Scripting News

Three Droidie pieces

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:23:00 GMT

I wrote two pieces over the weekend on the new Droidie blog.

1. Net-net: I love the Droid.

2. The holy grail in communicating cameras.

3. Press Up to Play? Huh?? Wazzat!?

A superfast RSS subscribe

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:49:04 GMT

I wanted an easier way to subscribe to feeds..

So I wrote down the way way I wanted it to work and this is what I came up with.

I'm on a site and think "Gee I'd like to subscribe to this." I see it's got an XML icon in the address bar.

I click on a Bookmarklet and after a few seconds, am transported to the Feeds page in River2. To subscribe, I just click the Submit button.

So that's how I made it work! :-)

http://newsriver.org/bookmarklet.html

Boom!

Coolest thing my father did

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:56:48 GMT

There's a meme going around about fathers and the coolest things they did when you were growing up.

Since Father's Day on October 3, I guess I've been reflecting on this stuff more than usual, and I have a story prepared. But first, my father actually had an opinion about this, he told a story that embarassed me about how he taught me to kiss. But I'm sure I thought it was cool when I was a toddler. Kids go for that kind of stuff. But the word we're looking for is "cool" and from my point of view, as an adult, here's the coolest thing my dad did.

Probably 1970 or 71. I was more than a bit of a rebellious teenager. So one day I got suspended from high school for bringing a bottle of wine to school. I was drinking with some friends in the yard before home room when the Dean of Discipline, Joseph Cotter, comes walking out, takes the bottle, escorts me to his office and calls my father to come get me. My dad drives to the Bronx from Queens, and I thought for sure I'm really going to catch it now, cause not only was I drinking wine in school, but it was his wine. I had stolen it from him. Oy.

Well, my dad comes in, and instead of giving me shit, he tells off Cotter. He says why don't you leave the kids alone. My chin dropped to the floor. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears. I thought I had moved to a different planet. The Dean thought so too, he was speechless. (He and I were enemies, I was, as you might imagine, and a major troublemaker. He thought he had me, but heh he no he didn't.)

So that has to be the coolest thing. On the drive home we talked about baseball and the weather, and he never punished me for taking the wine.

Update: Cotter died in Y2K.

Paul Carr's piece is rubbish (and disgusting)

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:08:58 GMT

This is how TechCrunch works. They write something stupid, then people write rebuttals explaining how it's stupid, building flow and page rank. It's the same method John Dvorak explains in an interview I did with him at the Apple Store in San Francisco a couple of years ago.

Anyway...

Carr's piece is rubbish, and just this once I'll take the bait.

Of course what the nurse at the hospital did, according to his account, was horrible. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that in addition to being a "citizen journalist" she was also a British citizen.

Of course, the movie-taker shooting the end of the life of the beautiful Iranian protestor did something horrible too. Imagine, not trying to help or comfort her as she bled to death in front of him. Okay, let's concede he was a citizen journalist (whatever that is), but then humor me and assume he was British too.

Or suppose the nurse and the guy in Iran were both homosexual. Or both were Christian, Jewish, Muslim, recovering alchoholics, ex-cons, single parents, only children, flat-footed, Mac users, high school dropouts, veterans, or whatever.

So we could conclude that everything negative anyone ever said about Christians was true, and homosexuals and British people.

This is Logic 101 and Carr failed it. And since he's bright, assume he failed it on purpose. Why? Refer to the Dvorak explanation.

This is what press people do. When Dvorak teases Mac people for flow, it's dishonest, but it's also fairly harmless. But Carr is doing something different. He's using people's pain not just for his own self-glorification but also to build flow to attract more ads and money. It's two levels of disgusting.

See also: Killing Straw Men.

A social namespace

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:15:38 GMT

A few days ago I added OPML export to listbrowser.org.

Today I want to extend that support to include information from the social network about each user. In this case, the social network is Twitter. I could see situations where this namespace might be used to present information from status.net or Facebook, when they support lists, as Twitter has.

I'm going to use the name xSocial. The "x" could stand for one of two things: 1. XML or 2. Experimental, in the spirit of MIME types that are considered experimental or ad hoc, or proposals of future standards, and have an "x" in front of their names. In other words, I'm doing this because someone has to go first, and maybe someone already has, so this is my way of asking for comments (or, more likely, flames).

