Scripting News for 9/30/07

Payloads for Twitter, round two 

On Friday evening I wrote a piece about integrating images, audio and perhaps other types with Twitter. There’s been a bit of reaction, not too much, I think because most of the people who are adversarial about this kind of stuff either don’t use Twitter, or because it’s the weekend.

Most of the reaction was either puzzled or negative. An example of puzzlement. Isn’t that what Pownce does? Yes, but… Two things: 1. Pownce is still invite-only and 2. Pownce doesn’t have an API, so it’s inherently not as interesting to me, as a developer, because I can’t build things on it.

I like Twitter because it’s open to anyone to use, without an invitation, and lots of people use it, people I care about, and it has a very nice API. Further, as I’ve gotten to know the people involved, I’ve learned that the API is of supreme importance to them. So our interests are in-line there. I see Twitter as a framework to build things on, a platform, like a big Christmas tree we can all hang ornaments on. I could build nicer ornaments with a few extra wires on the network that connects all the ornaments. In fact, I’ve already built two of them, and we use them all the time. But I couldn’t ask too many people to use them because they’re too ugly. What I’ve proposed is a way to make them pretty, to make them work the way people expect them to.

Now another form of pushback is, well why don’t you just build your own framework, different from Twitter, that does what you want, and leave Twitter alone. To which I say, I can’t do anything to Twitter, other than talk about it. Whether to build the interfaces or not is up to the people at Twitter. I can have an opinion, yet ultimately the decision, and responsibility is theirs. Now, why don’t I clone it? Well that’s something I’m just not going to do. I have relaxed lifestyle these days. I’m beyond the point where I feel the need to prove anything through my work. I like to play and try out new ideas, just for the pleasure of it. If I were 20 years younger, I probably would be approaching this differently, but I’m not 20 years younger.

No doubt there are people, lurking in the shadows, who would like to share some of Twitter’s success. The idea is so good that we’re just at the beginning of its adoption. Maybe there are as many as 50,000 people regularly using Twitter. I think in a few years there will be millions, using Twitter, or something very much like it.

But we’re at a unique place in the evolution of this stuff, which in some ways is very good. Suppose there were 20 Twitter-like systems out there, and we wanted to add a feature to all of them. Forget it! Developers just don’t like working with each other enough to overcome their competitive urge. But right now, with one player in the market, we could make 10 times the progress we’ll be able to make when there are 2 or 3. And a million times the amount in a market with 20 Twitter-alikes.

Further, the richer the API is, and the more broadly supported it is, the greater the incentive for newcomers to be compatible with Twitter. I don’t get the warm fuzzies from Pownce that they are willing to follow anyone’s lead, even though they don’t yet have an API. But if anyone out there is brewing another entrant, and reading this, please please be compatible with the Twitter API. Not just the spirit, but the letter. Make sure that all the tools built for Twitter run without modification on your system.

So these are just some of the additional thoughts. Evolution of APIs is an art, not a science. I’ve learned a lot about it before the Internet, and then in XML-based formats and protocols. We’re at a sweet moment right now, and if the Twitter guys want to lead, and if the rest of us are willing to be led (I am) then we can really build something wonderful.

Will the US bomb Iran? Soon? 

There is a lot of random speculation in my aggregator today about “surgical” strikes by the US in Iran. It’s unthinkable that the same process that led to the disastrous occupation of Iraq could stand, uncorrected, and get us into a much more serious conflict with Iran, one which we won’t “win,” (Bush’s plan for Iraq, ludicrous) no matter what we do. When will we take control of our government and stop this?

Google search for “surgical strikes Iran.”

The Mets on the last day of the regular season 

I tuned in the Mets game a few minutes late, and they’re already down 5-0 in the top of the first. Ooops. It’s now 7-0.

The Mets don’t have to win to make it to the postseason, if the Phillies lose. If that happens, they’d be tied, and would play a tie-breaker, winner-take-all game (I think tomorrow).

When Mets fans get a sense of entitlement, they break your heart. The Yankess are the entitled ones. The Mets are hapless.

“The nightmare is over for the Mets,” says the announcer at the end of the Marlins at-bat. No, it’s not over until it’s over. A big lesson in the philosophy of baseball.

In all my years following the Mets I don’t think I’ve ever seen them win easily. For that matter, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them lose easily either.

As the Mets score their first run of the day, I’m reminded of Tug McGraw, an early Mets philosopher, who said “Ya Gotta Believe.” I believe this is one of those moments when believing might make a difference.

Final: Mets lost, Phillies won. No joy in mudville tonight.

Scripting News for 9/29/07

Notes on the N800 

I still didn’t have the N800 working reliably on my home network, but it worked everywhere else I tried it, so I was determined to figure out what was wrong. I heard about a program called Kismac that helps you debug wifi, and it was a little bit of help. But the tide turned when I decided to turn off wifi routers (I had four running) and see if the N800 would start working. Well, one of my two Airport Extremes made the difference, when I turned it off, the N800 started working. So after a bit I tried turning it back on, and the N800 still worked. No explanation, but knock wood, it’s still working an hour later.

One nice side-effect of having Flash on the N800 is that YouTube works. I was able to watch the great MoveOn ad about Senator Mitch McConnell. It looked great on the N800.

Now I’m looking for a VNC client. I’d also like to play old TV shows on it, but the video player doesn’t have the rich set of codecs baked into VLC which has spoiled me.

Battery life on this thing is outstanding.

Scripting News for 9/28/07

Payloads for Twitter 

Back in 2001, I wrote a document called Payloads for RSS that explained how you could attach something to a RSS item. I didn’t explain how a RSS app would display or play one of these things, that would come later.

