Scripting News

Rebooting the News #8

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:56:43 GMT

This week's podcast with Jay Rosen is up.

Topics: Jay opted out of Twitter's Suggested Users List, he explains why and we discuss. His choice for Inspiration of the Week is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

As always, you can subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes.

Conflicts of interest in tech

Sun, 03 May 2009 23:25:19 GMT

It's Jay's week for the source of inspiration, so I'm bringing a different topic to our weekly potluck of speculation about Rebooting The News.

Obviously we're going to talk about Twitter's suggested users list.

Last week: 1. Jay was put on the list, 2. Got the surge in new followers, then 3. Asked to be taken off, and 4. Was taken off.

You can see the effect on his follower count in this graph. I took a screen shot because it will scroll off over time. It's stunning. Very clearly, being on the SUL has a dramatic effect on your count.

We've talked about conflicts of interest among journalists, but haven't talked about the same thing for tech people. Mike Arrington tried to ignite a scandal around me over something that happened at UserLand in 2002, when I was on the vendor side (and a blogger, which is part of what blogging was and is about). I responded, not with a blanket dismissal such as "Vendors don't have conflicts of interest" -- because I believe they do. They can get themselves out of conflict by divesting and/or disclosing. I guess most people felt that what I did wasn't so bad, because the hatefest never came about, and Mike looked bad, as if he was trying to deflect attention away from an article I had written the day before, about the conflicts that arise from accepting a large gift from a vendor you cover, without disclosing it when you write about them.

Today we'll find out, from Jay, what it means for a professor of journalism, and for an ordinary human being to receive such a gift.

In the course of the public discussion last week, I said that if I were put on the Suggested Users List, I would ask to be removed, and if the request wasn't honored, I would delete the account. I don't want the distortion it causes. I don't see Twitter as an advertising medium, I am not a journalist and could ethically receive a gift from a vendor, even so I would refuse it. I don't believe that Twitter should be getting in the middle of the relationship between users of its service. That's sacred territory. This is a matter of net neutrality. Could someone like Mike, who writes passionately about net neutrality in his TechCrunch column, possibly not see this?

Anyway, all this is a preamble for where I want to take this, because while these ethical issues are central to the trust between writers and readers, the economics of the web are goverened by another conflict, one that is very rarely talked about. I'd like to get it out there.

Here's the story...

1. Google makes a lot of money from advertising.

2. If one were to define advertising, it seems to me you'd have to include the idea of intrusion. An ad intrudes on your experience, it's a sidebar, it's something you wouldn't think of on your own. If you're already humming my jingle, I don't have to pay someone to play it for you. Or so it seems.

3. As search gets better, it will obviate the need for intrusion. A perfectly targeted ad at some point stops being intrusive and starts becoming information. If you get me the commercial fact that I need at precisely the moment I need it, you don't have to impose on me, I will welcome that.

4. Google is in the business of getting you the exact fact or link that you're looking for as quickly as possible.

5. Its advertisers pay money to get you their link before you find one in the search results.

6. But if they're the same link, maybe the advertiser will stop paying? Or if the customer believes that a better link is in the first search results rather than on page 5 or not there at all? The customer, perfectly happy, never has a reason to go where the ads direct them.

Now, I know that there are other forms of advertising, ones that program you to think a certain way, but you don't see those kinds of ads on Google. Maybe they'll have to change, because as the search engine gets better and better, which it should (right?) the ads will play less of a role.

We know that companies don't always play fair.

There was the case of GM sabotaging the public transit system in Los Angeles.

A lot of companies profited from the war in Iraq. If you don't believe they helped get that war going, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Special price. Just for you.

Closer to home, the recent price drop in laptops, the netbooks, show that there was some kind of price fixing going on before that, a collusion between the vendors to keep prices high. So we know that the tech industry is capable of the same dirty economics as other industries.

When Google has to cut its own revenue stream by enhancing search, will they do it? So far the competition has made this easy for them, but just this week Wolfram Research has been wooing the analysts with their new way to do search. Maybe this isn't the challenger that will push Google to seriously upgrade search, if not, surely at some point it will happen.