Here's a list of elements that may appear in documents that use the namespace.

xSocial:userId -- a string of characters that identifies a user.

xSocial:userName -- the user's name.

xSocial:userDescription -- a string of characters describing the user.

xSocial:userLocation -- a string, the location of the user.

xSocial:userUrl -- the address of the user's web page.

xSocial:userStatuses -- the number of status messages from the user.

xSocial:userFollows -- the number of people the user follows.

xSocial:userFollowedBy -- the number of people who follow the user.

xSocial:userProfileImageUrl -- the address of the user's "avatar" image.

xSocial:userScreenName -- the name the user goes by in the network.

Caveats and disclaimers:

1. Think of Twitter as establishing the precedent here. When in doubt each of these elements is defined by the way Twitter uses them.

2. Twitter keeps other information with each user, this is just the list of information that I include, now, in the OPML that's generated by listbrowser.org. I may add or remove data in the future, or use a different namespace. If it changes, I will hopefully remember to include a comment under this post.

3. Here's an example of a file that illustrates.

4. The usual disclaimers apply, including but not limited to: A. It's even worse than it appears. B. I make shitty software. C. I am not a lawyer. D. My mother loves me.

archive.org's S3-alike service?

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:04:55 GMT

An intriguing tweet yesterday from Steven Levy of Wired Magazine, which, if true, could open huge doors for future-safe archives.

Brewster Kahle is talking about the Internet Archive making public S3 storage (what Amazon rents) free on their servers.

Does anyone have any more info on this?

If this is true, I will be building on it.

Update: It's true. Here's the tweet with the scoop.

ListBrowser gets a new tool

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:20:21 GMT

I've done a bunch of little stuff for listbrowser.org, fixes and cleanups, added more data to the list pages, and most important, they now link back to the list on twitter.com.

This raises the obvious question, how do you get from a list on twitter.com to the listbrowser.org version of that page?

For that, we needed a bookmarklet.

http://listbrowser.org/bookmarklet

Follow the instructions on the page and then, any time you're on a list in Twitter and want to start exploring in listbrowser, just click on the tool.

Not earthshaking, but certainly nice-to-have.

A Droid newbies site

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:19:35 GMT

It's a good idea when starting something new that you think you're going to do a lot of to start a "newbies" site, to accumulate wisdom about.

http://droidie.com/

That's my site. I just posted my "stake-in-the-ground" -- where I'm at after two days using the Droid. I'm building a nest there. So far so good.

FlickrFan merges with River2

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:33:35 GMT

I have at least a couple of new things this weekend.

The first is that FlickrFan, the Feed Reader for Pictures, has merged into River2. You can now use River2 the same way people were using FlickrFan, to subscribe to photo feeds from any source, including the AP and AFP feeds, and feeds from Flickr itself.

I've explained the transition on the FlickrFan home page.

I got a DROID

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:58:27 GMT

I had to do it. Went down to the Verizon store in El Cerrito and put down $350 and bought the $99 per month unlimited texting plan. Took it home, fell in love. It really is beautiful. I'm an iPhone user who loves the esthetics of the iPhone. The DROID is different, but also very nice.

I'm sure there will be annoyances, always are, but the first-time experience is great.

The web browser display is large enough to be usable. The gestures that work on the iPhone don't work on the DROID.

I find both the on-screen keyboard and the physical keyboard hard to use. The keys are too small.

Oddly, when entering text into Facebook or an email, typing is natural and easy. It's only a pain when entering a username or password. I wonder why this is. (Probably has more to do with the operator than anything.)

The setting system makes sense. There are a few puzzlers. It allows you to format an SD card, but I don't see one. I've read the docs, very limited, but they make no mention of it.

They just sent me a text message asking me to sign onto their website, but the password doesn't work. Tried 8 times. Asked them to send a new one, they sent the same one again. I'll come back to this.

Took some pictures with the camera. Example.

Can't figure out how to get some music onto it. Plugged in the USB cable into my Mac but it doesn't mount as a hard drive. Don't tell me I need to use iTunes -- please!

Update: Quick podcast review, recorded on the DROID speaker phone using Cinch. A little baseball philosophy thrown in at no extra cost!

Update: How do I get music on this thing? Tried something dumb, after mounting it on my Mac desktop, I copied the contents of a Little Feat album into a folder I named Music. Let's see if the Music app on the Droid can find it. I launch the Music app and it says Sorry, your SD card is busy. Interesting! Let me try unmounting it. I had to click in the menubar to unmount it, and then boom (sorry Steve) the music app found my Little Feat songs. This is how it's supposed to work. Goodbye iTunes. Forever.

Update: It plays iPod-size movies, just watched a bit of fargo.m4v. Looks great.

Update: Second podcast of the day, goes into the way Apple is becoming Google and Google is becoming Apple and why that's good for everyone. Less than 6 minutes. Worth it, imho.

