amazing story that we may be about to provoke a war with Iran so the oil industry can take Iran's oil, after taking Iraq's. How many more hundreds of thousands of people will die, how many millions will be displaced, and how much more of what's left of our leadership will be foreclosed so the oil and defense barons can make a few more euros (they're surely not taking their loot in dollars).

When we look for someone to blame, we should look in the mirror -- we did this to ourselves, first by electing Bush, and then amazingly, re-electing him. But it would feel much better if I believed we were about to start undoing the mess, but I've been walking around with an undercurrent of depression this week, and I haven't been able to pinpoint the source, yet, but I have an inkling it has something to do with the evaporating hope that we're about to turn the corner. We may have created an unprecedented mess in the 8 years of Bush, we may have wrecked our economy and reputation, but at least we're about to start heading in the right direction. It seems perhaps not.

From gun control to abortion, to illegal wire-tapping and funneling government money to religious organizations, the man who sold us Change You Can Believe In, it's sad to say, appears not to have believed in it himself. To find out it was just a marketing slogan is too much to bear. It's so hard to accept that Ted and Caroline Kennedy stood up for him and said he represented the same hope as JFK, well, maybe we misunderstood what they meant. Or maybe it's time for them to take him aside and ask "What did you mean again?"

I'd like to get Aaron Brown back on the air. I'd like Keith Olbermann to be tougher. And if this is just a case of Obama getting comfortable in his new skin, with his new stature as presumptive nominee then I look forward to him re-finding himself, because we need leadership now more than we need a new president. A humbled Obama is worse than a proud McCain.

XMPP and Twitter, coming back on?

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:53:51 GMT

This post on the Twitter status blog, gives hope to developers wanting to hook into the full Twitter flow, the same flow that now only Summize has access to. Here's what they said: "We're hopeful that once we've improved the stability of the service we can bring back IM. It remains the highest priority feature weÕre working to restore." OK. That sounds hopeful.

Federating identi.ca?

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:06:55 GMT

I note that a number of programmers I respect are trying to launch instances of the software behind identi.ca.

If they're successful, and if there is a decent way to connect them into a federation (meaning we can communicate even if we're using different hosts), then we're getting somewhere.

Is there some place where someone is monitoring the status? A wiki? A discussion thread?

I'm not planning on running one until the trail has been well blazed, maybe not even then, but I don't mind helping track the progress.

Update #1: Les Orchard has two instances running.

Update #2: laconica.kamleitner.com.

RMack on Internet freedoms

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:51:37 GMT

I was catching up with On The Media earlier this week, and who comes on but my friend and former Berkman colleague Rebecca MacKinnon. I love those kinds of surprises, it lets me catch up, in a multimedia sort of way (it's better than reading an essay or blog post). A former CNN correspondent in China and Korea and founder of the Global Voices blogging network along with Ethan Zuckerman, now she's a prof at the University of Hong Kong. I got a really funny picture of her at the end of a movie in Nashville, a few years ago.

She has become an expert on freedoms on the Internet because of her connection to China; that's what she was talking about on OTM. Toward the end of the interview she said we even have issues with freedom on the net in the US. I thought she was being a little too kind.

This morning I saw a judge had let Viacom have all of Google's user data from YouTube, a very shocking thing for a judge to do. I thought RMack, with her perspective on Chinese freedom on the net would have something to say, and it turns out she does...

Rebecca MacKinnon: Corporate responsibility and the Internet.

Oh happy day!?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:44:02 GMT

A Twitter clone that's all-the-way open?

Did Christmas come early this year?

http://identi.ca/doc/faq

Marshall has a writeup.

I am dave over there. Follow me!

First thing --> looking for an API.

It supports the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, which I had not heard about until now.

evan appears to be the author of the software, or at least the authority on it.

From the FAQ, it will support the Twitter API, but doesn't yet. There is RSS here, but I haven't found it yet.

