Scripting News

Can Twitter save the news?

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:24:59 GMT

Jay Rosen, this week the question of Twitter as an environment for journalism came up.

If the outlets of MSM are in trouble and if Twitter is rising, can it fill some of the role vacated by MSM?

What about having a tech company running it? Esp if the company interferes with content? Or do they?

Are any conflicts inherited by publications that Twitter favors with flow? Is the behavior of non-favored pubs altered by the environment. Ideally how should a company such as Twitter behave relative to its community if it wants to foster journalism?

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rosen09march15.mp3

Is Twitter the savior of journalism? Or something like it?

Links mentioned in today's podcast...

Clark Hoyt: Bad News, and More Bad News.

CJR: Derivatives Echo Chamber.

Scripting News: Why it's time to break out of Twitter.

The back-and-forth with Karl Rove re Obama's "straw man."

Also mentioned in this Scripting News post. "We've arrived at a place where a political spinmeister, former adviser to the President, can get fact-checked by a random blogger, and get a confusing response. That seems a lot like the job that George Stephanopoulos or Bob Schieffer has."

Shrinkwrap software in the sky

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:36:48 GMT

Amazon EC2.

Google AppEngine.

Microsoft Azure.

Scoble goes to Rackspace.

I see a market developing.

Working on a new Howto.

EC2 for Poets.

"curly"

Where you were when...?

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:49:56 GMT

When you learned that JFK had been assassinated?

Okay, most of you aren't old enough to remember that. I am. And thanks to Google Maps I can show you where I was when I heard the news. I was in second grade, they let us out of school early, the parents came to pick us up. On this street corner my mom told me what had happened. I didn't get it. I asked who the President would be now, she said Lyndon Johnson. It didn't make any sense, because the only President I had been aware of up until then was Kennedy.

I got into this mode when I was trying to find the White Castle I used to go to when we lived in Jackson Heights.

Then I found the apartment building we lived in. Of course it's still there. We lived in Apt 5W. I remember that because I thought it was really neat that the apartment had the same last initial as I did and I was 5 years old. How about that -- a memory when I was less than 1/10th my current age.

Another way to get unreconstructed childhood memories is to watch a movie you haven't seen since you were a child. I didn't actually think the Cowardly Lion was a lion, I knew what a lion looked like, but I sure didn't think he was human! What a sweet kid, so smart.

Trying out the new Facebook

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:08:31 GMT

I'm only vaguely aware of Facebook. Not sure why, but I never really got into it.

Even so, some of my Twitter posts make it through to Facebook, so every once in a while I get a comment "over there" -- and that's how it feels to me, far away.

I had a few minutes this morning to check out the changes they've made and found it's much more accomodating from the point of view of a Twitter user.

A few observations.

1. On the home page you have a box. Instead of asking what you are doing, it asks what's on your mind. Small difference, and in fact much of the time what I post on Twitter is what's on my mind, not what I'm doing. I'm not one of those people who posts twits saying "I'm brushing my teeth," or whatever. Most of the time what I'm doing is none of anyone's business.

2. In that box you can type up to 160 characters. Twenty more than Twitter. Someone over there is marketing. If you're coming in second, you need to offer more. At first I wondered if it was unlimited. They must have really sweated over that decision.

3. Now that it behaves like Twitter, the other features come into play, ones I've been begging Twitter for since the beginning. The ability to enclose photos and video is essential. Why no MP3? Don't they love podcasts? I wish they would change that. (Update: Although there is no UI for MP3, if you link to an MP3 it will read its metadata and present it to the author. It doesn't seem to provide an inline player though.)

4. Now I might be interested in developing for Facebook. But their API never interested me as long as I was confined to a little box in their page. This venue is more interesting. Is there an API to post a twit to Facebook? (Update: Seesmic released a version of their Twitter client for Facebook, which sort-of implies that there is a Twitter-like API for Facebook.)

5. People can comment on your Facebook twits without using up twit-space in their own stream? That's a question. Do comments I post show up to my readers?