Peek was worth a peek

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:09:55 GMT

I thought perhaps the Peek email device might be a good service to get for a family member who's not very technical. I wanted them to have access to text messaging, and thought its advertised simplicity might be the answer. So I bought a device for $49 and bought one month of service for $19.95, with the understanding that it's not a service plan, and if I didn't like it, I could easily opt-out.

I used it for a few days and decided it wasn't what I wanted. It is simple, but the text messaging feature is a hack on top of email, and they put ads for their service in the text messages, and texting is more or less one-way, and it's the wrong way for my application. It's easy for the Peek user to send text messages but virtually impossible for them to receive them. This didn't suit the application I had in mind, because I wanted the ability to send messages to the family member. I didn't think she'd be sending many on her own (she doesn't now).

So I decided to opt out. There's no way to do it from the website. They don't explain how to opt out the FAQ. When I called the sales department, they said I could turn the service off, but I wouldn't be able to use the remaining time on the month worth of service I had already purchased. I said that's unacceptable. I wanted to get off the monthly plan and use the remainder of the time I had already purchased. (Maybe I'd find another use for it?)

After a lot of back and forth, the service person, Jacqueline, said I should get in touch with the operations manager, David Hung. I'm going to email him a pointer to this blog post.

Net-net, Peek is an attractive device, the service works reasonably well for email, but not for texting. It is simple to set up and use. However they don't make it easy to get out. At this point, I'm still going to charged for $19.95 on December 2. They'll probably do what I asked after reading this blog post, but you shouldn't have to write a blog post for what should be a routine matter. It should be easy to turn the automatic renewal off and on as you wish.

Twitter needs a command-line

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:10:31 GMT

Imagine a terminal program that accepted commands like:

twitter> follow davewiner

twitter> follow ev

twitter> unfollow sexygirl209

twitter> addtolist scoble halfmoonbay -u

The first few commands are obvious, the last would add scoble to a list called halfmoonbay and unfollow him.

I stumbled across this as I was thinking about how to implement follow and unfollow commands in listbrowser.org. Usually this would mean supporting OAuth, which is not a big deal, I already have the code, but it's a pain for users. Another site they have to trust. Even though OAuth is better than giving away my password, it's not much better.

Then I thought how nice it is for a developer to just be able to shoot the text of a tweet over at the status box on Twitter, where the user is already logged-in. But that just works for tweets. What about follow and unfollow, and list operations? And a myriad of other chores that now you can do either interactively or through the API.

Why not have something in the middle, more techy than the point and click interface, but easier than the API. We already have an idea how that works -- it's a command-line interface.

To be clear, there are already command-line interfaces for Twitter, but they run on the desktop. We need a CLI that runs as a web app from a public server. It could come from Twitter, Inc, or could be done by a developer. If there's more than one, it would be nice if they used the same syntax.

If you're already working on this, post a note in the comments or send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com.

WordPress and rssCloud

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:21:56 GMT

Joseph Scott has a post on the main WordPress site that explains that they are now supporting the two enhancements that were announced here on October 16.

What this means: Now any aggregator that wants instant updates of WordPress sites can have it. It was an issue for complex sites like Google Reader, that's why we enhanced our apps, so they could hook into rssCloud and provide instant updates to their users. If you use Google Reader or My Yahoo or Bloglines, tell them you want rssCloud support so you can get instant WordPress updates from sites like CNN, TechCrunch, GigaOm (and of course) Scripting News!

WordPress also fixed a problem that could prevent RSS feeds from reflecting the change immediately. That was a problem because sometimes we'd receive notification that a feed had changed, and then would go read the feed only to find that it hadn't!

Many thanks, once again, to the great people at Automattic.

Let The World Change You

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:47:25 GMT

I have a problem with entrepreneurs who say they want to Change The World.

Isn't that a lot to take on? How do you know your idea for changing the world is what the world needs? What if you Change The World and instead of making it better you make it suck. What then?

I am a former young person who wanted to Change The World himself. I look back at that young person, and think -- he was lovely in many ways but he made a pretty good mess of his life, because he had no clue who he was and how he got that way. Change The World? Good thing that didn't happen!

As someone who just watched his father die, I don't think any of us have the first clue how the world works. My father was a smart man, spent a lot of time thinking, and at the end, he may have understood 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of how the world works. And some of that was based on faulty assumptions. Yet my father would always give a couple of bucks to anyone who asked for it. And if you wanted to take a picture of him, no matter how old or sick he got, he always put on a smile and let you take it, and if you asked why, he shrugged it off, as if there was any reason to care. A week before he died, I tried to teach him to use Twitter, but he said he didn't have time. He was right.