Today, we may be at a similar place with Twitter.

Sometimes I want to answer Twitter’s question, “What are you doing?” with a picture, or a bit of audio. Some people want to send videos. It’s easy to imagine in the future that along with a Twit, I might also want to automatically send my location (obviously a preference), and maybe some other status information.

It seems that four bits of data are stored with each post: 1. the person who posted it, 2. the time it was posted, 3. how the post came to Twitter (web, Hahlo, Twiku, txt, twitterrific, twittergram are some examples) and 4. who it’s in reply to (if it is).

Now suppose I wanted to allow for payloads, as RSS 2.0 does. The problem is a bit more complicated, because not only do we have to specify how the data is communicated, we also have to say how it’s displayed.

Caveat: This is just a proposal, there are many ways to do it, this is just one way.

First, the “update” routine, as specified by the Twitter API, would add 2 optional parameters: 1. the url of a picture that’s a thumb for the enclosed data and 2. the url of the data.

A couple of examples…

1. For Twittergrams, which are audible tweets, recorded on a cell phone, the image would be a small speaker, . The second paramter would point to the MP3 file.

2. For a Flickr pic, the image would be a tiny thumbnail of the picture, and the second paramter would point to the Flickr page.

Discussion…

I thought the whole thing could be shrunk down to one paramter, a pointer to a bit of text that Twitter would trustingly display, but that’s the problem, you have to trust the app not to break Twitter, and we all know that wouldn’t last. Even a well-intentioned delveloper can forget to close a table properly, and that would leave the Twitter display in disarray.

I also thought we might register data types with Twitter, but that’s a likely black hole. Apple went down that path, so did Microsoft and the IETF. It’s a lot of work to make those systems work, and it’s just a matter of time before they break down in chaos.

I think that Twitter should probably handle two or three types specially because they are so common and useful. Those are pictures, audio and possibly video. But that’s potentially a lot of work, and can be done later.

Some will object that this only makes sense in the web, and that Twitter is designed for SMS. To that I say two things: 1. Degrade gracefully. 2. You already have features that make sense only in the web, e.g. the pictures next to posts that show iconically who’s saying what. That’s a nice thing to have in the environments that can display pictures, and its presence there does nothing to diminish the experience for the environments (e.g. SMS) that can’t.

Today’s links 

Ian Kennedy does a view-source on the NY Times and finds there’s a lot of metadata in there. Cool!

Dustin Sacks has feature requests for Flickr, some very good ones, esp a Referrer log. Twitter needs this too.

Jeff Jarvis on newspaper blogs.

Scripting News for 9/27/07

Republicans: A betrayal of trust 

Excellent ad. They picked up the “betrayal” theme from the General Betray Us ad, and addressed the Republican’s objections, by directing the betrayal theme at an obvious “Washington politician,” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. It’ll be interesting to see how the Republicans vote next time. Not claiming they read my advice, but it’s almost exactly what I asked for, and I think it’ll work well.

If you like the ad, give MoveOn money to run more ads.

Apple updates iPhone. Legal, unhacked phones become bricks? 

According to Saul Hansell at the NY Times, Apple intends to break phones that have been unlocked.

But Francine Hardaway and Patrick Scoble both updated this afternoon, and bad things happened. Hardaway’s phone was “fried,” she needed a new phone, and Scoble lost all his data.

Hardaway: “Trust me, I didn’t hack it.”

Jeff Clavier: “This effing piece of s..t is bricked.”

Robert Scoble, Patrick’s dad, updated successfully, and got the new features. Scoble has guts.

Spaley’s iPhone is now “a useless piece of crap.”

Looks like Josh Bancroft’s iPhone was hosed too. I would hold off on the update until we find out what’s going wrong.

Sugar Attack: “It wasn’t until I saw a friend tweet about the new iPhone firmware upgrade that I realized I could now access the iTunes WiFi store.”

Twitter is taking a shower tonight 

I love Twitter, but there have been a lot of problems, and this is too much. They’re taking it down tonight, for two hours, and we’re hot on a big story, and it’s developing — on Twitter.

This seems like a bad night for Twitter to go to sleep. (But there probably never is a good night.)

I don’t think the Twitter guys really understand how much we’re doing with their service.

It’s been going down a lot lately. And while other people have been complaining about it losing posts, I had never seen it lose one, until yesterday, and now it’s losing them regularly, for me too.

Read the first three words of this post again.

They raised $5 million, it seems now it’s time for them to get the bugs out, hire some people who really understand scaling, if necessary re-implement the system from the ground up. Do whatever is needed to make it as reliable as the other tools we depend on. We need Twitter to work. It’s not a fun experiment for us, we’re using it.

Jack, Ev, Biz, Fred — please take note.

Postscript: The announcement changed, now they’re saying it’ll be down on Sunday night. Much better. Thanks!

Good morning Internet! 

An interesting discussion popped up on Flickr under the picture of the N800, which arrived yesterday. I’d like to get to the bottom of the problem and get it working. What I really want to know is if there’s an Apache running on the device. If so, can the camera drop pictures into the htdocs folder? Can I record a podcast? Will it drop the MP3 file into the htdocs folder? We may just have to wait for Bug Labs to get the user programmable hand-held, but after a night of sleep, last night’s failure is fading out and a teeny bit of enthusiasm is returning. But first I have to go to breakfast and do a couple of meetings.

Postscript: Apache for the N800.

Postscript: The N800 works at a local Internet cafe. I was able to browse the web and make a Skype call.