6. Who can see my posts? My friends? Anyone? I think this is a major difference from Twitter, where everything is by default public. Here, I think everything is by default not public. Or maybe not public in any way. I'd love to see a Facebook for Twitter users howto. Are there enough Twitter users to make that worth doing?

7. Now I see what they mean about how it's a favor to FriendFeed. There's the Like command. They totally need to have that in Twitter. Retweeting is so lame. Like is what we need.

8. I don't like the way they link to things. I linked to this post over there, and there's this huge picture of me next to the link and an extensive quote. No no no. That's wrong. I want a little icon that means "click this to read more." Let me write the intro in the message I post. (Which I did. The excerpt is wrong.) Screen shot.

9. Since (presumably) this text is staying within the Internet (and not being transmitted via SMS) why not allow styling -- bold, italic. Or maybe it is meant to go through SMS (hence the 160 character limit).

10. I really like the way they do pictures. But it should be possible to collapse them, so the picture stops taking up vertical space. That's the problem with media objects, they take up space. If you let the user collapse, then you can have it both ways. Win-win.

11. I know they're tacky but how about some animated smileys.

12. Movies work great too.

Summary: I like what they've done! Will I use it? Don't know.

I'd like to try out Jaiku

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 18:47:03 GMT

I've got a Laconica server up, and a small community has started there -- the very same day Google released Jaiku as open source, and somehow made it able to run (for free?) in AppEngine? I want to try it!

But the instructions assume you want to build the app or check things out or care what libraries it uses. None of that applies to me. I want to see what it's like to sysop one of these systems, and get feedback from people here on scripting.com. So...

Choice #1 is for someone to write a howto that a technical end-user might be able to use to set up a Jaiku on AppEngine. That way I could test the docs and the software, and pave the way for others to follow.

Choice #2 is for someone to set one up for me and give me the keys. Not optimal since I won't be able to help improve the setup process.

I like the way this is shaping up. As a user I want choice, it makes me powerful. If any vendor, open source or not, feels that they have me locked in, they won't listen. If the users are truly independent of the vendors then really interesting things can happen.

So if you like Jaiku and want to help it, let's go!

What will we call a Twitter?

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:18:53 GMT

Here's a TechFlash piece where a Google exec talks about a Twitter-like service. "There's relatively little data in Twitter," Bershad said. "I think if you could take a Twitter-like service and combine it with a lot of other data sources about the users, you might be able to come up with something more interesting."

He's thinking about having his own twitter.

Interesting!

Leo Laporte already has one.

http://army.twit.tv/

So do I. (Though far more humble than Leo's.)

http://home.smallpicture.com/

As you read those sentences, does something bother you?

Pause for a moment and think about it before you read on.

We're using the word twitter in a new way.

Up till now it was a company and a service.

Is it a trademark? Curiously there's nothing on the site (that I can find) that indicates that it is.

So here's the question.

If you accept the premise that some day there will be many twitter-like services, that it will be common for blogs to have their own community twitter like Leo and I do. And that corporations will have twitters for coordinating projects (narrating your work). That there will be services that are competitive with the original Twitter, perhaps from Google and Facebook, and others. If you accept some of these premises, then the question is -- what will they be called?

Will they be called microblogging services, which is the current nomenclature among techies, or will people take the shortest path and call a twitter a twitter?

Curious to know what people think.

PS: Unrelated, Paul Andrews just sent a screen shot of his Twitter page with an active search box.

What I meant by 'breaking out'

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:39:29 GMT

First, thanks for all the interest in today's earlier piece. It's getting a lot of traffic and comments, all of which have been interesting. We've heard from lots of users and two Twitter board members.

A commenter named Jonathan asked what I meant by breaking out of Twitter. Here's what I said.

Thanks for asking -- I was wondering when someone would.

I don't know exactly what it means. If a real competitor came along that would create one possible answer, some of us would move there. Probably everyone would instantly get an account, if it were done right, some large number would stay there. If it had features that Twitter didn't have that were high value then it might suck a lot of the life out of Twitter.