I don't know how you feel, but it seems to me that search has been pretty constant for the last few years. It's been a long time since the quantum improvement that Google offered over Infoseek, Alta Vista, et al.

New iPhone

Sun, 03 May 2009 19:22:44 GMT

It was raining on Friday, and I went for a long walk up and down the hills, very vigorous -- but I got soaked and so did my iPhone. After taking its last picture and uploading it to Flickr, it died. It wouldn't respond to attempts to revive it, so I took it down to the AT&T Store in downtown Berkeley and bought a replacement for $199.

My old iPhone truly was old, this bright shiny new one is so much nicer -- and faster. And the restore process worked flawlessly. Everything from the old phone was backed up on my Mac, and when I inserted the new one it asked if I wanted to restore it from the old image. I said yes. It took a long time, but I lost nothing, except passwords, which is the right way for it to work.

So now I have a new iPhone and where almost everything was broken on the old one, nothing is broken on this one. So the iPod functions work, and it can play videos -- the old one couldn't do eitehr of these things. All my headphones work with the new one, the old one had a non-standard jack for headphones (yes, I know I could get an adapter, but I can't manage to keep track of things like that, it was pointless).

But I still want to bring a music/video player with me because the iPhone, apparently -- can't multitask! If I'm watching a movie and it's going through a boring spell, or I just want to listen to the dialog, why can't I check my email or Twitter -- or look something up on Google? When I use my laptop I can do all these things and watch a movie.

And I'm reminded how shitty the keyboard is on the iPhone, and think it's a paradox that Apple's COO says netbooks have "cramped" keyboards. The iPod has the worst keyboard. Even if I type something correctly, there's a pretty good chance it'll change it to something ridiculous. When the Newton first came out people used to laugh at how it would mess things up. The iPod really isn't much better, but people stopped laughing. I wonder why? Cook is wrong -- my Eee PC has an infintely better keyboard than the iPhone, and you know something -- it costs less than an iPhone too.

Anyway -- net-net -- it's a nice new toy to have. In a way I'm glad the old one broke.

Posting to twitpic and posterous?

Fri, 01 May 2009 20:26:02 GMT

I'm having the damndest time figuring out the APIs to these two web services. I just want to post a picture. I already have code that does multipart forms, for Flickr and the now-defunct Pownce. These guys seem to be doing it in a non-standard way. Anyone with a clue?

Update #1: I got it working with Posterous, but I get image not found from Twitpic. Here's the request I'm sending to Twitpic, with the password xxx'd out.

Update #2: Don Park debugged it, now it works with both.

Maybe it should be social from the start?

Fri, 01 May 2009 20:18:56 GMT

Seeing the first-time Twitter user experience reinforced an idea that's been lurking in the background. Since the magic of Twitter is, theoretically, in its limits, perhaps they should have a limit on who can join and under what circumstances. Perhaps before you can create a new account you have to name 20 people with Twitter accounts who you want to follow. They could be celebrities if you want, or spammers -- then at least the recommended users could be tailored to your interests. The algorithms that suggest new feeds kick in, and they are well understood, once you have a few seeds to get started. The one-size-fits-all approach obviously isn't working.

What a first-time Twitter user sees

Fri, 01 May 2009 19:10:53 GMT

I'm doing some work with a Twitter app that wants my username and password so I needed an account to test with. I created one, and accepted the 20 users that they suggested. This is what I saw:

http://tr.im/keiv

There's a lot of spam in there, and little that's coherent. This is the best they could find? Are they even watching?

DiGiorno pizza is tasty food

Fri, 01 May 2009 03:38:44 GMT

We don't have ads on Scripting News, but from time to time I put in a plug for a product I really like.

A few weeks ago I got a fantastic toaster oven, and I've been looking for food it cooks well. I picked up one of these DiGiorno pizzas and man they are some good food.

It's not Ray's, it's not NY pizza, which is still the best. Yeah it's made by Kraft and it probably is junk food. But it tastes soooo good!