Finally: This thread had the answer… I have it running with no security, but it works, with the settings tweaked as indicated in the thread. I will have to get it working with security, but for now, I am able to connect.

Scripting News for 9/26/07

Nokia N800 arrives, finally 

First impression is no impression at all.

So far they make Apple look very very good.

To paraphrase a Cadillac ad, when you turn your mobile device on, does it return the favor?

Apple, yes. Nokia, the jury is still out.

A couple of hours later, the battery is charged, but it’s taking forever just to get it connected to the Internet. I have good wifi in the house, my laptops and iPhone use it all the time. The iPhone “just worked.” Oy.

Oh the humanity. To update the N800 you need Windows, with v2 of the .NET Framework. Yeah, I have Parallels on my MacBook, but I recognize an invitation to lose huge amounts of time when I see one. For a $350 impulsively purchased toy (a week ago) this is turning out to be a huge pain in the you know what.

Media you can’t trust 

I saw most of the speech given on Monday by Iranian President Ahmadinejad at Columbia University. I also watched a lot of the coverage that night and the following morning by MSNBC and CNN, and I gotta say, they behaved shamefully, as badly as Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, who introduced Ahmadinejad.

Transcript of the Ahmadinejad speech.

Video of the entire talk and intro. 1 hr 21 min.

Ahmadinejad came off as a gentleman, he had every right to be offended. Had I been in his place, I would have found it hard to give a speech after the intro Bollinger gave. And then the cable networks completely misrepresented what happened. It was beyond spinning, it was outright propoganda. It wasn’t until Hardball that a reporter, Chris Matthews, talked about what really happened.

It’s basic decency to the guest and to the people watching, that they not tell us what to think. It’s a very American thing to let people make up their own minds. That Ahmadinejad was able to claim this as an Iranian value, when it was so clearly not an American one that day, was shameful to me as an American.

What if Columbia had maintained neutrality. Asked direct questions, accepted his answers and moved on. We got the tiniest glimpse of how revealing that might have been when he said that Iran didn’t have homosexuality. The audience laughed as if he was making a joke (not in derision as the TV anchors reported). At first it wasn’t at all clear if it was humor, his delivery was so straight, he seemed serious, but how could he seriously expect us to believe there were no gay people in Iran?? When it was clear he wasn’t joking, it was a chilling moment. There it is, that’s the face of despotism. Now we know, despite his protests, that we’re still better than he is, I haven’t heard the US government claim that there are no gays in America (but I have heard them say things approaching that level of dishonesty).

Had they just let Ahmadinejad speak for himself there would probably have been no need to hit us over the head with what they want us to think about him. But as it stands, that was the only clear thing he said at Columbia that wasn’t basically reasonable.

His pitch: I come from a place that’s far away from here. You sent your army to fight on our border. We don’t like the Israelis because they mistreat the Palestinians who had nothing to do with the Holocaust (a far cry from saying the Holocaust never happened). It’s pretty clear, although he didn’t say it, that given a choice, he would like to see the Palestinian people rule the space now occupied by Israel (this is probably what they mean when he says he wants to “wipe” Israel off the map). So, that’s not our position, but it’s not really different from ours. The reality is that there are two peoples who claim that territory. So Iran is on the other side. That’s not exactly front page news.

An aside, very few Americans know the role we played in overthrowing Iran’s attempt at democracy in the 1950’s. I recommend Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men. For an overview, Chris Lydon did a podcast interview with KInzer in 2003.

We lose so much when we don’t have the courage to listen to our foes. Some of my countrymen see it as a sign of weakness to listen, but they’re wrong — if we’re sure we’re right, what exactly do we have to lose by listening? Only if we’re concerned that we might be wrong, should we fear listening, and then only if we want to stay wrong.

Look, I know I’m not going to convince any of the people who say that everyone who uses their mind is weak, but to people who like to decide for themselves, and want free speech for everyone, don’t be fooled by what you hear on TV. They act as if they are owned by people who desperately want a war with Iran, and are willing to sacrifice American freedom to get there. Bollinger is clearly one of those people. And so do Time-Warner, Microsoft and GE (the owners of CNN and MSNBC). If not, then please do something about it, shake up the media so that we get to really discuss this, openly and fairly, before we start yet another ruinous war.

President Betray Us 

Living in Berkeley we’re always just a few degrees away from the MoveOn people. I hear they’re really freaked about all the attention the General Betray Us ad got.

I think it’s good and they should follow it with a new ad, maybe not in the Times. “Okay, maybe we shouldn’t have called him General Betray Us.” Not quite an apology, not quite a retraction, just food for thought.

The next ad would have a big picture of the President, with a big headline: “President Betray Us.” More fodder for the talking heads.

And then a FAQ, listing just a few of the ways the president has betrayed us. Not exactly calling for an impeachment, but starting the process of moving on from Bush, about a year early.

There’s nothing wrong with humor, and political humor is almost always vicious. If Bush whines too much, follow all this with an ad calling him a coward. “Mr. President, if you can’t stand the heat, you could always resign early.”

And then, after having cleared the field of Republicans (they’d all be running for cover, hoping their face wouldn’t be on the next ad), you could start putting pictures of Democrats in the ads. Senator Betray Us, with a big picture of Harry Reid.

I think it’s time for The Rest of Us to start flexing our political muscle.

I’m a gun-totin liberal, Republics betta watch out!

Dave

PS: We should start another campaign that every time the President calls the other party “The Democrat” party, we should give $10 to them. That’d get him to shut up quickly.

Scripting News for 9/25/07

Opportunities for integration 

When everything gets an API then everything you can imagine will be possible if you can write a script.