It might mean lots of little Twitters. I'm starting one here on scripting.com, and in the first few hours of use it's already interesting. It wouldn't in any way be a replacement for Twitter. But it offers an alternative. Sort of like the difference between a blog and a big website, when blogs were just booting up in 1999 or so.

Or it could mean that Twitter voluntarily breaks itself up. Again I'm not sure what that means, but it could mean that Twitter stops having anything at all to do with the content of Twitter. Or it could split into two, CelebrityLand and LandOfThePeople. I don't see any of that as likely, but if I were part of their team, I would encourage them to look at doing to themselves what the competition is likely to do it. That can work out better, because then they get to do it on their own terms instead of the rougher treatment a competitor might offer.

Right now though, if Facebook offered a "lite" user interface that did just what Twitter does, plus a few nice extras, it would rule. Or if Google did, they would probably suck a lot of the energy out of Twitter. Not sure who else could do it.

BTW, to people who think Twitter already has too big a head start, I'm not so sure.

Twitter didn't exist to promote Twitter. But it will exist for Twitter 2.0. So whoever does it will have a superior word of mouth network already built, by Twitter.

I saw this effect first hand by being here for the rise of blogging and then the rise of podcasting. The latter grew much more quickly because we had blogs to promote podcasting with. The slow part was the building of the network, once it exists, new ones that build on it boot up much more quickly.

Why it's time to break out of Twitter

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:25:17 GMT

First, so there are no misunderstandings, I am using Twitter, I will continue to use Twitter and I will recommend Twitter to others, as I have been for 2 or so years. This is not me slamming the door on the way out, something I dislike intensely. If you're leaving just go. But I'm not leaving.

There was an event a few weeks back that convinced me that it's time to break out, like jailbreaking an iPhone. I don't like the relationship Twitter-the-service has with Twitter-the-company. Yesterday I was talking with a Twitter board member, Bijan Sabet, someone who is becoming a personal friend, and said that it was good that the phone company wasn't part of the conversation. That's exactly how I feel about the company he is on the board of. Yet they are very much part of the conversation.

I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. People like Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis all viewed being at the top as a competitive thing, so they did what it took. Me, I just poured a lot of energy and creativity into it, and got the number of followers that comes from doing that. It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers.

I first noticed this when I was on Ana Marie Cox's page on Twitter. All of a sudden she went from 3 or 4 thousand to over 60,000 in less than a week. She had no idea why. A thread opened, there were theories that it was a spam attack, but then Williams jumped in and said it was because she was on the Suggested Users page. The LA Times ran a story on it, and then pretty much everyone knew. Scoble and Leo were openly angry, understandably so. These guys worked really hard to be at the top, I watched them do it, and now they're not even close to the top. (BTW, Cox is no longer in the Suggested Users list.)

I don't have a quarrel with the people who got the boost, I think it's pretty clear none of them asked for it. I do think the company should have done this much more carefully. Now there's no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. And the people who got the push have a problem if they are members of the press, because this gift they got from Twitter is worth money. It might be worth a lot of money. If one of them posts a pointer on a Twitter account it's going to get a lot of flow. And what if a reporter were critical of Twitter in a piece she wrote, would Twitter revoke her status?

TechCrunch uses their Twitter page to point to articles on their site, and every page has ads on it. So the gift from Twitter is worth dollars to them. It's hard to imagine them pulling punches when it comes to reviewing the company. But are they likely to be more kindly disposed to the company? It's hard to imagine when they're delivering so much free flow that doesn't earn them a warm space in your heart.

And what about Scoble, Leo, Guy and Jason? Did they say something to offend Twitter? Possibly. I can name one thing for each of them that the guys at Twitter probably don't like. But why should I have to even think about this? Until they tilted the table so heavily in favor of these people, I didn't. But it always bothered me that they could.

Why does the NY Times get the gift but the LA Times doesn't?

Why is Tim O'Reilly on the list, but not Jay Rosen?

Why TechCrunch and not GigaOm, PaidContent, SiliconAlley, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, VentureBeat, etc etc.

