Scripting News for 6/30/2007

Today’s iPhone isn’t a reading device 

Here’s how the browser on my desktop works.

I click on a link and immediately start reading the text on the screen.

When I click on a link in Safari on the iPhone, before I can read anything, I have to futz with the display resolution of the browser to make the text visible. This may not sound like a problem, but what a distraction, when following a link, before getting the idea, your mind has to take a detour into managing the device. In reading as in the movies, suspension of disbelief is broken when your mind has to exit the space of ideas and manage the projection device. It’s wrong for the device to ask you this, even as a setup issue it should be usable out of the box, but it’s unacceptable that it make the user configure the browser every time it displays a new page.

Today’s iPhone isn’t a reading device. It wouldn’t take much to configure the browser to be an excellent reading device, but Apple will have to give up the idea that the browser should work the same as the desktop browsers do. The iPhone is nowhere near as capable as a desktop display. Wishing it were so, and shifting the burden to the user to make it so, is not an acceptable solution.

I thought I could overcome this by creating a special version of a site just for the iPhone that crammed all the text into a narrow column, thinking that the browser wouldn’t see any need to make the text small because it would have all the necessary horizontal screen real estate to display every character at a fully visible resolution.

Nope. It still displays the text in an unreadably small font.

Here’s a photo of the iPhone displaying a test page.

It’s behaving like no web browser I’ve ever seen, and it’s behaving badly. It’s breaking an implicit agreement between all platforms that co-exist on the web. We create sites that assume nothing about the device they’re being rendered on, and browsers should take care to make our text readable for users of their device. The iPhone web browser doesn’t keep that promise.

Caveat about ‘initial’ reviews 

One of the things I’ve learned from being a developer is to keep a notebook with my impressions, the things that confused me, the questions I have. That was before I had a weblog. Nowadays that notebook is public, which helps me share my process with others.

This has a lot of advantages, for one, it gets me answers more quickly. It also teaches other developers how users think, think of this as a small contribution to improved usability in all products. It also provides feedback to the developers of the products I’m using, if they’re listening (I find out later they often are).

So with that caveat — I’m still not able to synch the iPod in the iPhone the way I want to do it. I turned off the automatic synching on the front page of the iPhone panel in iTunes, now all the songs appear, but they’re grayed out. I want to remove them all. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do it.

Another problem, I tried connecting a set of Bose headphones into the headphone jack on the iPhone. No music comes out the other end. Huh?

PS: I was able to reclaim all the space used by the deleted songs by choosing to Synch only selected playlists, and selecting none of them. When I hit the Apply button magically my used space went from 3.8GB to 0.2GB. I have no idea why this worked, but it did.

Picture worth 1,000,000 words 

Paulo: “Nothing like a good conversation with a friend.”

Initial review of iPhone 

I just spent a couple of hours playing with my new iPhone.

I remember that the first few times I try a new cell phone, I wish it would just work the way my old one did. So I’m trying to factor that in, and imagine what it will be like to use it later, but it’s not easy.

I was able to register with AT&T, choose a service plan, get a phone number, and make a phone call. I was able to use Google Maps to locate my house, and while YouTube was slow, and so was the email app, even though both were running over my fast wifi as opposed to the relatively slow AT&T network, they were all usable and useful, and in some cases represent features the Blackberry doesn’t have, and would be nice to have. But there are optimizations I hope Apple makes soon.

This is my fifth iPod, and it works differently from the last one. I like to use my iPod with manual synchronization, but that doesn’t appear to be possible with this one. I’m not happy about that! I have my iPod act down, and I want to use this relatively small one (it has just a 4GB capacity) the same way I use my larger, 60GB video iPod. It doesn’t seem possible.

Look, all the other people reviewing the iPhone are gushing. I just don’t have that in me, at least at the beginning.

And there’s a major usability problem with the Safari web browser, it’s hard to believe that Apple didn’t see and fix this problem before shipping, because it seems to make all websites unusable in the default configuration, with the default font choice, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to change their choice of font. Is it possible they made this choice so that the TV commercial would look good, and forgot to test the browser the way real people will use it? I must be missing something??

