I added a What is This? section to the Thread Writer docs page. #

They say this is an AI-generated trailer for Heidi. If true, wow. I suspect a human did this. And if so, wow. It's just freaking great.#

I remember seeing the early Pixar demos, you could see they had a new idea. A few years later, Toy Story. That's how I judge ChatGPT et al. #

The server running Drummer and FeedLand wasn't doing well, so I decided to double the memory, and add a second CPU, basically doubling the monthly cost, which still is so low it amazes me. Anyway, it's remarkable how much better the server is doing, so I did the same for the server running my newest apps, with the same result. I now monitor the CPU and disk usage graphs for both servers, and figured out that the servers were running out of memory and thrashing by swapping stuff to and from disk. You can see it in the 14-day graphs. The things that look like spikes are actually minutes worth of flatlining where basically nothing is coming in or out until the situation resolves. Now apparently that never comes close to happening. #

I live in the mountains west of the Hudson River, where we're getting hammered with rain this summer. We needed it, we were in a drought. I have a feeling that's over now. This last storm seems have been the tipping point for the ability of the mountains to absorb the water, now there's huge runoff, the creeks are full, there are roads that will wash out if there's much more rain. It's very easy to get depressed in this weather, but writing about it helps.#

Podcast: Ode to Chris and Mary. 10 minutes. #

On this day in 2003, Chris Lydon and I did the first podcast in his 20 year series, certainly the longest-running podcast on the web, and imho unapproached in excellence. #

Here's a picture I took of Chris during the interview. #

I was actually wearing a Google shirt that day. 😄#

All these years later, we who love podcasting owe Chris and Mary our thanks for their pioneering efforts and sticking with it for twenty freaking years. #

You're welcome to try Thread Writer for Bluesky. 💥#

I'll believe that Facebook's new social network is growing when I get the feeling "it's happening over there." So far that hasn't happened once. To think that's it's somehow dominant is ludicrous. As a developer, I want a platform that has curious creative people ready to try out new ideas. That's a niche Twitter has now given up, probably forever, and I doubt if Facebook wants developers for Threads. #

There’s hope for a bootstrap pairing of the open web and social nets to create a pretty good writing platform that doesn’t lock users into one platform or another.#

Podcast: Thoughts re the Threads rollout. And respect for Elon Musk in a limited way, reminds me of Philippe Kahn. 20 minutes. #

Twitter isn't going away. What we should hope for is they start adding stuff to Twitter that users really like. And that'll force Facebook to do it too. As a result technology moves forward. One-party systems stagnate as we've seen.#

The discussion about Threads is happening on Twitter. In a sense nothing has happened until links to Threads posts show up here. It's an almost zero-interop system at this point.#

Actually you can embed posts in HTML pages (example), but that's about it. You can't even link to individual posts or threads. Or if you can, I haven't seen any. You can also link to individual posts, example. #

My address on Threads.#

Has anyone found any indication of an API as part of Threads?#

I've been developing a new thread-authoring and publishing tool for Bluesky. Looking for people who are good at reporting bugs to try it, report on the experience. Looking for deal-stoppers, important things that don't work. If you have time today to try it, please send email. Thanks!#

Maybe the inflation was caused by disruptions in the supply system due to Covid. Maybe all we had to do was wait for the system to come back online, modulo the greed of businesses to increase profits with the air cover of "oh it's the inflation you know."#

Does Facebook with their new "threads" social network plan to fill the API Gap left by Twitter kicking the devs under the bus? Will Facebook love devs more?#

Every Fourth of July the song of the day is the US Blues, the hippie anthem of love for the USA. Wave that flag, wave it high and wide! #

Journalism should care about Google breaking the open web as much as they care about Musk breaking Twitter because, in capitalism, Musk has the right to break Twitter, he owns it, but Google doesn’t own the web. I think the reason journalism will report on Musk breaking Twitter and not Google breaking the web is that they need a person to report on, and Google has never really had a personality. The two founders are quiet, and I don't think I've ever heard the current CEO speak a word. So they're unreportable?#

I was wondering if the W3C feed validator has an API. I'd like to submit my feed to it periodically to keep track of changes.#

Frum's take on Twitter sounds right. "Twitter itself may eke out a ghostly existence for a long time, like the thing that calls itself 'Newsweek.'"#

Poll: Will you create an account on Facebook's new Twitter clone?#

This graph illustrates perfectly why it was time to upgrade the server FeedLand and Drummer run on.#

FeedLand: Making titleless items a bit more readable in rivers. #

A video tour of the Art Show feed on Bluesky. And the story of how and why it was created. #