Breakage in the new Twitter UI

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:49:13 GMT

I happy to report that I have the new Twitter user interface on my account and it's nice.

However, apparently the "status" param is no longer recognized.

http://twitter.com/home?status=thisusedtowork

That would put "thisusedtowork" in the "What are you doing?" box. URL shorteners redirect to Twitter with the new shortened address in the "status" param.

This change breaks users. Any help would be much appreciated...

Update: Just got a direct message from Twitter, they fixed the breakage. That's excellent turnaround. Thanks!!

Impressive

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:44:33 GMT

Jay Rosen: "I got put on Twitter's official suggested users list last night. I asked them to take me off it today and they did."

We. Are. What. They. Are. Going. To. Sell.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:38:26 GMT

When people say they don't know what Twitter's business model is they're being silly. They know. We all know. "Let us reason together," a US President once said.

They call it User Generated Content. We're the users. What do we do? Generate. What do we generate? Content. We're like the bacteria that make beer or yogurt. You put in the basic ingredients and out the other end comes content! It's cooool.

It all came to me last night while I was sitting in a theater watching a really bad movie, a remake of a totally excellent BBC mini-series. You can tell it was bad because instead of being wrapped up in the plot or studying how they crafted the movie, I was trying to figure out how they got me in the theater. They got me in with celebrity hype. There were two great stars in the movie. I thought it would be great. I was wrong! I bought two tickets, they got $20 from me, and we walked out it was so bad. (In one scene Mirren walks off stage saying "Fuck you very much," which I thought was a perfect summation of the movie.)

Someday, probably very soon, a movie studio is going to rent Twitter for 24 hours to do a special event for their movie. On that day 1/4 of the tweets you see will be about how great the movie is. You think you'll quit, and maybe you will, but a lot of people will think it's cool and they'll buy the product. Marketers love that kind of stuff. They pay big bucks for it.

So if you think that having a lot of celebrities doesn't have anything to do with you, you're wrong. The point of celebrities is they say things that everyone hears. That's what makes them celebrities. You may not want to hear it but they're going to say it anyway and in the end you are going to hear it, like it or not.

One more thing. You may groan when you hear Christmas music. But you hear it anyway. They own you for 1/3 of the year. And when you get to be my age, it's so bad that I find I'm humming Christmas songs all year round. In April I find myself singing "City sidewalks, busy sidewalsk, dressed in hoilday style. In the air there's a feeling of Christmas." And if you read that sentence, you're singing it too.

Kurt Vonnegut described a novel-within-a-novel, Now It Can Be Told by Kilgore Trout, in which the main character is the only real human and everyone else is a robot sent to test him. It's a possibility I have considered.

Doing my part to help revive the economy

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:33:07 GMT

Once again I have some money burning a hole in my pocket and I want to blow some (of course) on electronic gadgetry. And, as always, I turn to the readers of this blog for advice.

1. Is there a Linux or Windows equivalent of the Mac Mini? A headless, keyboardless, mouseless computer that doesn't cost too much, that isn't made by Apple. I already have three Mac Mini's, I love them, but I find myself interested in, even lusting for, an Asus EeeBox. Have you tried it? Do you like it? Any other choices?

2. For the same application, I've been thinking about getting a gamer platform, with a really fast CPU and lots of RAM. (An aside, the application is processing lots of text, which involves relatively little net traffic and doesn't require a persistent IP address. No need to pay Amazon $90 per month when I could buy a cheap computer for $300 and be done with it.)

3. I bought a Panasonic wifi webcam a couple of years ago, and it was pretty good, but it stopped working (maybe dropping it a few times had something to do with that). I want the same functionality without the wifi. I'm looking for Mac software that samples the built-in camera every minute and saves the result to a file. From there, I can write scripts to push it where I want it to go. Surprised to see this functionality isn't something Apple provides, but near as I can tell, they don't.

4. Still thinking about getting the FlipCam. That was the thing I didn't buy last time I tried to kickstart the economy. (Update: I ordered the FlipCam today.)