(After watching the commercial I have an idea how this might work. There seems to be a tapping interface that makes the text larger. Hmmm.)

Given that all developers are going to be using Safari as their development platform, this problem seems vexing.

I took a couple of screen shots to illustrate.

Here’s my Blackberry, in its default configuration, being used to read this weblog. You can click on the picture to enlarge it.

And here’s the same site on my iPhone. My eyesight isn’t great, but I can’t imagine even someone with perfect eyesight being able to read this.

Has anyone figured out how to change the default font size in Safari?

Postscript about “initial” reviews.

Dan Gillmor: “This feels like a beta product.”

Scripting News for 6/29/2007

Phone-to-twittergram breakthrough! 

Roger Strickland has a bare-bones phone to Twittergram system working.

I just called his service on my Blackberry, recorded a Twittergram, and it was posted through the web service.

Yehi!!

The number to call is 888-281-3613. Don’t talk too long (remember the 200K limit). Hang up when you’re done.

Awesome!!

Others are working in this area as well, but Roger was the first to break through with working functionality.

I’ll be leaving a voice TwitterGram from my iPhone, with any luck, in less than an hour.

This is coooooool.

Peets on University has great wifi 

The free wifi from the Apple store reaches across the street into Peets. So you get excellent coverage here and it’s free and fast. Thanks Apple.

m.twittergram.com is live! 

Want to hear what people are twittering about on your mobile device?

http://m.twittergram.com/

It works on my Blackberry, it launches a music player app when I click on one of the links, but I haven’t figured out how to get it to play. Ooops.

Does it work with the iPhone? We’ll find out sooon.

How does it work on your mobile device? Is it TwitterGram-capable?

BTW, we should have a way to post a TwitterGram from a cellphone soon, maybe even later today.

iPhone day arrives 

Big news from Palo Alto. A UPS truck pulls up at the Apple Store. Does it contain the iPhones. No one knows for sure!

It’s fun to watch the play by play!

Everybody please remember, it’s just a phone, okay?

uncov reviews Pownce 

I love these guys whoever they are.

“Pownce also feels a little bit like Twitter except that its user interface makes you want to gouge your eyeballs out with a fork.”

They also point out that it’s a lot like FTP, and is an overpriced repackaging of Amazon S3. And that the size limits prevent you from sharing anything really useful.

ISPs from the AOL era 

Quickly, I thought this morning I’d install the Comcast self-install network interface that arrived via UPS yesterday. Well, the first part went quickly, I got connected, but then it wanted me to download an installation kit, which once downloaded on my Mac (it came in as an hqx, so they clearly understood it was a Mac) wouldn’t run because it required Internet Explorer. I imagine that’s a big support headache for them.

No problem for me, I just launched Parallels, but it couldn’t find the cable modem, so I’m stuck, which is probably okay, because I don’t really want to install anything to get my second ISP connection in the house. I have six computers, so only one is going to get anything installed on it. And the clue that I didn’t want to do it was the requirement that you disable all anti-virus software. Uh huh. Yeah, and why exactly should I do that?

They also require that you get a comcast.net mail address.

When do you think buying Internet connectivity will get you that and only that.

PS: Don Cook, a Mac user, called Comcast, they set it up on their end, and that was that. I figured that’s all we had to do. I’ll call them tomorrow.

Scripting News for 6/28/2007

Today’s stuffff 

nytimesriver.com is updating again. Anything you can do to help build word of mouth would be much appreciated!

A Morning Coffee Notes podcast where I discuss where twittergram.com is at.

Scoble & Son are first in line at the Apple store in Palo Alto. Oh the humanity.

Scoble: “Drop by and make fun of me.”

Nik Cubrilovic on iPhone as a platform.

My profile page on Pownce.

Wait in line without waiting in line 

Join Thomas Hawk and the Scobles as they wait in line outside the Apple store in Palo Alto.