So I've recently seen the end. I don't think too many people get much further than my dad did. He lived to be 80, grew up in Europe, fled from a war, fought in a war, raised a family, was married 55 years, got an education, taught, went to museums and the ballet and opera, traveled everywhere, and I don't think he would have said, at the end, he had any idea how to Change The World. It's only youth that figures it knows, but that's because of strong chemicals and not knowing what you don't know. It's an illusion.

Change is made by all of us, over many generations. The best we can do is make a few other people happy for a while, make ourselves happy, and if you do that, and leave the place a little nicer for having been here, I say -- Job Well Done!

Maybe instead of changing the world, relax, and Let The World Change You. That's closer to what actually happens in life, no matter how rich or famous (or not) you are.

See also: Transcendental Money.

Twitter's SUL as a list

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:09:36 GMT

Here's the Suggested User List as a list.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/twitter-s-sul

How I produced it.

I created a fake account, gristmillie, visited the Suggested Users page, checked them all and followed them. Then, from my own account, I went to the page of people she follows, went through each one and checked it, adding it to my list.

A caveat, this will go out of date when they add more people to the list.

Here's the listbrowser.org rendering, and the OPML version.

OPML for Twitter lists

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:27:31 GMT

A new feature of listbrowser.org.

When you're displaying a list, you'll see a white-on-orange XML icon at the bottom of the page, right next to the (also new) Refresh icon. Click the XML icon and you'll get an OPML rendering of the list. You should then be able to import that OPML into Google Reader or some other feed aggregator just like any other OPML file. What that means? Like everything related to Twitter lists, it's too early to tell. But one thing is for sure, you can now use Twitter to author OPML. That in itself is pretty new idea. (It's totally new.)

Here's a screen shot showing where the XML button is on my innovators list. This is the OPML version of that page.

BTW, one of the reasons the OPML Editor is called the OPML Editor is that you can enter that address in the Open URL dialog in the File menu and it'll open in the editor. This is a convenient way to create mashups of Twitter lists. At this point I haven't got a way to get OPML into Twitter, but you gotta figure that's coming.

I've got some more kickass features in the pipe. This is very very fertile ground.

PS: The Refresh button tells listbrowser.org to get the list from Twitter, instead of using the copy it has cached. Normally it'll reload on its own after an hour, but if you just made a change to a list and want listbrowser to reflect that, just hit the Refresh button when viewing the list.

Introducing listbrowser.org

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:51:22 GMT

I wanted a quick way to browse around to see what people are doing with the new Twitter lists feature. So I put this simple app together.

http://listbrowser.org/

If you want to jump into your own lists, or someone else's, just enter their username in the box below and click the Go button.

Here are some interesting jump-off points.

My Berkman Center list.

Tweetdeck's Team list.

Patrick LaForge's Breaking News list.

If you have any questions or comments, please post them here.

What's the root list of Twitter?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:44:04 GMT

My hard drive has a top level, it's called Macintosh HD.

On PCs it's C:

Yahoo's home page is the root of its directory.

Suppose you were going to design a list browser for Twitter, one that would allow you to hop from list to user to their lists to other users and their lists and on and on.

Where would you begin?

There is clearly no top to this thing. Which imho is good, the same as the web. There is no Home Page, no place everyone starts. It's why the web is open and democratic and without a bottleneck and has no gatekeeper to keep you out. Hat's off to TBL for designing it that way.

That still leaves me with the problem...

Rebooting the News moves

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:32:28 GMT

Beginning with this morning's show, at 9AM Pacific...

The site is moving to wordpress.com.

The feed should continue to work, but you may find that all the posts are new again now that the guids have changed.

The feed is located here now.

http://rebootnews.com/feed/

It seems that WordPress does a redirect, automatically from rss.xml (the old location) to the new one.

The editorial system should work a lot better, and I hope more interesting discussions will evolve from each show.

How Google got left behind

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:15:27 GMT

Suppose there's a topic you're interested in and you want to stay current on it. What tool would you use to do that?

That's at least part of the purpose of the whole push to "realtime" stuff. I've been writing about it since 1997, I called it Just-In-Time Search. Similar ideas, but not exactly.

When you search for friends you always get the same old pictures, because the search engine reports them in order of relevance. Perhaps there are newer pictures, but they're nowhere near the top, and it might not even consider them relevant enough to index.

We need a search engine whose primary axis is currency, that values news and images based on their newness, not by how many others are pointing to it. Google has News Alerts, but that's it. Their news system is geared toward big stories. I'm interested in the small stuff their search engine covers. There's news there too.

Update: A commenter says that Google does have time-based search. I'll check it out.