Adjix has a breakthrough idea in URL shorteners

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:26:36 GMT

Sometimes it's funny how you're led to an interesting idea when you're not expecting it. This idea arrived at the end of a chain of events started by inviting Guy Kawasaki to use my 40-tweets app. Here's the story.

1. Guy asked if I could make the app work with his favorite URL shortener, Adjix. I said I'd check it out.

2. Joe Moreno, the CEO of Adjix, emailed me and showed how to get hit stats from his service, in a manner similar to what I was getting from tr.im.

3. When I tried to deref one of his short URLs I found he was using the meta-refresh technique. I was irritated, why isn't he using the HTTP redirect mechanism like everyone else. He said it was so they could use Adsense to track clicks. Some of his users wanted it. I found a way to work around the issue without having to parse the HTML and then forgot it. (Here's the text of the page they return.)

4. A few days later Moreno mentioned in an email that another advantage is their shortener could be served statically from S3. This hit me like a ton of bricks. Say what!

Think about it. When you shorten a URL, what if instead of generating a record in a database that requires a dynamic server to stay up indefinitely, you generated static HTML and saved it somewhere likely to survive the apocalypse. It's not a complete answer to the problem presented by URL shorteners, but it's pretty great half-step. Maybe even a 3-quarters-step.

Joe wrote it up here.

Jake Jarvis calls this an Apocalypse-proof URL shortener. I like!

How to get started with Facebook's new API?

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:29:19 GMT

I'm reading the docs for Facebook's Open Stream API, with fascination. It sounds like an app can read and write to a user's stream, something like the way one writes an app to access the Twitter status stream. That's something I want to do!

But...

Say I want to write an app to access my own stream. What's the process? How do I give the app permission? What's the endpoint?

I assume FQL is Facebook Query Language? What do I do with that? I don't know.

I have a feeling these docs are written for developers who have been working with Facebook. I have never written any code to call Facebook's API.

If they want to go after Twitter developers (no one is going to like this, but it's the truth) read their developer docs, and make your API work like that.

I say no one is going to like that except Twitter developers of course.

This is why I say that to compete with Twitter you must start with item #0 in the wishlist.

Rebooting the News #7

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:10:56 GMT

This week's 40-plus minute podcast with Jay Rosen and myself.

To subscribe, add this URL to your podcatcher (or iTunes).

Sony got it right

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:25:24 GMT

The new Walkman is great. Click the pic for comments, a full-size picture, link to the product page.

Retweet is stupid

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 21:45:59 GMT

Okay I'm going to get crucified for this, but I found myself saying this on the phone today to Andrew Baron. If I was willing to say it to him, I should have the guts to say it publicly.

Now, I'm not saying the people who retweet are stupid, or the impulse to pass on a link to everyone who follows you is stupid, but...

A retweet is the same as voting up something on Digg or Reddit. It's a piece of metadata about the tweet, and should be stored and displayed with the tweet. When you retweet something, none of the 140 characters should be used in saying that it's a retweet and who it came from.

Digg does it right, Twitter --> wrong.

Another app that does it right is FriendFeed.

Look at this post, it's been liked a lot. When I wrote this it had 225 likes! Like is FriendFeed's term for retweet.

Nothing needs to be done, but I'm glad to get this out there, once and for all.

Hope you're having a happy Sunday!

Why there will be many Twitters

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 21:35:19 GMT

Yesterday I wrote about the Lotus 1-2-3 of twitters, but it may not be obvious why there will be more than one network of networks -- so let me explain.

1. Twitter is growing fast.

2. Its use as a medium for news has become apparent. I've been saying that for a long time. It's both the front room and back room for news. How it's delivered and how it's produced.

3. Umair Haque suggested the NY Times buy Twitter. Of course it's too late for that. Pretty soon Twitter will be able to buy the NY Times.

4. I think it's pretty obvious that Twitter is on a trajectory to become one of the major media networks, a Turner, Fox, NBC, Time-Warner, Viacom, Disney. When it's apparent to more of the heads of these companies, they're going to start wondering why their stars are on Twitter and not on their own network.