As I explain in today’s podcast… 

Two features I want to add to twittergram.com, asap.

1. A telephone interface. Remember the use-case with a driver in a car, wanting to send a brief message of love to his or her pal, alone at home? Odeo, the company that Twitter grew out of, has this software. BlogTalkRadio, Jott, and others, have it too. A simple feature that allows such a service to send an XML-RPC message to the TwitterGram web service is all that’s required to make the connection.

2. A Flash module that records an MP3, as a standalone app, or to be embedded in the twittergram home page. This removes a step in the “authoring” process, having to find and launch an MP3 recording app, and then save the result to disk, then find that file in the web page. All that can be reduced to a single step with a Flash module.

I have several other items on my to-do list, that I won’t need help to accomplish, but these two sub-projects are outside my reach.

twittergram.com can now handle wav files 

As an experiment, I uploaded a mini-podcast I did with my parents in 2004. It’s a wav file.

There is a new optional parameter on the web service. Scroll down to the section in red to see the change (eventually the color will be removed).

The web interface has also been changed to support wavs. You don’t need to know anything other than you can choose a wav from the file dialog and if it meets the size criteria, it should work.

This feature was added to help it work with another service that can only generate wav files. In other words, it’s a market-driven feature.

Scripting News for 6/27/2007

Twittergrams, Day 5 

We reach a new milestone today, now, in addition to a web service that developers can hook into, there’s now a web app, that anyone can use to upload a small 200K or less MP3 to the TwitterGram service.

http://twittergram.com/

Enter your Twitter username and password, a title for your gram, and choose the MP3 file on your local system. Most people who have tested it have been successful. If you have any questions or comments, post them here.

An obvious next step is to include in the web app the ability to record the MP3, which will remove one more big step from the process. Anyone who can help with a Flash app that I can embed to do the recording, please post a comment. Thanks in advance!

Yesterday, Wired ran a very nice piece on TwitterGrams. Like everyone, including me, they say the jury is out on the idea. But they’re willing to give it a chance. Excellent and thank you. Nice picture too, I like the glasses.

I recorded my own TwitterGram this morning to introduce the new web app.

Some of today’s grams 

200K turns some people into Haiku poets.

Shareski wants you to name that tune.

Or this funk classic. (On the tip of my tongue.)

Amyloo wants to know what movie?

Yes, it’s an advertising medium, with just 200K.

And it’s good for some things that are too painful to contemplate.

It’s all every bit as pointless as Twitter itself.

Here’s the RSS 2.0 feed, with enclosures. Try it in your favorite podcatcher, or iTunes.

Since we’re into puzzles today 

Marc Canter and many other people think I’m full of it when I say the right number of identity systems for each user is 1. But I am right. And I know it.

It’s a Zen puzzle, almost a riddle, one which a smart user like my pal Ponzi would never be confused by. You have to be a great geek tech genius like Marc to get it wrong.

Here’s the puzzle. If all identity systems you use interoperate seamlessly, grasshopper, how many identity systems do you use?

Here’s a hint. How many email systems do you use? RSS systems? Web systems? The correct answers are 1, 1, and 1.

The meme spreads nicely 

Rafe: “Pownce an interesting alternative to Twittergram.”

And everyone is invited to use Twittergram. If you dare!

Tinyurl has an API 

Of course I’d like to do what Twitter does, and generate a Tinyurl in place of a longish URL for each TwitterGram. I had assumed all along that Twitter had a special deal with the TInyurl folks, but apparently not so. They have an open API that is simplicity itself. It’s so simple it’s almost hard to describe.

Try clicking on this link:

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://scripting.com/

It returns a Tinyurl. Copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into the address bar of your browser. it should take you to the home page of my weblog. Apparently it works for any URL you give it. And of course you can call it from a script just as easily as you click a link in a browser. Very nice!

I’m going to put this into twittergram.com, posthaste.

PS: It’s in, and it works.