I wonder if now what I've been trying to do with RSS, blogging and podcasting, get underneath the bigco's and live on a plane that doesn't require any one of them, makes a bit more sense now. I'm at least a generation older than most of the other techies who cohabit this space. What you're seeing now for the second or third time, I've seen five or six times. The more times you see it the more predictable it gets, and the more confidence you have in your understanding. That's why, when Google tries to take control of the web I won't do it. All my freedom as a developer comes from the integrity of the web. Once it's gone you can't get it back. I feel the pull. I could convert completely to HTTPS, it would make my life a bit easier to do so. But I won't as long as Google is the one forcing it. If they back off and commit to not blocking the non-HTTPS web, then maybe I have more flexibility. #

I like Bluesky/Masto because -- they promise independence from bigco silos run by megalomaniac billionaires hell-bent on conquering everything. I just want to play with my friends. I'm into working together not world domination. Been there, done that, found it boring and lonely. #

If you're a Little Outliner user, and you can still access your files, you should download them asap. Use the command in the Tools menu. Then you should switch to Drummer. It's a significantly better version of LO2 and does not depend on Twitter for identity. I think the reason it still works for some people is that we cache the login information on the server, and as long as the server doesn't restart, you can continue to use it. But the server will eventually restart, and that'll be the end of LO2. It's had a good run and Drummer has been out there for a couple of years now. #

Of course Harvard is using ChatGPT in their comp sci classes. I can't believe how snotty journalists can be. If you were a doctor and a new treatment for cancer appeared, no matter how flawed, you'd want your students to be up on it. Maybe they'll figure out how to fix the flaws. Journalists act as if they're the only ones who know the outcome and everyone else is either corrupt or stupid. That's who covers news for us.#

I'm starting to think about writing a validator for the W3C's feed validator. A validator-validator. I'd submit my feed to it via a web service (not sure if they have an API), and if that feed doesn't validate with the W3C validator, and we believe it is valid per the RSS 2.0 spec, we would open an issue on their repo. Maybe if they want to be really cooperative, they could run the test feeds against their validator whenever they make an update as part of the validation process, and never release a version where those feeds didn't validate. This would allay my concern about them breaking RSS because they don't respect or understand the RSS 2.0 roadmap. I'd start with the Scripting News RSS feed, which does validate at this time. BTW, their warnings are bogus imho. They should recognize the Source namespace not warn me about it. A copyright statement can and should be able to have a © character. Why not? The spec doesn't prohibit it, and it's part of the language we use for copyright. And this is not an Atom feed so that warning about Atom was a bad move. The authors of the original validator were promoting Atom at the expense of RSS. Why not put that to bed, it's not exactly an ethical thing for a validator to do imho. #

Too. Much. Rain. #

New FeedLand gesture. It was a complicated gesture to see all the text of a too-long-to-fit item in FeedLand. Then it hit me, just click on the freaking text to make it bigger and then click again to make it small again. Much easier to do, and what else would a click mean?? Here's a quick video demo. ;-)#

To say there will be no programmers in 5 years is as ludicrous as saying there will be no email users in 5 years, because an AI chatbot can write email.#

There was no place to post comments or questions about the Source namespace. So I created a place and linked to it from the spec. #

Over on Masto and Blueski you hear a lot of people rooting for Twitter's demise. I am not one of them.Twitter is deeply installed in our society. It would take a long time to rebuild something like Twitter, and I don't think it's even possible. I don't like Musk's politics, an understatement, but I see that problem as possible to overcome. #

This is a test. I realized something, ever since FeedLand moved to email identity and therefore had to use HTTPS to protect the passwords, any time I include an image in the right margin of a blog post, it has to also be served by HTTPS or else the browser will refuse to load it when the item is viewed in FeedLand. It has probably also meant that the right-margin images weren't showing up in other RSS systems for much longer. So anyway, if you see the delicious Love RSS icon in the right margin of this post in FeedLand that means I've found a workaround that works. My writing life gets more complicated. I guess it's worth it?#

Our challenge is to make sure the really interesting stuff happens on the open web, outside the silos. If that happens we can go on. Otherwise we go right back to where we were when Twitter and Facebook dominated. Not a good place. 17 years of stagnation. #

As with most online services, there's a virtually impenetrable wall between users and the people who run Bluesky. Has to be that way. There are hundreds of thousands of us, maybe tens of them. They're having trouble keeping the system running. As I dig in more on Bluesky, not because I'm getting married to the platform, btw -- more friends reach out and ask for help getting an invite code. It isn't about Bluesky though, it's just that we got the feeds up there first, so there's a way I can build. Ultimately my goal is to build a layer on top of all the social nets I can, so it doesn't matter which service you use, the stuff I create can make it to you and will. I used to write about "when a big tree falls it creates room for new growth." I wrote that about Jerry Garcia. And it's equally true about Twitter. As they vacate, and get smaller and more focused, I believe understandably, the places they vacate once again become interesting places to develop. I can't miss an opportunities like these. #