Think about it this way -- do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones -- they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now."

Bijan says that Twitter is the little guy, but to me they look big -- huge -- when they have the power to move people up the ladder so quickly, and introduce doubt about their relationship with individual users. When being in favor with Ev means so much. That's screwing the whole thing up.

Bottom-line: This isn't the way the Internet works. The guys at Twitter should know this. I think they're living in a bubble, and creating one at the same time. No one likes someone who pops the bubble while it's still building. So be it. We need to get that power out of their hands, or they need to disclaim it. They're such a small guy, it's really puzzling why they would do something that alienates so many. Most people won't say it, for the obvious reason that their business interests prevent them from. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be said.

Berkeley is a small town

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:36:07 GMT

Tom Hunt a Berkeleyite since the 60s, who makes a living helping people keep their computers running, says Berkeley is a small town. If you look at the University as a factory, everything else is just a little place where everyone knows someone who knows everyone. I've now lived here 2.5 years and it's not unusual when I go out to meet two people I know. It's a small town with lots of creative people who like to use their minds. My kind of place.

Anyway -- there was a Laconica hackfest here a couple of Saturdays ago, at the open working space on Shattuck near Ashby. I had never been there, but I know a bunch of people who work there. Turns out a friend, Ken Sedgwick, was hosting the meetup even though he doesn't use Twitter or Identi.ca very much. But Ken knows how to package up Unix software so that it's easy to install and maintain. He's a consultant, that's one of the things he does for his clients.

So I went to the hackfest with a mission -- I wanted to create a Twitter that anyone one could install for themselves and host in Amazon's cloud. I have a theory that Twitter can be like Lotus Notes, a workgroup application that installs like shrinkwrap software did in the 80s. I want to learn about this, and hopefully -- if the theory is right, help start a billion Twitters to go with the billion weblogs we've got running now. Or something like that.

We had a dinner last night at China Village on Solano, eight people showed up, Ken told us where he was at. It sounded great, but he kept saying how much more there was to do. Even so he let us try out what he had, and it was a lot easier than most of the tech I have to crunch my head through (I was thinking of OAuth, which took two weeks). I was able to get my Twitter running in 10 minutes. Nothing to it! (Now, I have a little experience with EC2 and that probably helped. But it's still really easy. A tech type could get through it in no more than an hour.)

So here it is...

http://home.smallpicture.com/

This is going to be the Scripting News community Twitter if such a thing is possible. Create an account if you want. I have no idea if this is permanent or if we'll have to start over at some point. But I'm proud of the work that Ken did, and excited about the possibilities for the future.

I don't want to point to Ken's HowTo until he says it's okay. I think it is. But you never know, we'll do things in the right order. But know that Berkeley is humming, we're creating some good stuff. Glad I moved here.

An alternate OSCON?

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:58:32 GMT

OSCON == Open Source Convention.

Pretty sure I was at the first one, in Monterrey. It was described to me by Tim O'Reilly, who puts it on, as a place where all the open source platforms could come together under one tent. Perl, Python, PHP, Apache and many others.

It's been in Portland for the last few years, and this year it's moving to San Jose.

I had hoped to lead a discussion at this year's OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux. Frontier is the runtime environment that the OPML Editor builds on. It's an object database, scripting language, outline-based editor and database browser, debugger, multi-threaded runtime, verb set, Web CMS, TCP stack, built-in web server. It was the environment that XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and of course OPML were developed in. All this and the whole download is about 5MB and it installs in a minute. It also has an RSS-based updating mechanism and most updates are "hot" -- meaning you don't even have to relaunch. I love this enviroment, I built it starting in 1988 as the last programming environment I'd use, the one that had everything I wanted, and that's what it is. And because the early development was done so (ahem) early, it was designed to run well on 1Mhz machines with 1MB of memory. As a result it fits really nicely in today's machines.

Now, it runs on Mac and Windows, but I really want it to run on Linux -- so I proposed a session at OSCON to discuss this and see if I couldn't recruit people to work on this. Unfortunately, yesterday I got the rejection email. I kind of expected it, because O'Reilly doesn't seem to like me these days, or whatever -- I don't know and it's not important.