She nails it 

Ponzi: “How do we decide how many social networks is enough? Are there any central tools that can load all our info for us into multiple sites?”

The answer to the first question, imho, is: 1.

To the second, no, not until we know which one is the answer to the first question.

White man speak with forked tongue!

PS: Yesterday’s post on identity is required to understand my answers here.

Scripting News for 6/26/2007

Tonight’s message 

Find out about tonight’s dinner by listening to my latest TwitterGram.

Always a quickie, guaranteed to be 200K or less. A bite-size podcast.

BTW, the blogger whose name escaped me is Berkeley neighbor Scott Rosenberg.

Does Peter have an iPhone? We’ll let you know.

You can spy on the festivities through the KitchenCam!

River of News everywhere, now, please 

AOL embraces River of News. Why doesn’t everyone else just go ahead and do it too. Think about it. When you want news, you want the new stuff, you don’t want to wade through sections looking for the new stuff. You want the computer to find it for you. Too many electronic news sites are patterned after newspapers, that published once a day. In the real world of today, news is published all the time. Might as well get used to it, it’s not going to change. Oh the insanity of the Apple iPhone ads. They show the user panning over the NY Times website front page and it looks like paper news. What a joke. 25 years from now today’s kids will look at that as the definition of insane.

John Dvorak: “This is so easy that I’m going insane!”

Glenn Fleishman: “The iPhone has a very small screen compared to even the tiniest laptop.”

TwitterGram, Day 4 

Garrick Van Buren has the first client for the TwitterGram web service, written in AppleScript, for Audio Hijack Pro.

I’m working on a website that connects up to the web service. Slowly at first, the bootstrap begins.

Today’s links 

Uncov: “Ikan is a barcode scanner that you use to scan the empty packages of shit when you throw it out so you know to buy more. It’s got some web integration thing so it will e-mail you a shopping list. It will even send your list to an online grocer!”

Les Orchard: “If I were Scoble, and I read this, my immediate response would be to write a nice, long essay on arm farting.”

NakedJen: “I’m going to keep wearing my seatbelt.”

We’re getting close 

Paolo writes about open relationship standards.

In the last couple of days I’ve written, debugged and refined a web service that does TwitterGrams. It builds on Twitter’s identity system, much the way I imagine I’d build off an open identity system. That is to say that Twitter is almost everything I’d want from an open identity system. But not everything. I have a feeling that Mike Graves is nodding as he reads this, and I believe he knows what the missing piece is. And it’s one that Twitter (or anyone else) could add, almost trivially.

What’s missing: The ability for any app to store information associated with an account. Each person defines a namespace that can connect up to any other person with a namespace. At the intersection between two users could be (I’m channeling Marc Canter here) an appointment, a photograph (or many), a movie, a weblog, you name it. Marc could decide that this post belongs in his namespace in addition to mine (where the original lives). That’s what the permalink is for.

Are we close? Yes we are. The API for TwitterGrams borrows a key idea from the MetaWeblog API, that a RSS item can hitch a ride with every bit that travels over the pipe. There’s the metadata. David Weinberger should be happy.

BTW, the connection to Twitter’s identity system is simplicity itself. They do nice work over there. Thanks!

Scripting News for 6/25/2007

Web service docs 

The TwitterGram web service is up and running.

Documentation with sample code is up too.

Questions, comments are welcome, as are client apps.

Lots of stuff remains to be done. A web browser user interface, RSS feed, press tour.

Paulo Fierro has a Twit O’Gram player.

TwitterGrams, Day 3 

Tom Simonite at New Scientist has mixed feelings about TwitterGrams.

Here’s an example use-case. You’re driving in your car and thinking of your dog at home, alone, missing you (and you missing your bud too of course). So you pick up the cell phone, speed dial the TwitterGram voice service (it doesn’t exist yet) and say some reassuring words to your pal.

Now at home you have a special PuppyGram client running on your MacMini or AppleTV or somesuch. Your picture comes on the screen, and the computer barks three or four times to get the attention of your best friend. And then your little message comes on screen.