And sometimes, to give you an idea, all that has to happen is that a wall come down. The latest, most intriguing such wall was the paywall at the NY Times. Now all of a sudden we find the wealth of information published by the NY Times over many decades is available without tariff. More important, we can point into the archive. We’ve gotten so accustomed to the wall, that you actually have to think when it may be possible to go in there, as if it left behind a wall in our minds, even after the wall on the web is gone.

For example, the first episode of Ken Burns’s The War, an epic series about World War II from the American perspective, cited several NY Times articles. If you looked carefully you could see the dates, and the actual headlines, and then if you have a browser handy, as I do (I have an iPhone) you can actually read the article while the narrative continues. Today this is mostly a gimick, but I suspect as we get used to having history so available (like having a library microfilm machine, which I used to spend whole days playing with when I was a kid) it will change our sense of information, perhaps as much as anything else that’s ever been on the web.

Take movie reviews for example. What a thrill to be able to read a review of a movie that I love that came out in 1932! The reviewers back then were more forgiving, less sarcastic, more enthusiastic. Consider their review of the Hollywood Revue of 1929, a favorite of mine that I’ve only seen once (I’d pay for a DVD, if it were available). They loved audible movies (that’s what they called them) as if the term “talkie” was as elusive as “podcast” was in the summer of 2004. Again, we’ve just scratched the surface.

Wouldn’t you like to have NY Times movie reviews integrated with Netflix? Or have Yahoo’s movie rating service available on the NY Times site. And I have to wonder whether they really have gone all the way. You can’t see the reviews unless you’re logged in. Can Google’s robots, therefore, see the movie reviews? Unless the’ve made some special arrangements, it seems not.

There is already empirical evidence. Try searching for a review of a popular movie from the past, and see if the Times review shows up. Some examples: The Sting. The Godfather. Casablanca. Field of Dreams.

It would be helpful to get a technical guide to the newly hatched NY Times on the Web, or (as in the old days of software) a reviewer’s guide, so we get some ideas of what to look at. Clearly a lot of work went into opening up the Times archive. I’m going to be in NY the week of October 8 and will have some time toward the end of the week. If anyone at the Times would be willing to spend some time with me reviewing what’s now open, that would be helpful.

In any case, at least the Times today is somewhat more available to be integrated into the fabric of the web. That’s some progress. How much, remains to be seen.

Postscript: Kottke did a great job of skimming the surface of the newly opened Times when it first came online, just one week ago today.

Welcome to the 21st Century 

Proof that there still is more to do.

On Saturday I got an email from Sylvia saying that a friend of mine had bought her first iPod. It took me a few minutes to figure out that she was talking about herself. Funny, I had never thought about whether she had an iPod or not, but I have been on her case to get a digital camera.

So she brought her iPod over, it’s one of the new “fatty” nanos with video. It was so funny to see it through her eyes, and even cooler to read her story. I didn’t realize that there was a reason she had never gotten an iPod.

Sylvia: Sliding into song.

I seek out experiences like this. Stones I can turn over that reveal a rich experience, an eye-opener, a bright horizon that doesn’t take much time or effort to achieve.

Nokia N800 update 

Amazon is usually pretty good at getting stuff delivered quickly, but this time they’ve really dropped the ball.

Last Wednesday I purchased a Nokia N800 from them, six days ago, and spent $3.99 to have it delivered overnight. It shipped that night. But instead of expediting it, they sent it UPS Ground from Dallas, with an estimated delivery date of October 1. Ouch.

So I started emailing with people at Amazon, and they wouldn’t give me a straight answer to a direct question as to when I could really expect the product to arrive. There were three back and forths before I gave up. (They refunded the $3.99, which wasn’t what I wanted, didn’t ask them to.)

Luckily, it didn’t take very long for the unit to travel from Dallas to San Pablo, which is a 20 minute drive from Berkeley, where it arrived on Sunday morning. I assume because it’s marked as a low priority package in some way, it spent the whole day yesterday in the warehouse. According to the UPS tracking site, it isn’t “on the truck for delivery” today, so I assume it will spend another day in San Pablo.

Now of course this isn’t a world-shaking issue like war or famine, or the way the US media is trashing the president of Iran, but I did promise to let y’all know what I think of the Nokia product, so this is what I think — anticipation is wearing off, I’m getting busy doing other things, and the impulse purchase feeling is gone. The sweaty palms I had last week are pretty dry now.

Postscript: Engadget has a few clues about the follow-up to the N800. So while my palms dry out and coool down, I’m beginning to feel like returning the device and then asking Nokia to put me on the press list. It’s ridiculous to pay for what amounts to a review unit. Is Nokia listening??

Fall conference plan 

I have three conferences on the schedule this fall, which is an unusually large number of conferences for me these days. It’s a pretty wide-ranging and eclectic group, and so far I’m not actually speaking at any of them, which suits me fine these days, I’m enjoying not speaking and just listening, to the extent that I can keep myself from saying anything.

1. I’m going to Jeff Jarvis’s Networked Journalism conference on October 10 in New York City, to bring together bloggers and professional news people. I’ve been to a number of these meetups, and I appreciate Jeff’s prime directive for us, no trash talk, we’re there to find ways to work together. My main observation is that while we’ve accomplished so much in virtual space, we have neglected the material space. Putting bloggers in the same physical space with each other and professionals on a routine basis is a sure way to make new ideas and projects materialize. Where to do that? The newsroom, of course.