1995: "Like the big tree that fell last March, the death of a huge human being like Jerry Garcia frees up a huge amount of space. Once there was a tree, now there are seedlings. After the sadness, there will be huge creativity."#

There is an RSS feed for the Bluesky art channel. I'm seeing if I can put together a nice way to view the art w/o being a Bluesky member. #

I found and documented a problem with inline images from Drummer as displayed in FeedLand. I believe the problem has been there since we switched to email-based identity a few months back. As a result today's post with an inline image works. #

If a bear tweets in the woods can anyone hear it?#

Welcome to July. Here's the June OPML archive. #

Here's a new feed for Bluesky I put together in a couple of days. It's based on feeds on Twitter that were shut down in the great twitter app blackout that periodically spooled great art in the middle of all the hubub and todo of Twitter. I loved it. And missed it. So I brought it back. 💥#

Re the Harvard blogs, I contacted the Harvard people and the Automattic people are in the loop and they're going to work together to get the old Harvard blogs hosted on Automattic servers. I feel pretty good about how this is going. 😄#

As a software developer and marketer, I really don't care what goes over the wire, as long as I know what to do and it doesn't break. The main arguments in RSS-land were whether or not to rip up the pavement and start over. I'm pretty much always against that. :-)#

Sometimes people throw bombs because they like to blow things up, not because things need to be blown up.#

Today I get to work on eye candy, a little app that sends a beautiful work of art to Bluesky every so often, taken from the thousands of art images that used to be posted regularly on Twitter as an act of love by a group of volunteers. Apparently Musk's Twitter shut them down, what a stupid thing to do. Musk should be focusing on streams of content that have value in and of themselves. Art is like that. It's like putting curtains on your windows. Strictly speaking you don't need them. But they make the place look better. I think Bluesky is the place for that right now. Update: First post with an image. Now comes the fun stuff, spiffing up the format and getting it uploading random pics on a schedule. Then I move it to a server and just enjoy the art as it floats by. #

Another great ChatGPT use. I have a mental block with regular expressions. I know when to use them, but I just can't construct them. I used to be able to do it, a long time ago. Anyway, now I describe the problem to ChatGPT and it gives me back the expression. I don't even have to formulate the question very carefully, it figures it out. Now I can relax about it. #

It's very hard for me to type blob, I keep typing blog. #

An outliner is a combination of a text editor and draw program. You have gestures to move objects that's similar to what you can do with objects in a draw program, but you also have the use of the keyboard to write and edit text. I just realized that as I was editing a complicated JSON structure, thinking the design of this is overblow, but I'm glad I am using an outliner to manipulate it, I'd be going crazy selecting stuff, cutting and pasting. All that is at a lower level, factored out of the user experience of the outliner. #

Note to self: Add persistence to Textcasting definition. #

My first podcast was on June 11, 2004. About the bright future of podcasting. #

I'm working my way through past seasons of Succession. I'm in the middle of the last episode of Season 1. I know what's coming, of course, so I can just revel in the outstanding writing, acting, photography, scenery, the raw wonderful subtle emotions of the characters. #

A piece I wrote about identi.ca, the precursor to ActivityPub, in 2008. I found it interesting to read with foresight what is coming true today, 15 years later. It's a myth that everything happens fast in tech. We waste so much time reinventing and breaking stuff, it's amazing anything ever gets done here. 💥 #

I was working on some stuff in Old School, the static site generator I use to build Scripting News, and in the process broke the RSS feed. Thanks to Richard Eriksson for the report. It should be fixed now. Still diggin! #

If you write an editorial saying AI could drive the human species to extinction, please explain: 1. How this would happen. 2. Why this is worse than the human species driving itself to extinction. Lost jobs is not a good answer to #1, imho.#

AppleTV is running the whole of the first episode of Silo as a tweet. This is new, never seen this done before. I imagine that Apple is paying Twitter to do this, or maybe not. Maybe Twitter wants to establish itself as a medium for watching, not just participating, and Apple is helping. I think we'll see more and more of that. A diminution of individuals communicating and more corporations and political parties. People who think Musk is going to regret buying Twitter are imho probably wrong. They were just barely treading water, sitting on one of the most amazing communication systems ever built. A restructuring is for sure going to cause a dip, but once straightened out, it could turn into a strong business. It's not smart to bet against a company that's as installed as Twitter is.#