Okay, that’s a trivial example, but Twitter is all about trivial examples. It’s the stuff of no importance whatsoever that make us feel nice about being human.

In any case I’m having a blast writing the web service. it’s almost ready to deploy.

PS: Almost every domain with the word “cast” is taken. We have podcasting to thank for that.

PPS: Yesterday there were 29 hits on Google for TwitterGram. At noon today there are 406.

Am I competing? 

Yes and no.

I had a philosophical talk about this last week with Marc Canter. For a long time, he and Doc Searls had been saying publicly that I ought to do something to help unify the identity space. Mike Graves, formerly of VeriSign, was saying similar things. I always wondered what they meant. Did they know how I would do it, if I would try to do it?

Last week I spelled it out for Marc. If I try to coalesce some kind of standard the only way to do it is by competing. Writing a spec and asking nicely if everyone would implement it gets you nowhere. The only way to get something to stick is to put up a compelling app, and let the market drive a standard. Tech people don’t play nice unless the market forces them to.

That’s how it worked with RSS. There was a period of a few years when my software and content dominated, and that’s how RSS came to be the powerhouse it is. I had the three sides of the puzzle needed to drive a standard. 1. A tool that generates the content. 2. A tool that consumes the content (two horrible words, but what are you going to do) and 3. Content.

1. and 2. were Radio UserLand. It was a blogging tool that generated RSS 0.92 and then RSS 2.0, and an aggregator that consumed these formats (and all others of course). Following the logic of Postel’s Law, we were conservative in what we send, and liberal in what we receive. And #3 was at first Scripting News, and then the content flow of our very powerful partner, The New York Times. 1, 2 and 3, that’s all it took. In other words, everything.

So if TwitterGrams take off, and I think they might, I’m going to have to put some software in the middle of it. A new branch to the coral reef that Twitter is. And then people can build compatible front ends, and compatible back ends, and everybody will be happy. Hopefully when the dust settles, if there is something to this, I’ll be left with something of value to reward me for the risk and effort (and the years of barking up fruitless trees and chasing down blind aleys, and convincing people they should listen to me). But, as I have found out many times, there are no guarantees if you choose to work openly, which I do.

BTW, hats off to the folks at Twitter for having the guts to work openly themselves. Without their very courageous and liberal API I would never attempt such a project.

Anyway, if you have a service that could be turned into the PuppyGram service described above, go for it. I may do one myself, I do have a desktop client I like to work in, but there’s room for so many, in so many different environments. Think about all the places RSS reaches and that’ll give you some idea how diverse this kind of market can be.

Between Mike and Charles 

Charles Cooper says “the blogosphere” needs to get real about the line between church and state.

My response: The tech blogosphere was invented because of the sloppy church-state line at CNet and other professional pubs. They’re the last people who get to preach this particular gospel.

Inside the tech industry, we all know what’s going on there. In private, no one is confused. They always take the side of big companies over small ones, even when it’s ridiculous to do so. The reason — big companies advertise, they pay their salaries. And the little ones are too little to make a difference. Even if their products are standard-setters. Do they look out for their readers or their bottom lines? Of course, they throw the readers under the bus (a metaphor that should be thrown under the bus, btw).

Further, there is no such thing as “the blogosphere” and there’s no way for the lines to be anything other than what they are. Of course, individual bloggers can do something about it. And of course we all know who Cooper is talking about, Mike Arrington.

Now this is going to blow Mike away — I’m going to defend him. Not because he’s my friend, even though he is, but because he’s doing a bunch of things right, and before everyone goes too far, let’s understand what that is.

Mike doesn’t tell bedtime stories, or mask his position behind vague words. He comes right out with it, and tells you he’s pissed off, or to pound sand, or worse. Sometimes I can’t believe the things he says, but at least he’s not dancing around it, like some other people do. (More on that in a bit.)