2. I asked for a press pass to the Web 2.0 Summit, and was graciously provided one. I’ve never been to one of these. I’ll try to keep the expectations to a minimum, and an open mind, and as I said before, I’ll try to say nothing at all, just listen and blog. I came pretty close to that at Gnomedex, only speaking once, and look at all the trouble that caused.

3. I’m going to Le Web 3 in Paris, my second European trip this year and I’m totally looking forward to it. I’ve gotten to know Loic Le Meur, the promoter of the conference, now that he lives in San Francisco, and it’s fair to say that we’ve hit it off. It’s so much fun to brainstorm with the guy. Yesterday he was here at the house in Berkeley and we sat in the den, with the FlickrRivr app running on the big screen, and it had its hypnotic effect on him. It really is something, you can’t describe it in words, people have to experience it for themselves. As a result it’s going to be part of the show in Paris, running constantly behind the speakers. Now that’s what I’m talking about! A few days ago, in my wrap-up of TC40, I wrote: “Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over.” There will be over 2000 people at Le Web 3, some of them will be programmers, so maybe this is where we will get a chance to try out real time media hacking.

Scripting News for 9/23/07

The year of the social network 

As long as I’ve been involved in the tech industry there’s been the concept of The Year of X, where X has been artificial intelligence, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, P2P. Proclaimed by tech pubs, most likely to help their ad sales reps sell space, they focused the attention on areas the industry was investing money, in hopes of being there when lightning strikes, when wealth is created, as it often is in the tech industry. Sometimes the “year of” prognostications are right, more often they’re wrong.

In that sense, there’s no doubt that 2007 is the year of the social network in Silicon Valley. This may not be the year when huge wealth is created, but I don’t doubt that the area is fertile, and I don’t say that lightly, because I’m often a contrarian when it comes to self-induced Silicon Valley euphoria.

There are a couple of ideas I’ve been getting ready to write about, I’m not quite ready yet, but here they are anyway.

1. When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences, they may group into large subsets of the users, and they may not. Some food for thought.

On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it’s like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I’ve seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product.

Note that when reporters cover Twitter, before they’ve become users, they probably write about the home page at Twitter, where complete strangers report on the kind of spaghetti sauce they like. That may be why so many articles dismiss Twitter as useless. (Dwight Silverman, a columnist at the Houston Chronicle, provides the evidence. “When my colleague Loren Steffy trashed [Twitter], for example, he did so without ever adding anyone to his Twitter page.” In fact, Steffy is following 0 people, is followed by 2, and has updated 0 times.)

2. Integration is so tempting, but elusive. The other day a friend on Twitter wrote about a movie he liked. I looked it up on the NY Times movie review site (a newly revealed location now that their archive is open and a very valuable one, another topic I plan to cover, the wealth of the NY Times archive). I would have then liked to have clicked over to Netflix to order it. And even better, I’d have liked to have looked at what other movies he likes.

Now we’re very close to having this, we just need a way to co-relate two identity systems, Twitter’s and Netflix’s. And think of the value in integrating Amazon with Twitter. The mind explodes at the possibilities. This is what I meant when I said earlier “they’re not trivial problems, they’ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes.”

This issue is now coming to a head, as the users can see the next step clearly. How to integrate the systems is known technology, but it’s not a solved problem economically and politically. We need to get clear on the opportunities, and feel free to dream when the barriers between the networks come down.

How CBS interviewed Iran’s president 

I watched the 60 Minutes interview of Iranian president Ahmandinejad with amazement. At the end of the interview he reminded the interviewer, Scott Pelley, that he was the president of a sovereign country. He wondered if the interviewer was an agent of the American government. Amazingly his question made sense. I wondered too.

Transcript of interview: Part 1, Part 2.

I tried to imagine CBS interviewing the President of the United States this way. I couldn’t imagine that our President would sit for the full interview as the interviewer reminded him repeatedly that he hadn’t directly answered the question as to whether Iran was producing a nuclear weapon or whether Iran was supplying arms to people fighting the US in Iraq. Ask once or twice, accept an incomplete even evasive answer, because that’s how they interview politicians on American television. To hold Iran’s president to a higher standard is hypocritical.

I wouldn’t have blamed Ahmadinejad if he had asked why Iranian weapons are any worse than US weapons. Wouldn’t he have the right to object that the US had troops in Iraq, a country that borders his, with people who share his culture, religion, even his sect, but he didn’t. There’s no question that American soldiers are killing Shi’ites in Iraq, and perhaps there’s no question that Iran is arming our enemies in Iraq, but so what? I don’t see how what we’re doing is any better, and when you consider that Iraq borders Iran, it’s as if a foreign country were occupying Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. His interest in peace in Iraq is clearly greater than ours.

He was much less adversarial than the interviewer, who was supposed to be disinterested. The president of a sovereign country, even one our country isn’t friendly with, has no obligation to be disinterested.

The moment of greatest shame was when he asked Ahmadinejad if he admired anything about President Bush personally. I don’t understand where the question came from, and why it wasn’t edited out of the interview when Ahmadinejad declined (gracefully, I thought) to answer it. Is this somehow relevant to the conversation between our countries? Is this how a strong and respectful country learns about an adversary?

Perhaps CBS should find out first first if Americans admire the man before we ask if others do.

Morning monkey roundup 

TechMeme really likes Friday evening’s Monkey piece, it’s been #1 for almost 24 hours. Even if people still use the Social Graph term, it may have done some good by asking the question — what’s the difference between a network and a graph? In math there is no difference, a network is a graph and vice versa.

I got one thing wrong, apparently the term came from Facebook, presumably as a way of separating what they do from their predecessors.

Dan Farber reported in May. “Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a ’social graph,’ the network of connections and relationships between people on the service.”