Here's the RSS. http://identi.ca/dave/all/rss Just add "/rss" after anything.

I've hooked it up to FriendFeed, but it looks (much) less than optimal (and I'm being kind). They really need to work on the RSS, it's the first really lame thing I've seen in identi.ca.

Social cameras, on the way

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:43:11 GMT

Bijan got a preview of the iPhone 2.0 software, which adds location to the camera.

It's a piece of the social camera puzzle.

When you come back from vacation where there are lots of other people taking pictures, go to Flickr 4.0 and enter the location and the time, and voila, vacation pictures and you're in all of them. :-)

It's bad news for people cheating on their spouses. Now it'll be easier to follow your trail and who you were with. (I had a preview of this, when I was on a date, walking down the street the other way was Justin with his camera mounted on his hat and his broadcasting laptop in his knapsack. It was a long time ago, if you want to see who I was out with you're going to have to search through a lot of archives. Enjoy!)

A feature like this (which was obviously coming for years) will reshape what it means to take a picture. That's why people are confused, because we all come from the past, and this product exists only in the future (for everyone but Bijan, who I hate).

Just kidding of course. Heh.

PS: This originally appeared as a comment on Bijan's blog. An illustration of "chasing the news" earlier today.

How to stop chasing the news

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:44:11 GMT

My Internet writing is so distributed these days, there are five main places I write, and a host of others where I write peripherally. Here are the five:

1. Scripting News (and its RSS feed).

2. The comments here (managed by Disqus).

3. Twitter (used to be a lot, now much less).

4. FriendFeed (links, comments).

5. The OPML Editor (for software dev work mostly).

My writing style differs in all the places, it depends on its newness, who's there, what the tools let me do, what I'm doing there.

None of them are what I want them to be, but I'm happy because I feel like things are shifting, and I'm almost ready to understand what I really want.

First, like a lot of people, I have either found or invented systems to connect the five places. When I write something here, I ping Twitter. FriendFeed has been programmed to automatically pick it up. My writing sometimes but rarely flows through the NewsJunk website and out to FriendFeed and Twitter because it's like a radio station, again, pushing links and content where we want it to go. We're all set up for new destinations. The NewsJunk software (which is a major undertaking, like Manila was in 1999) is all about moving ideas around.

But movement isn't really what we want.

For a moment think about TechCrunch. Okay let's say one of the editors writes something longish over on FriendFeed and then realizes that would make a good post on TC. So he switches over to WordPress (the editorial software they use) and pastes it in there, makes some corrections, adds a picture, some links, edits some more, adds a few thoughts, then publishes. A few minutes later an update, he spots a typo and fixes it. Now what happened to the FriendFeed article? It's still there, unchanged by all the improvements. But what should have happened?

It seems there should only be one copy of the story, and when it changes on TC, it should also change on FF. Further, when he adds some pictures, or links to a podcast, or embeds a video, that should happen in both places as well. And of course there shouldn't really be two places, there should be one, with two views. TechCrunch is a flow of articles grouped around a name, with the judgment we assume comes with it. But the idea originated somewhere else (it seems all of them do) and after it migrates it still exists there.

I go through a similar process with pieces that flow to the Huffington Post. First, I get the piece in perfect shape over here, and then copy it over there. Of course it never is perfect, and then I'm stuck making changes in both places.

Now should the comments in both places be the same comments? Ahhh, at that point I'm nto so sure. We'll have to try it out and see what happens. (In the Huffpost case, definitely not. I don't feel like a member of the community there, even though the comments I see are in response to my writing.)

If you want to get more ideas about this, revisit Web 2.0 Gas Prices, a piece that tells the story about how an idea sprouted in one place and then bloomed in another. Lots of data were integrated from pictures to maps to MP3s. Try to ignore the issue of wheher it's fair to McCain. That was the point in the discussion on FF, over here on SN, what's interesting are the editorial techniques and what kind of software will be needed to support them.