Then someone sent me a pointer to http://opensourcebridge.org/ which is in Portland on June 17-19. Now I have an incentive to see if people want to go there. San Jose is closer to Berkeley, so I'd rather go there, but a really open OSCON would be something that's worth supporting. There are other new projects that don't have space at OSCON, so maybe we could all get together in Portland and see what happens.

tinyarro.ws

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:16:50 GMT

A new URL shortener.

http://tinyarro.ws/

Ho hum.

No -- it's interesting -- seriously.

The URLs are weird. Are they shorter? Not sure.

The web used to be full of weird ideas that stretched your mind.

Not so much these days.

This is one of them.

Let me know what you think!!

PS: Wish I had thought of it.

Update on the 1000HE

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:59:21 GMT

A quick note -- I decided yesterday, that rather than deal with restoring the new netbook that was crippled by malware after just a few hours use, I would instead take advantage of Amazon's generous return policy. I sent the computer back yesterday, and today, before noon, a new one arrived. I spent about half of the day provisioning it, something I'm getting good at.

But this time I've used the new knowledge I have about protection to install various tools that help guard against a reinfection. I promised I'd list those here so others can benefit from the incredible outpouring of information from the members of the community.

First, I declined to update Java and then went to Add-Remove Programs, and took Java out of the system entirely. Perhaps someday this computer will need Java, then I can download it from Sun's website. Until then I don't want to take the chance that it was the opening that the malware got in through. (It's the one thing I updated, and when I went to a perf test site to measure the speed of my connection, the little app was running in Java. It's all I could think of, so it maybe unfair to blame Java, just want to say that.)

Then I installed the following apps: Ad-Aware, Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. The last is, according to Stan Krute, a tool that will help if the computer gets infected. Yesterday I learned how important that is. The malware made it impossible for me to get to the Norton site to get a tool that might remove the bad stuff. Same with McAfee and the Microsoft site for defending against malware. It's a good idea to have the removal software already in place when you need it.

Ad-Aware and Spybot are two old friends. In the days of Kazaa (a supposedly nice program that totally ruined a laptop with spyware) they helped get rid of the infections that kept coming back. In those days I was using IE. One of the blessings of this age is Firefox. It may not be the perfect browser, but it isn't full of all the openings of ActiveX and whatever else IE leaves open that the bad guys take advantage of. I will never ever under any circumstances run MSIE again.

Everyone says great things about Avast. I've run it once, it installed easily.

At this point after just a few hours, all the tools say the computer is 100 percent clean. I have the OPML editor running, and uTorrent, Firefox, VLC, SlingPlayer, iTunes and not much more. Ready to kicks some butt I hope.

Folks, this is, in no way, open

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:06:03 GMT

Today the Guardian announced their "Open Platform," much as the NY Times did a couple of weeks ago. It's even less open than the Times was.

If it were actually open they'd announce it to all developers at the same moment, so we could all try it out at the same time on a level playing field, not give an advance to their favorites. In the press release they talk about developers who got an early look. Fine. It wasn't open then, that's for sure. Is it open now?

Well: "API key approvals will be granted on a very limited basis, so please don't be offended if we fail to reply to you or don't approve your request in the short term. You can be assured, however, that we intend to open the service more widely soon."

Okay, but please don't be offended if I don't apply for one.

You gotta wonder if when they get out of beta their competitors will be able to repurpose their content. My guess is not. And how broadly do they view their competition? And why should anyone have to guess if they're "open."

All this begs the question, because even if they were just publishing RSS feeds (btw, they are), to be competitive in the API business, you have to enable other people to publish on your side of the API. That was the flaw of the Times model too.

I have no idea how these guys got the idea that they could save the news industry by becoming the tech industry; I don't think they can. What's the diff betw what they're doing and just adding more metadata to their feeds?

My guess this is the result of some tech guys doing their best to give the higher-ups what they want. Some market analyst or consultant told them that to survive they need an API, so come hell or high water, an API is what they'll have.