Google Trends comparison of “social network” vs “social graph.”

Google News archive search for “social graph.”

Fred Wilson posted a comment pointing to a post where he wondered what the graph thing was all about. His post was one that inspired me to write my piece.

Buzzwords and phrases are useful if they describe something new.

For example, I remember when platform was new, but I didn’t object to it, because it explained a concept that we needed a word for. Today it’s still much in use, and there’s little or no confusion about what it means.

I was doing audio blog posts before we had the term podcast, and I totally got behind it because we needed a word for what we were doing.

But social graph is not needed, it makes something simple sound complicated, and we totally need it to sound simple if the problems are going to get solved. They’re not trivial problems, they’ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes.

Another problem with new names for old things is that it tends to push aside the pioneers and makes it sound like newcomers are not also-rans. Fred had a reasonable gripe as a backer of Wasabe when Mint started getting credit for being a first mover. At least they didn’t have the chutzpah to try to make it a trend and give it a buzzword.

Someone is being pushed aside with the term “social graph” likely some competitors of Facebook like MySpace and LinkedIn, and some pioneers are going to lose credit for their innovation if it takes root. It may still take root, but I felt I had to say something.

BTW, the title of the post contains a grammatic error because I changed the title to monkey from something else and didn’t look carefully at the resulting title.

Scripting News for 9/21/07

How to avoid sounding like an monkey 

A few weeks ago a well-respected developer wrote a blog post about something he called the “social graph.” A graph, to most people, is a diagram like the one on the right, which plots the value of a stock over time. For 99.99 percent of the people this is what a graph is. For a very small group of people, a graph is also something like this:

This is the kind of thing you study in a branch of mathematics called Graph Theory. I know a bit about this because when I was an undergraduate, getting a degree in math, I studied this stuff. I proved theorums about how many edges you’d have to traverse to get from one point to another. There are many types of Graph Theory graphs, directed and undirected, for example. Some that you’d need two colors to paint, or three, but none need more than four (a theory that has been proven since I left school, thanks to computers).

Graphs are useful for modeling stuff that goes on in computers. They are also part of a field of math called combinatorics that’s related to statistics, and also related to a highly theoretical area of math called topology.

Now if you showed that diagram to most educated people, they probably would call it a network, and before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what — they’re exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don’t we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don’t want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated.

PS: This Google search illustrates. Most of the definitions of “graph” are what you’d expect if you weren’t a math major.

PPS: Copy editors, just change “social graph” to “social network.”

I’ll be writing about podcatchers 

In the coming weeks and months you’ll probably see me writing about issues of podcatchers here, because I’m working on one. It’s the third one I’ve written, so this time maybe I’ll get it right.

A lot of things have changed since I wrote my first podcatcher back in 2001.

1. Back then there were no podcasts, so it was a proof of concept, a chicken without an egg (or an egg with no chicken), a step in a bootstrap. Today there are lots of podcasts. An embarassment of riches.

2. Back then implementing a podcatcher was simple, there was exactly one format to support, RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Today, luckily, it’s still fairly simple, as far as the format goes. The only variability is the iTunes namespace, which complicates things, just a little.

3. Today there are enough users to make it possible to support lists of podcasts published by fans, and instead of just subscribing to the podcast feeds, you can subscribe to lists of feeds. I will publish one of these lists, in OPML 2.0 format, as a proof of concept.

4. The first version of this new podcatcher will run in the OPML Editor because that’s where all my software runs at first. But the goal is to port it to run in other environments, some with millions of users. I want to provide a popular alternative to the one that Apple publishes which currently dominates the market. (Note: I’m generally pleased with the way Apple dominates, they’ve been very fair about allowing users to export their subscription lists. But if we want to create the opportunity for others to innovate in the area of podcast players, there has to be choice at the podcatcher level. That’s my main motive for revisiting this area.)

There probably are some other changes, and I’ll write about them as the project moves forward.

Now….

To people who say that Apple has the market sewn up, I say Bah!

I think iPods are great, but they’re designed to play music, not podcasts.

Every bit of music is something you want to keep forever, a podcast loses almost all its value after you’ve listened to it once.

You have to pay for music (in theory at least) but podcasts are free.

Podcasts beg to have a player that can download them without synching with a desktop computer. Okay that’s something podcasts have in common with music.

I buy Apple products all the time. I’ve gone from resenting Apple so much that I wouldn’t buy their products, as recently as 2005, to today when not only do I only use Macs, but I’m constantly telling people why they’d be better off using Macs. I can’t help but evangelize the products, I think they’re that much better than Windows PCs.

But as much as I love Apple (can’t believe I actually said that) I still don’t trust them with a whole medium. We need them to have competition. The rest of the tech industry seems to think they’re immune to it, that creates a huge opportunity with someone with enough chutzpah to think they can do it.

Yours truly,

Dave Winer

PS: Here’s my first bit, on the subscription problem, and how it could go away.

Marc Canter 

We could solve the subscription problem 

Okay I’ve been writing about OPML reading lists here for years. I’m now on my second implementation, so maybe this time I’ll get it right.

But there’s something cool that happens when (hypothetically) the entire installed base of podcatchers supports OPML reading lists. All of a sudden the subscription problem goes poof!

Ask anyone who’s worked on a RSS reader, for that matter, ask anyone who’s used one, what a PITA it is to subscribe to a feed. All those little buttons, or copying and pasting, and looking at urls, and trying to figure out whether you want this format or that format. It’s a miracle anyone actually subscribes to feeds it’s so damned complicated.