A few weeks ago for the first time a reader noticed the double-entendre in the name of this weblog. People always assumed it meant "News About Scripting." Sure to some extent that's what it means, but we all know, not so much these days. But it's main meaning was "The application of technology to news." Scripting is the verb, not the subject. You always have to be looking for that with me, I have a devious mind and sometimes (not often I hope) I lead you in one direction, when the action is in a different one.

PS: I've been working on a new "junk" site, this one for tech news. I'll have a writeup here soon.

PPS: What I've learned from the political NewsJunk, the MSM guys have figured out blogging, and generally do as good a job as the amateurs, though some of the pros are just running linkblogs and not much more. They typically don't like NJ, for some reason. Go figure.

PPPS: It seems postscripts should have lives of their own too. The next one should live here, and also live in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

PPPPS: The Reshare command in FF, it seems to me, shouldn't create a copy, rather should add the item to my flow, at the top of the list, and any comments that appear in either place would be seen in both. It's understandable that copies must be made when things move among silos, but within a silo why not deal in pointers? (Or give the choice to the user.)

Podcast with the Gnip guys

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:43:34 GMT

I caught up with Eric Marcoullier and Jud Valeski of Gnip in Eric's car, this afternoon.

http://mp3.newsjunk.com/interviewWithGnip.mp3

Earlier today, on Scripting News, I asked Twitter to use Gnip to communicate with developers so the network can come back on. I wanted to find out if anything had come of it.

Nothing had...

Meanwhile, the guys believe there's no technical reason that Twitter can't turn back on all the services that were hooked into the XMPP gateway -- the protocol is designed for that kind of syndication.

It seems, therefore that the reason must be economic -- which leads to the conclusion that Twitter, which was founded as an open platform, with a Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom philosophy, is now headed in the opposite direction.

We know where that leads, to the place where Instant Messaging foundered, which motivated the development of XMPP to route around the problem. (Oh the humanity!)

Gnip raises the question in about as clear a way possible, will Twitter come back to developers, or are we looking for a new platform to do the wonderful things we were hoping to do with Twitter.

Eric, like me, is friends with Bijan and Fred, on Twitter's board, so we're posing this question, which is potentially controversial, in a friendly way.

Here's the smiley to prove it:

I wish Twitter would partner with Gnip

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:17:17 GMT

Yesterday I wrote a teaser piece masquerading as a vision piece. The vision is not mine, it's Eric Marcoullier's, a very affable and brilliant entrepreneur from San Francisco, who founded MyBlogLog and sold it to Yahoo for big bucks a few years back.

As we know Twitter is having scaling problems, and in fact, some of the problems are related to people pounding their API when they should just be getting the data through Gnip, Marcoullier's new startup.

But Gnip didn't officially exist until 9AM today, but as of now (9:20AM) there is no excuse. Twitter, what are you waiting for? Call Eric now, and do a deal and let's get on with building a fantastic network of wired-up Internet apps that scale.

And if you want to get details, get the full scoop from my amigo Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb.

Here we go!!

Update: Mike Arrington seems to agree. "Notably absent from the list of partners is Twitter, which may be the one service that needs something like Gnip the most."

A way for Twitter back in the pink?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:18:31 GMT

I'm not sure how much of the stress in Twitter is caused by the services that poll its API on behalf of thousands of users, but it's got to be a lot of work to service all those requests that are constantly coming in.

Here's why it has so much work to do. When I post something to Twitter, within a couple of minutes it shows up on FriendFeed. I don't know for sure, but I bet that it's calling the Twitter API every few minutes to ask if Dave has posted something over there. Most of the time the answer is no. And it's asking for each of the thousands of FriendFeed users that have connected their Twitter accounts to their FriendFeed accounts. Wouldn't it be simpler for FriendFeed to say to Twitter: "Here's a list of all the FriendFeed users who want to have their twits reflected over here." Then Twitter could call FriendFeed saying "Yo, Dave just updated and here's what he said." Don't call us we'll call you. It's often more efficient.