Correct me if I'm wrong please. (And if the past is prologue, the Guardian will attack personally, calling me names, in print, as they've done so many times. Not to say there aren't a number of very nice people at the Guardian these days. Maybe they can moderate the response keeping it professional and impersonal.)

Big hugs, your pal in Berkeley, Dave

Run the OPML Editor on port 80

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:12:52 GMT

I always have to reinvent this, every time I want to set up an OPML Editor server on port 80. So now, by posting it here, I can just search for it and I should find the instructions. If you don't understand, don't worry.

It's now incredibly simple to do this.

1. Add this line to opmlStartupCommands.txt:

user.opmlEditor.flServerOnPort80 = true;

2. If the OPML Editor is running, quit and relaunch.

3. As it starts up it asks for your Admin password so it can do a port forward.

You're done!

"curly"

BMW never returned the call

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:11:07 GMT

Closing the loop on the issue with the BMW.

1. The car is drying out. Nice weather over the last couple of days helped. I guess we'll find out when it starts raining again if it still leaks.

2. The independent repair service, H&B, did great, non-warranty work. $120.

3. BMW wanted $800 for the same work.

4. BMW of North America never got back to me.

5. Weatherford BMW, the dealer that sold me the car is a real piece of work. They completely lost me as a customer. In the future, when my car needs warranty work, I'll drive to San Rafael.

6. Thanks, as always, to the Scripting News readers -- a fountain of knowledge and good will!

Reminder: Why I switched to Mac in 2005

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:49:25 GMT

I switched because I was Mired In Malware.

I got a new EeePC 1000HE last week, and after just a few hours of use, it's infected with a rootkit virus of some kind. Really clever. Spent three hours last night trying to eradicate it, but in the last three or four years, the malware guys have gotten a lot more clever.

Contemplating switching to the Hackintosh flavor of netbook.

Ran Ad-Aware, getting ready to run Spybot. Downloaded Combofix. I'm going to try to resurrect this baby. Also considering doing a fresh install of Windows but that sounds like more work that Leopard. And then you're still using Windows.

You can read all about my trials on Twitter. But this problem is now serious enough to demand its own blog post. I'm going to see the silver lining here, a chance to learn a lot. Albeit stuff I never wanted to learn.

Of course there will be the moralizing and I Told You So's. Thanks in advance for sharing your wisdom. I agree you are superior and wiser and a better person, in every way.

I don't use MSIE. Please no need to tell me not to use IE. I use Firefox.

Interview with Jay Rosen

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 18:57:52 GMT

It's a good idea to check in with Jay on where journalism is at every once in a while, which is what I did this morning. I'm going to try to do these more regularly with people who are on the Friends Of Dave channel, like Jay.

We start off talking about curmudgeons, then on to rebooting journalism, Meet The Press, the broken government, and everything related. Jay is really smart, spends a lot of time thinking about things I really care about. I thought the interview came out great. Hope you all listen. 40 minutes.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rosen09Mar08.mp3

Jay is a professor of journalism at NYU and was my choice as Blogger of the Year for 2008.

Update: Three articles mentioned in the interview.

A follow-up: It might make sense for Jay to offer one or two paragraph critiques of various bits of journalism. For example this story on TechCrunch is interesting, but it might be more believable if we knew who the author was talking to, or why the source wouldn't go on the record.

Handwritten notes from the interview.

Solving the TinyUrl centralization problem

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:33:17 GMT

Following up on an earlier bit about centralizing and TinyUrl, this is one of those vexing problems that actually has a solution!

Every web app that produces long urls should provide a built-in url-shortening facility. The user interface would be similar to the one in Google Maps they call "Link To This Page." You click on it, and up pops a box containing an address you can use to point to the page. Screen shot.

But look at the size of the url that Google gives you. It should be short. Why not something like: http:\//goog.us/8uj9oj.

In other words, why doesn't Google have a built-in shortnener?

When blogging software gives you a permalink, it should be short. It's okay to make the user ask for one, why clog up the system with shortened urls no one uses.