Mike gets stories that CNet doesn’t get, that no one else gets. Look at the piece he did on Mitch Kapor’s product earlier today. Compare that against the nonsense that passes for tech news done by the pros. They put reporters on the stories who have no idea what they’re writing about, and you can tell. Or old school guys who only quote their friends, and haven’t found a new trend or product in years. All they know is that Apple, Google and Microsoft are important and that little companies are not. So it’s a long time before a CNet hack gets to tell Mike how to do his job, even if he does act as a mouthpiece for a crappy Microsoft campaign (I wish he wouldn’t do that).

On the other hand, Mike says he values loyalty above all else, but he turns his back on his friends far too often, and doesn’t call some people on their hypocrisy when he really should. If he’s really a gunslinger, he needs to take it out of the holster a little more frequently, and aim it at some people who aren’t such easy targets. I want the doors to open wide, and the self-dealing in-breeding to stop. It’s making it really hard to make progress. Too hard.

The fact is that it’s a fucked up little industry, and everyone needs to clean house. There are some pockets of brightness, and we need to help those shine, and we also need to shine the light on the dirty practices that pay your bills, but hurt everyone else. That’s creeping into what we used to call the blogosphere, and that’s the scary thing. It’s not that Mike needs to become more like CNet, it’s that Mike is becoming too much like CNet.

Charles, Mike, back to you.

Scripting News for 6/24/2007

I give up 

I don’t identify as a consumer. Why not get it over with and refer to me as a parasite.

Will Linked-in open up? 

Apparently Linked-in is considering its options as a platform with an API. The reason: Facebook, newly open to developers, is stealing its thunder. It would be cool if they just implemented an identity service that managed relationships between users, and allowed developers to define the relationships. Rather than incrementally one-upping each other by being slightly more open, why not go all the way, and operate an indentity service for your own application and for everyone else. This would put Linked-in (or whoever) at the center of Internet 3.0.

A few days ago, I wrote about explosive deconstruction of social networks, and said I didn’t know how it was going to happen but it was definitely going to happen. I posited that perhaps Twitter was enough of an identity system to serve as the core, and since then I have been able to latch a compelling app onto Twitter, one that captured a lot of people’s imaginations in less than 48 hours. So that tells me that Twitter is probably sufficient (I have to finish the implementation).

Twitter meets podcasting, day 2 

Continuing yesterday’s thread.

I’m now working on a web service that takes four parameters:

1. username (a string)

2. password (a string)

3. MP3 bits (base64-encoded binary)

4. metadata (a struct)

The username and password are for the user’s Twitter account. This data passes through the web service, it is not retained. You have my word of honor on that.

The bits are the “gram” — the official limit is 200K, but there’s a little bit of grace. (We’ll accept slightly more than 200K.)

The metadata is a struct that can contain fields that have the same names as an RSS 2.0 item, such as title, link, description, category, source, etc. Very much like the Metaweblog API. Not all the elements are acceptable, but ones that aren’t are ignored. (For example, enclosure.) All are optional, as is the struct itself. The title, if present, is used in forming the Twitter post. The remaining elements are retained, and used to form feed(s).

The twits are also posted to a global Twitter account — twitogram. (They don’t allow accounts whose name begin with “twitter.”)

The username and password must be valid for the MP3 to be retained.

The service returns a string, if successful, the URL where the gram is stored. (I’m using Amazon S3 for the storage, so it should be fairly reliable.)

There’s a limit to the number of grams you can post over time. Not sure exactly what the limit will be. Maybe no more than one every ten minutes? Interested in people’s opinion.

The ideal client for this service, it seems, is Flash, because it can do the MP3 recording and has XML-RPC support. I will also implement a RESTful interface.

Disclaimer #1: Who does he think he is? Just some guy.

Disclaimer #2: My mother loves me. (I think.)

More dislcaimers will follow.

Postscript #1: 29 hits today for TwitterGram.

Sign of the time 

Rafe Needleman: “Go to friend’s wedding or blog Federated fracas?”

Berkeley hills 

This is the neighborhood I take my walks in.