Before you blame anyone, it’s not actually anyone’s fault. It’s a result of the market not being a monopoly. The only way to solve the problem is if everyone uses the same web app to manage subscriptions. And we know that’s not going to happen any time soon. Or, if every reader supports OPML reading lists. Now that might actually happen, even though it’s not very likely.

But podcasting, that’s a whole other story. According to many people there’s only one podcatcher, iTunes. So that’s simplified the problem. For example, look at this page of NY Times podcasts, and how they handle it.

See the Subscribe button? Nice. Except for one thing. It really should say “Subscribe in iTunes” because that’s what it does. And it works, because in many people’s minds, iTunes is the only way to subscribe to a podcast.

And it could stay that simple if Apple would do one thing, offer the option of publishing the OPML automatically to a publicly accessible web address, so the user could continue to use Apple’s server to handle subscriptions, even if they’re using a different podcatcher (for example one that runs on a Nokia N800). It would be the mark of a truly great company if they did that. Maybe they are that great.

Otheriwse at some point we’re going to ask the NY TImes to change their page. And they may not be too happy about that. Wouldn’t blame them if they were.

Moral of the story: If we can centralize the subscription process, and move it out of one reader or another, and get the readers to all support subscription to reading lists, the awful ugly issue will go away for users. It’s one of the oldest tradeoffs in the tech business, to make it simple for users, the vendors have to give up some power.

Scripting News for 9/20/07

Calacanis at Gnomedex 

Here’s a video, released today, of his much-discussed talk at Gnomedex in August.

Could Google buy Yahoo? 

In a comment yesterday on Marc Canter’s blog, discussing the race to be the default identity system for the Internet..

“I wouldn’t count out Google, they’ve got a lot of users, and a lot of money. I think they could probably buy Yahoo, but someone else would have to do the math.”

Ashkan Karbasfrooshan did the math.

How to sponsor an open source project? 

I’m looking for ideas, established practices, do’s and don’ts for sponsoring an open source project.

An upfront caveat — this is not an actual offer. It’s totally hypothetical. If I make the offer it will be done in some other more formal way.

The project: I want the OPML Editor to run on Linux.

I don’t want to hire someone to do this project, rather I want to offer a reward when the project is completed.

The source code is already released under the GPL, in versions for Mac OS X and Windows. Of course Mac OS is a flavor of Unix, but the internal API is quite different, I imagine, from Linux. I’m not looking for elegance, I’m looking for functionality. I don’t care how the port is done, just that it be maintainable, and then be released (of course) under the GPL.

Personally, I think the most likely way to get this done quickly is to compile the code under WINE, using the Windows version of the code, and then go back and connect up the Unix system calls, so that all the Unix related verbs work. (Note the OPML Editor is actually a rich programming environment, despite its diminutive name. It’s an instance of UserLand Frontier, which goes back to 1988.)

To me, it would be worth $10,000 to have the OPML Editor running reliably on Linux, because then all the projects I’ve built and am building would then automatically run on Linux. Now I’m not saying that the project can be done for that amount of money (it’s possible that it can), but I also don’t feel I should be the only person funding the project. And maybe it’s enough of a prize to incentivize someone or a group to do it.

Now, of course, I see problems. Since it’s an open source project, how will I know who to give the reward to if the goal is met. It might be the result of the work of a group of people. If so, I think they would have to figure out among themselves how to split the reward. On the other hand, I don’t see any movement right now to port the codebase to Linux, so maybe if someone is interested in the project, you should do it on your own, and just present the results. If it works, then it seems you would be entitled to the reward.

I seem to remember people proposing groupware systems for creating these kinds of projects, a few years ago. Not sure if they came to fruition, for all I know there could be an eBay for open source programming projects. If you have any information to share on this, please post a comment here, and thanks in advance.

Postscript: Jim Russell makes an excellent point. “If you had a third choice on the download page, making the source as widely distributed as the app itself, you would have had a port a long time ago.” Maybe so. Let’s leave no stone unturned. I have added a link to the source on the download page, per his suggestion. Also here. And in today’s comment thread. And in the sidebar on the support site. BTW, there’s also a source listing site that’s indexed by search engines.

Amazon on how to get by DRM 

Amazon: “Many of our customers have already discovered that one cheap way to get DRM-free MP3s is to buy them on CD and rip them themselves.”

Here’s a screen shot.

It’s common-sense advice, but still somewhat remarkable that they’re addressing the issue of DRM right there on the home page. It could be that I’m seeing it and you’re not (possibly because I just bought a Linux hand-held computer from Nokia). It’s hard to tell.

Here’s their guide to ripping CDs.

Scripting News for 9/19/07

Next Apple toy isn’t even from Apple! 

Remember a couple of weeks ago when Steve Jobs took the stage and announced a $200 cheaper iPhone. That was pretty bad. And an iPhone that’s just an iPod. Who needs that! The new Nano sure is cute, but cute insn’t enough. I have a 1.5 year old 60GB video iPod that still works (sorry Steve) and I never use the video, so the $300 I have burning a hole in my pocket for my monthly Apple impulse buy (above and beyond the new Mini I bought last week) is going to (drum roll please) Nokia!

Yup, my next iPod/iPhone-alike thingy isn’t even from Apple and it runs Linux, and comes highly recommended by geeks everywhere. I just put in the order on Amazon, I’ll let you know how cool it is in a few days.

PS: This is my way of thanking Ben Bernanke for the huge windfall I got in the stock market yesterday and today. I think the 1/2 percent drop in interest rates is supposed to make us go out and buy stuff to stimulate the economy. Just doing my part Uncle Ben!