5. The thought has probably also popped into the heads of the people at Twitter. They will try to make deals with some or all the media companies. They have a lot of power, and should be able to cut good deals. But as the negotiations go forward, it will become apparent to the execs that these guys are competitors. They will consider Make vs Buy. If they're smart, they'll do their deals with Twitter at the same time doing deals to get their own network going.

6. Luckily for the other media companies, users are portable. I'll explain. Say Ashton Kutcher (someone who I had never heard of until he showed up at a tech industry conference last year) decides to cut a deal with a major studio to head a new twitter-like network. Could happen. They'll get their network built, quietly, then start leaking it with teases on billboards of course, but also (you guessed it) on Twitter. When Oprah sees him do his network, she'll want one. And so will Larry King and Shaq, and all the celebs who have yet to make a splash on Twitter. Brad Pitt and Ed Norton will call theirs The Fight Club. George Clooney's will be Oceans Million. Prince will hang out in Paisley Park. And you think Apple won't have one? It might have a 140-char limit, but it won't just be text.

There's a lot of money to be made in these networks and it costs so little to start one. An average Hollywood film costs two or three times as much as all the money Twitter, Inc. has raised so far. Spiderman 3 cost $258 million. That's just one movie. And over time the cost will come way down. That's why I suggested that FriendFeed get a clone ready, now -- so they can do deals with the media companies when they're ready. Which might happen any week now, if it hasn't already happened.

Remember, it's not Kansas anymore, the house fell on the witch and Ev and Biz are wearing the Ruby-red slippers. Click your heels three times and say "There's no place like home."

Yours truly, over and out, Dave

The Next Killer App is to Twitter as 1-2-3 was to Visicalc

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:22:21 GMT

This post is dedicated to Mitch Kapor, Jonathan Sachs, Dan Fylstra, Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston, Ben Rosen, Ev, Biz, Jack, Bijan, Fred et al. A lot of people on that list, and I have had the privilege to know most of them, and I've met all of them.

First a very brief story of what Visicalc was and how it was surpassed by 1-2-3. And please understand this is my version of the story, I'm sure all the principals will have their own versions.

Visicalc was god. It was the Twitter of the early 80s. It was credited with creating the personal computer boom led by the Apple II. The product was created by the two Dans and Bob. Mitch worked for the company. Everyone said Mitch wrote spaghetti code. The two Dans and Bob didn't take him seriously. They were gods after all and Mitch was a mere mortal.

Along comes the IBM PC. It's a private thing, but since Visicalc rules, they got early access. The two Dans and Bob and Mitch all saw it. They started to port Visicalc to it, but didn't do anything special. After all, their software is what made the PC boom. The IBM PC would be just another Visicalc machine. Mitch didn't see it that way. So he got together with a brilliant coder, Jonathan Sachs (so much for the spaghetti code!) and got money from a very smart man in NY, Ben Rosen, and started Lotus to make 1-2-3. The two Dans and Bob knew about it, but they didn't take it seriously, because they were gods and Mitch writes spaghetti code.

But the one thing they didn't figure out about Mitch, that made him such a killer, was that he used the product so he knew what features would be most valuable to other users. Not saying the two Dans and Bob didn't, I'm pretty sure they did, but Mitch was really tuned in and watched users get confused and hung up with Visicalc, so he knew what to focus on for 1-2-3. I don't know for sure, but I bet the Visicalc team didn't really listen to Mitch.

When the IBM PC came out everyone wanted new software for it, and the Visicalc guys just offered the same old stuff, but Mitch's software had a sexy UI (for the day) and ran like a bat out of hell, used all the memory of the PC, and had a macro language, so everyone bought 1-2-3 and that was the end of Visicalc.

So somewhere out there is an idea for Twitter that, like 1-2-3, will represent the future, leaving Twitter to own the past. The challenge for brilliant software designers everywhere is to figure out what that is and to do it!

I've been studying it as long as anyone, I started using Twitter in the summer of 2006, and have been puzzling it out every damned day, waiting for Twitter to give me something new to sink my teeth into, and I'm convinced it's going to come from a Mitch-Jonathan-Ben combo out there, not from the original team. Probably for many of the same reasons Visicalc didn't rise to meet the needs of experienced spreadsheet users.