Back in the old days when I used to work on much larger systems known as mainframes, they had special-purpose computers whose only job was to offload work for the main computer, much the way a booster rocket or a tugboat help a space ship or an ocean liner. In computers they were called TIPs which is an acronym for Terminal Interface Processor. Each user sat at a terminal, a sort of dumb computer that behaved like a printer, and typed away, and then the TIP would talk to all the terminals, and then talk to the mainframe in a language only the two computers understood. It was much more efficient for the mainframe. Seems Twitter could use that kind of efficiency.

There's lots of this kind of connecting going on these days, and it is costly. It slows systems down. Probably the way the problem is going to be solved is through something like the TIPs, adapted to the 21st Century.

Just a thought for a possible way to make Twitter a little more perky.

PS: In 1997 I knew Apple was going to fire its CEO, I had been brought in, in confidence. The morning of the announcement, I wrote a Wired column (published on the web) calling for his resignation. It ran two hours before the announcement. Some people mistook it for cause and effect.

Looking for a few good feeds

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:28:47 GMT

I'm revamping my feed reading.

FriendFeed has made me (and apparently others) much more aware of how I get my news.

I've also learned a ton from the NewsJunk project. I get much better political news now than I ever have, and it's getting better all the time.

Something I've learned...

The thing that makes the difference: GOOD FEEDS.

Behind those feeds of course are honest, smart people with a passion for information.

I started NewsJunk because I was getting terribly spotty news about politics. I asked how other people get their politics, and everyone said the same thing, they hunt and peck. Now I get a steady stream of great stuff. It's like the briefing books political candidates get from their staff, but open to everyone. When a story breaks I get a bunch of perspectives. If I'm not interested, I don't click, but in an instant I have a sense of what's going on.

And it's a level playing field. If a story breaks via pro or amateur, we get it. Fast. No waiting. (When we're doing our job.)

Now, I want to straighten out my access to news about technology.

In a word, it sucks!

I want it not to suck.

As much.

Tech news is different from politics though, most people in the tech world, the insiders, hit TechMeme at least a few times every day, I do, at least 20 or 30 times. I don't want it to change, it serves a very useful purpose. But it isn't enough.

What I want is what I've always wanted: News about products. New products. What people think about products, but features added to popular products. And not just the really huge products, like GMail and Amazon. I use lots of stuff. You should see my bookmarks and my system tray. And some of the products I'm interested in aren't even in my Bookmarks. Earlier today Steve Rubel wrote about Summize and a neat new feature they just added. It's a really small thing, but I care about really small things. I make and products for a living. Ideas are important. And someday I might meet the guy who did that, and I'd like to know about it so I can congratulate him. The personal touches matter. People care that you notice. I certainly do!

You know what else I like -- hearing about products from the person who implemented it. What were they thinking? What were their goals? What were they surprised by when people used the product? What questions do they have? You can learn a lot by listening to the person who wrote it.

Anyway, I want to know about products. Today I found two blogs that are devoted to reviewing tech products. I added their feeds to my mix.

I want to know what you rely on for product news, and I want to start reading what you read, voraciously. And I don't just want to read it, I want to consume it.

So please, if you feel so inclined, either post a URL of a favorite product-related feed in the comments here or send it to me at scriptingnews1 at gmail dot com.

Thanks!!

"cheesecake"

PS: If we can improve the flow of news about tech products we can create more opportunities for tech products. I'm sure there are niches we're missing, big ones, but they're hard to see because the picture has been muddied up by all kinds of peripheral stuff.

PPS: One of my inspirations for this work was a post by Fred Wilson where he said he wanted a TechMeme for inspiration. I don't think it'll end up looking like TM, and your source of inspiration might look very different from mine. We've gotten too centralized, imho -- we'll now get more decentralized. Pretty sure I see how it could work.