Today’s links 

Paul Krugman has a weblog. Subscribed.

CyberSalon in Berkeley, September 23, “Politics 101 Meets Web 2.0: Democracy or Demagoguery?” 4 to 6PM, Hillside Club, $15 at door for food, drink, and open mike discussion for digital and analog political activists. Political candidates of all stripes now have web sites, participate in social networks, and can respond to folks via YouTube. So are we closer to democracy?

Marc Canter wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg.

OPML 2.0 freezes on Thanksgiving Day (U.S.) 

Mark your calendar: November 22.

That’s the day, barring something unforseen, that OPML 2.0 will move from a draft to a final frozen spec.

If you plan to use OPML 2.0, or you’re already using it, please set aside a few hours to carefully review the spec, between now and the end of September, or at the latest early October, to be sure it makes sense to you.

We’re doing this very slowly and carefully so people will believe in the quality of this spec. If you don’t think it’s a good spec, now is the time to say why. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

You may not like the format, that’s not the issue now — it’s the spec we’re trying to finalize.

Thanks for your help!

Time to shake up conferences? 

The TC40 conference, which (important caveat) I did not attend, had a big impact on the space I occupy. Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on Techmeme, but it is important, and for the two days of TC40, most of the top articles had something to do with the conference. Yet most of the people in the TechMeme loop were not there. This makes me wonder if we can do better with these conferences that become the cursor for a few days. And the answer is of course we can. But it may mean reconfiguring the conference to take the emphasis off the people in the room and put it on the people on the net.

As Jim Forbes points out, if you wait for hotels to change, you’re going to wait a long time. They’re not really in the conference business, they’re in the bedroom business. So anything that keeps people out of the hotel is likely to stay out of the conference — like really terrific networking. So that suggests a different approach, one that does not rely on hotels.

I’ve done four conferences, three of them at universities, and one at CNET in San Francisco. At two of them, we hosted as many people as they did at TC40, because we had multiple tracks, and a very large facility. And the last three were all very much present on the net. The first, not so much. If I do another conference, we’d try to push the envelope on the net side of things, and probably not try to host as many people in person. Instead of 500 to 1000 people, I’d try for 50 to 100 people. Kind of a middle-ground between the experts at the TC40 conf, and the audience. More like a TV studio than a conference. Everyone would be either a blogger or reporter. All would be encouraged to participate. And everyone would lead a chat room, or a blog comment section, or a video track. We could have much more diverse video nowadays, because of services like justin.tv and ustream.tv, and I’m sure many others, who provide outbound bandwidth. All we’d need at the facility is enough bandwidth to connect to these services, and if you’re not at a hotel, that’s not at all hard these days. You could do it at Stanford or Cal, or even the Hillside Club. If you’re not deep inside a building with thick walls, EVDO can serve as a backup. If you can’t get on through the LAN, try a WAN instead.

I’d also like to see less of a focus on the interests and success stories of venture capital. Something has really changed, even the VCs seem to know it. Money is undifferentiated, so why pay so much attention to what the money people say. Let’s get people with big ideas to contribute them, and to disagree with other people with big ideas. That’s not to say I’d exclude the money people. But I would insist that they be people who are participating in the networked conversation, not just at the show, but 24 by 7, on blogs, on Twitter, on whatever.

I had this discussion with Loic last week. I didn’t think and still don’t think that it was a good idea for him to have French politicians speak at LeWeb last year. I didn’t think it was a good idea for Chris to invite John Edwards to speak at Gnomedex in 2006. Why? Because these people don’t have blogs, they don’t understand the net. They want to use it, for sure, to get money and votes, but they don’t have a vision for it, beyond that, so what they have to say is uninteresting. “Give me money. Vote for me.” That’s all they say. If they want to come, great, let them listen and ask questions. And look for politicos (as with the VCs) who are making a difference on the net. People like Fred Wilson or Paul Kedrosky, for example. I’m sure there are many more.

And I’d work to develop more ways for the back-channel to participate, to come to the front. That’s the key to the future of conferences, how to extend them into the net, so the communication path is every way imaginable, not just from the venue out to the world. I want to feel like I’m in a nerve center, whether I’m at the venue or sitting in my living room in Berkeley. I had that feeling, btw, or an inkling of it, watching the AlwaysOn conference eariler this year, which had excellent presence on the net, real-time. The TC40 conference promoters, amazingly, actively thwarted the back channel. I don’t know what their thinking was, but I think it was wrong.

Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you’re going and are excited about it. Sometimes it’s amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap.

I’d also like to see a mix of interviews and debates, and open discussion. Dinners in every major city that wants to have them. The truly great tech conferences of the future will be world wide events, as the web itself is world wide, and will be inclusive, not exclusive, and cost very little to participate in, if not $0.

Mundeemo: “Don’t forget a row of suicide booths..”

Boston vs Silicon Valley 

Doc Searls: “If you’re a fast-growing tech company looking for the maximum quantity of high-quality local talent, there isn’t much choice. Silicon Valley is the place.”

Adam Green, on the other hand, wants to bring the Boston Boomers back into the tech business.

Closing loops 

As predicted, Mint did win the top prize at the TC40 conf.

Fred Wilson, an investor in Wasabe, one of several companies in the market that Mint is entering, thinks we should have a discussion about the security of financial data on the web.

Just in time for my Long Bet with Martin Nisenholtz, the NY Times has opened their archive and eliminated TimesSelect. So now if they broke the top stories of 2007, they will show up in a Google search. If this means I lose the bet, so be it. The money goes to a charity, either way, and I’d rather have the Times content be open.