What you can’t tell from the picture is how perfect the climate is for exercise.

I think it’s the nicest weather in the whole United States.

Scripting News for 6/23/2007

Twitter meets podcasting? 

The other day I was thinking about other kinds of Twitters. The thing we like about Twitter is that you can’t post a book-length story about what’s going on right now, you can only do a 140-character synopsis — “I just got on BART” or “Driving to NoobCamp.” It’s one of those Worse Is Better or Less Is More things we like so much about the Internet. So I started making a list of different kinds of Twitter, and immediately gravitated to something I call TwitterGram, where you use the 140 characters to link to a 200K audio message. Think of it as Twitter meets podcasting.

So I created one these messages. Click on the link below to listen to it.

http://twittergram.com/dave/audiogram001.mp3

I linked to this message from my Twitter acct.

If you want to play the game, record a response, no more than 200K, upload it somewhere, and link to it from your Twitter account, and put @davewiner somewhere in the text of the twit (so I will see it). Of course I’ll be surprised if anyone actually responds, but what the heck, maybe people will.

I have a funny feeling Chris Pirillo will like this.

Tom Morris responded! Yehi!!

My response to Tom’s twittergram.

George Ellenberg says it’s a great idea, but not practical because it’s too much work.

My response to George is basically, yes, but if it’s fun and people like it, it can be made easy.

Tom Morris suggests a URL scheme for TG’s.

Twittergram #4. In the first few hours of brainstorming you don’t have to deal with every issue every person might raise. Sometimes it’s better just to suspend criticism, you don’t even know if the idea of the moment is what you’re going to implement. There’s always someone who says you can’t do it. Amazing how many of the big ideas of the Internet had to go through the objections of people who thought it couldn’t work.

Amyloo stays well within the 200K limit. Thanks!

This is kind of like the Dixie podcast we did in 2005.

Twittergram #5. I’m going out for a bit, but when I get back I’ll put up a web service that takes care of a bunch of the details of doing Twittergrams. Not all of them, but a lot. You’ll need to have software on the desktop that can record an MP3, and that can send an XML-RPC or REST message to a server. You’ll get back a URL, but you won’t really need it, because it’ll also take care of posting the MP3 to Twitter. And it’ll probably also generate an RSS feed (it would be kind of ridiculous if I didn’t do that too, as far as I know Twitter doesn’t understand enclosures, and this app begs for them).

Moving day for Berkman Center 

Baker House, the old Berkman Center building, where I had an office for a couple of years, is on the move. The building is moving down Mass Ave. It’s a historic building so it can’t be demolished and the law school wants to buid something new and modern where the building used to be.

The Ukranian Center, another historic building, is also moving today.

Comments on people-ready 

Re the “people-ready” discussion.

There are a couple of reasons why the writers shouldn’t have done what they did, and in all the comments already posted, no one has gotten to this.

First, Mike Arrington implies, in the title of his post, that everyone knows about this practice. Maybe it’s disclosed, quite possibly he has written about it and I missed it. But to imply that everyone knows they’re doing it is wrong. I didn’t. I’m sure others didn’t as well.

Second, and this is the really important one. It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another example of being paid to say something supportive of Microsoft.

The only one of the people involved who showed any interest in what others think is Om Malik, and even his interest was conditional. In public writing, what people think of your writing is very important. They may not agree with you, they may not like what you say, they may not like you, but you want to be sure they know where you’re coming from. Any doubt about that removes value from your work. Do it often enough and it removes all value.

Mike says that this discussion cost him money that he needs to make payroll. I encourage him to look at a bigger picture. Any cloud over his integrity with readers will have a much bigger impact, imho.

Comprehensive roundup from Jeff Jarvis.

Doc Searls: “The question isn’t whether advertisers are paying for text in a box. It’s whether they’re they’re also buying kinder treatment in editorial postings. We need to hear that. Not to be told where to go.”

Dan Blank brings some welcome comic relief to the drama.