Here's my wish list:

0. It starts as an exact Twitter clone. Command for command. Then see item #2. I get to completely redesign the UI.

1. I want to start my own Twitter, for free. You host it for me. Anyone can join.

2. I have to be able to edit the template, fully, so I can make it look like my blog. This will allow designers, for the first time, to tinker with the look and feel of a Twitter. They played a big role in the blogging bootstrap, but have mostly been sidelined by the emergence of Twitter.

3. I want to map my domain to it, so it's part of scripting.com.

4. It's gotta be fast!

5. Lots of prefs that determine who can join, what they can do, various editorial roles. If you used Manila, I want to be able to delegate to managing editors and contributing editors.

6. Easy hooks into Disqus (and competitors) so each tweet can be the beginning of a conversation.

7. Plug-ins that hook into the UI so I can add commands to my Twitter, without modifying any source code.

8. The ability to attach a picture, movie, MP3 or any arbitrary data to a tweet, basically the same power as the RSS 2.0 enclosure element.

9. Full data portability. I've got to be able to run a script on my desktop every night to get a complete XML-based backup of my community.

I guess my point is this -- soon there will be enough Twitter users who yearn for something really new, and it seems doubtful that Twitter-the-Company will want to give it to them. With all the new users just getting started, they're going to focus on getting them up the curve. So we're really getting ready for the 1-2-3 of Twitter, the next level of power, so we can build richer and more connected networks.

See, that's what I really think Twitter is -- a Network Construction Kit for Real People. Sort of a Tinker Toys or Lego for networking. We've gone a long way with a few simple pieces. We need some more stuff to play with.

It's always like this, in every layer. At first we need training wheels, and a tech company to provide the whole package. Then we get comfortable with the technology and we want to order a la carte, to design our own meal. You can try to contain the users, lots of companies have -- but it never works. If this blog is about anything, it's about that -- documenting the never-ending cycle of tech booms and busts, bright new days, and endless platform wars, starting in 1994. It's all so predictable, you'd think one of the rising stars would figure it out and plan accordingly, but it seems they never do.

Unfair Twitter, Inc backlash

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:32:49 GMT

I feel the need to make so many disclaimers here.

1. Yes I have been critical of Twitter.

2. I am not on the Suggested User List.

3. I think they're making really big mistakes in managing the community. (That they are even managing the community at all is a bad sign. They should be trying actively to stay out of managing it.)

4. And about a million other things.

But...

I think some of the criticism of Twitter-the-Company has been over the top in the last few days. They've clearly been fighting some huge fires and the order in which they are 1. Acting and 2. Communicating makes sense to me, because I've been on their side of difficult situations, on a much much smaller scale, and my experience is that users don't treat the server guys fairly, no matter how you try to explain that you're doing the best that you can humanly possibly do. I've seen users do some horrible things while the fires are burning, and I see some of that now.

In the last week they've been fighting security issues, hacking, and a huge influx of new users. Any one of these things would be pretty taxing, but all at the same time -- well, it's gotta be hell on their side of the interface.

I've been watching the communication, and I think they're doing a really good job of explaining and their intentions are good.

That doesn't mean I don't think they brought on the stress themselves or that I support other things they're doing. I don't expect to be on the SUL, and I don't want to be. I'm not saying this to kiss up to them. Let's all try to be fair. That's my point.

Today's Morning Coffee Notes podcast

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 16:44:58 GMT

New podcast: Sidebar to last Sunday's Rebooting The News podcast with Jay Rosen, relating the blogger assignment desk idea to Hypercamp, which is a more comprehensive blueprint for how blogging becomes the backbone of news in the future.

Also a response to Kevin Marks and Steve Gillmor who, in comments, asked me to clarify a blog post about mixing data with Facebook and/or Twitter structures. Mystically they all seem to relate.

Finally, a tribute to the hippie-surfer culture of California.

PS: You can subscribe to this podcast in iTunes. It's the second command in the iTunes Advanced menu. Paste this URL into the dialog that appears and click OK.