Another key point, when they give you a shortened url, it should point back to the software that gave it to you, so the shortened link will be exactly as long-lived as the thing it's pointing to. In other words, the URL shortener wouldn't contribute any extra link rot, to use an old term coined (I believe) by Jakob Nielsen.

It's a mistake, in hindsight, for Twitter to give us TinyUrl urls, because the link depends on two companies and two servers. It would be better if it just depended on one, less likely to break.

Now that URL length has become an issue for users, it might be even better for designers to view URLs as part of site design. Look at the address for the page for the Wii at Amazon. Wouldn't it be easier to find if the address were:

http://amazon.com/wii

Try clicking on it -- it actually works!

Why should a user ever see the longer crappy url?

In other words, url-shortening isn't just for Twitter users, it's for everyone. Maybe most people don't look at the urls, but some do, and maybe more would if they made more sense?

Note: This is a repeat of a piece I wrote in November 2007.

A short step in URL-shorteners

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:04:27 GMT

Progress in the art of twittering comes incrementally. This suggestion is a very small increment but one that would make the job of a frequent linker, such as myself, a little easier.

I would like my URL-shortener to grab the title of the page I'm linking to and insert it into the typing box, before the shortened URL.

Suppose for example I wanted to link to a post Doc's site. From that page, I'd click on the bookmarklet in the toolbar of my browser, it would take me to the shortener page, and this is what I'd see:

Then I click Submit, and off I go. This is a step I do manually now. Better if it were automatic!

Any URL-shortener could do it. The first is likely to get my business.

What blogs are for: BMW

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:27:39 GMT

One of the reasons everyone should have a blog is that when a company pushes you around, you have a place to post your side of the story, publicly, so future customers have a chance to benefit from your experience. Over the years I have written up experiences with Travelocity, American Airlines, Comcast, a now-defunct ISP, a Bay Area plumber. Now I'd like to tell you about a problem I'm having with BMW.

I bought a new BMW in July of 2007. It's my fourth BMW and I love it. It's powerful and fast, incredibly responsive. I don't drive much, but when I do, it's still a pleasure. That's saying a lot after having a car for almost two years; I still look forward to driving it. BMW makes a fantastic product.

But -- then we've been having all this rain this winter, and it turns out the car leaks. Water is coming into the cabin, the carpets are wet, they're not drying out even though the weather turned nice a few days ago. So I brought it in for service on Wednesday. The dealer said it was my fault the car is leaking, and wanted $800 to fix it. Now this is a car that has a four year warranty that's supposed to cover everything. I've owned a lot of cars over the years, even a rusted-out Wisconsin junker (that I loved anyway) and I've never had a car leak water. I didn't believe for a minute this was my fault. I told them I live on a normal street, not on a hill, with not many trees (but some) and I could check with my neighbors, but I didn't think any of their cars were leaking. He suggested I call BMW of North America customer service to see what they say, and they said the same thing. I should pay for this because it was caused by an "outside influence" (the rain, I guess).

Then at breakfast on Thursday a friend who also has a BMW says Weatherford is notorious for ripping off customers. Once he brought his car in for service, they failed to fix it three times, and each time wanted to charge him for the repair. He paid, cause what are you going to do, they have your car. Meanwhile they were pressuring me to either return the loaner, or agree to the $800 charge. I told them I was waiting for a return call from BMW of North America. (Three days later I still haven't heard from them.) \

So I went back to the dealer, got my car, returned the loaner, got their writeup of the problem (now the estimate was $625), and took it to a local independent BMW repair shop that gets good reviews (deservedly, it turns out). They showed me a BMW-issued service note, from January 2008, explaining that the 5-series has a problem with water leaks.

I scanned and uploaded the service note: p1, p2, p3.

It's so outrageous. They knew the car has this problem, yet they still wanted $800 to fix it.

10:15AM: I have a wet car that smells bad. I have a call into another BMW dealer to see what they want to do about it.

11:15AM: Got a call back. They want to see the service note. I've emailed him a link to this blog post.