Scripting News for 6/22/2007

Did Microsoft pay star writers? 

Valleywag has a story that Federated Media is paying “star writers” to recite a Microsoft marketing slogan.

I sent emails to several of the writers and Microsoft PR. I also asked John Battelle, the founder of Federated Media, if this is true. He said: “As usual, it’s a bit more naunced.”

I have reason to not trust Valleywag, they’ve said things in the past I’ve known were not true, so right now I don’t know what to believe.

On the other hand the Federated Media site is for real, and it has quotes from the people Valleywag says are quoted. So some of it is true. Battelle didn’t deny it.

Om Malik: “I have requested Federated Media, our sales partners, suspend the campaign on our network of sites, and they have.”

What is an identity system?  

Dinner last night was with Doc Searls, at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco.

When I got on the BART in Berkeley, I sent an email to Doc from my Blackberry saying I was on the train. When I got to the Powell Street BART station, I sent an SMS saying I had arrived. I walked three blocks to Union Square, and there was Doc, smiling and ready to talk about identity, which is much on my mind these days.

We covered a lot of ground, I reviewed my belief that the features of social networks are due to deconstruct into simple services that can be recombined by skilled users in an infinite number of ways. At the core of all of it is an identity system. So what is an identity system? Is there a good definition somewhere? How many features can you add before it becomes more than an identity system? This is important because in this area, it’s important to strip it down to its bare minimum, so that the first component of any network of people, events and resources can be maximally combined with features that depend on identity. The goal is to give the user the most options with the fewest identities.

Now this need to be minimal explains the interest I have in Twitter. Could it be that the ability to post 140-character status messages should be part of any identity system? Should every identity service minimally have a web browser interface, an IM interface and an SMS interface? Or is a back-end service enough, allowing applications to serve as front-ends, exclusively?

It seems that these are the questions we’ll answer in the coming months. But my gut feel is that if Twitter has more functionality than is required to define an identity system, it’s not much more. Not too much more. To prove it, one would have to build an application that required identity using Twitter as the identity server, and see if the extra features turned out to be useful, redundant, or in the way. My guess is that they would be useful, not redundant, and not in the way.

Then I had a conference call with Marc Canter this morning where we talked about the same issues from a whole different perspective. Marc believes in the explosive decontstruction of social networks, although he uses more polite terminology, because he believes in vendors, and true to form, I’m out to subvert the vendors.

Doc and I reached a very interesting place, but I don’t want to, at this time, talk about exactly what that was. Not sure I could do the idea justice. Might be better to put up an example app.

Also I should mention that Elliot Noss of Tucows was at the dinner too. Identity services and domain services are related, don’t you think?

PS: In 2001, I wrote about the “explosive deconstruction” of the brand names of journalism, a process that today, is well underway.

What’s up with Twitter? 

Last update was 2 hours ago.

Only five updates in the last 12 hours?

What’s going on wit da Twit?

Today’s links 

Soup of the day: Spicy Chicken Soup.

Drag queen of the day: Rudy Giuliani.

Soul artist of the day: Al Green.

Buongiorno! 

Sports fans!!

Scripting News for 6/21/2007

Dell Hell 

I was thinking of getting an inexpensive Dell desktop for a home server, but after reading this review of their customer service, I was reminded why sticking with Apple is probably the best bet.

Today’s links 

Todd Cochrane: AT&T’s Secret $10 DSL.

Get my most recent trivia on Twitter.

Gets to the point 

An idea for a conference session…

A-list blogger sits at table in front of room.

Participants line up. Each, in turn, dictates a 140-character blog post, which the blogger dutifully enters, verbatim. Two or three links. Next.

Sort of an open blog.

Only works for bloggers with a certain amount of flow, or A-list goodness to bestow.

Happiness 

Happiness is a doctor’s office with open wifi.

More happiness 

Happiness is your blog moving from rank 260-something to 140-something on Technorati for no apparent reason.

It would be wonderful to break into the top 100 again. At the beginning, this blog was #1 on Technorati.