When you hear journalists talk about use of ChatGPT in education they talk about ways students can use it to cheat. They never mention the support functions it can play, like a perfectly tireless and free-of-charge tutor. That's how I often use it. If I'm not sure I've remembered something correctly, I just ask ChatGPT to remind me. It's a kind of drill that was never available before unless you were a rich kid with parents who spoil them. #

After a good night's sleep and some reflection, I bet the reason the Harvard blogs project is shutting down is the same issue that's haunting all online service providers in 2023, moderation. Not exactly a business for a research center at Harvard to be involved in. Just a guess. #

Doc's Harvard blog, a mainstay of the post-blog-boom blogosphere, is about to go away. I started the service that hosted Doc's blog. You know how they say in startups, will the last person to leave please turn the lights out? Well we both lived to see the end of the dream, Doc and I. Our blogging service was the first such service at an American university, possibly in the world. Of course the ideas seem obvious in hindsight, but they weren't obvious then. I went to Harvard hoping to bring intellectuals to blogging and vice versa, and as a bonus we got podcasting. It worked. Anyway, Doc wrote a final post today, have a read, it's a typically beautiful Doc memoire. And here's the archive.org listing for the original location of his blog, part of the original group of Harvard blogs, started in 2003. #

Here's the announcement of the new Harvard blog server on March 23, 2003. You can see how we got there by reading the archive for the whole month of March. I started out in Woodside, CA, having just sold my house and packed the car and drove cross-country. I got to work real quickly. By the end of the month I had given talks at the Kennedy School and to the user's group of system managers at Harvard. It was a real rollout. We had weekly meetups at Berkman, every Thursday. All the history was recorded on the blogs. Luckily I continued to tell the story on this blog too, and that archive will remain. #

Meanwhile the archive of scripting.com remains in place, and archived in OPML on a GitHub repo. Should last a few more years. #

May 2003: What makes a weblog a weblog? I believe this link will go 404 too on Friday. #

Manton Reece writes that we should welcome Facebook's new cage fighting platform, not block it. I'm neutral. I don't know what it is. I seriously doubt it'll be exciting. And I think they should stop calling themselves Meta, that's stupid and dishonest. They're Facebook. They need to own that, because it's their actual name. #

I am celebrating the imminent arrival of Facebook's thing, whatever it is, by buying a domain. It's what I do. Some people collect shoes. Other people classic cars or vinyl records. #

Every company should train an AI chatbot with all current info about everything so people can get answers. Most company info if documented at all is scattered, depends on Google for search, and it increasingly sucks. I spent years not finding a crucial piece of technical info about a company whose products I depend on, till I asked the question on my blog for the Nth time, and most people don’t have the ability to do that. And that's info the company wants people to have, and it ’s well documented on their site. We were supposed to be creating an information rich world, but so far it hasn’t worked. Someone should step up and be the example, reap the competitive benefits.#

The archive.org puzzle appears to have been solved. There are at least two URLs you can use to access the RSS 2.0 spec on the Harvard website. When I looked up the one with the apparent problem, it was one they only started tracking in 2016? I don't know. Kye Fox on Bluesky found an archive of the spec that is available on archive.org starting on July 22, 2003. Here's the archive for this blog for July 2003 (the actual page, not on archive.org). This is the URL we were using at that time. It hadn't been moved to cyber.law.harvard.edu yet. So we have found a snapshot of the spec from 2003. And it was my mistake, not archive.org's. The statement that it had been at the same address for all 20+ years was not true. I am sorry for my mistake, and thanks to archive.org for doing such a good job of maintaining the record of this document and all the rest that they do. 😄#

I wish help systems for online services could answer questions about my account, not give me instructions on how to find the answers. Why can't they do it for me? I've been spoiled by ChatGPT which actually parses the words I type, and gives me the answers I asked for. For example, I have a Google Workspace account, set up by someone else. I want to add new email addresses to my account. I can't find out how much I'm already paying for the email addresses that are already allocated. I do know the total amount, $26/month. It's way too much money for what it's doing, btw. Basically I'd like to give it instructions in my language. "I'm thinking of adding five new email addresses, how much will that add to my monthly bill?" Then if I decide to go ahead, I could just tell it, in my own language -- "add them please." Pretty simple, right? It's what I would say to a human being, and the human would get it. And so would ChatGPT. Why can't Google Workspace? See how much software now has to be redesigned to meet the expectations of people who expect the ease of use of ChatGPT? #

I wondered why ChatGPT wasn't given a name like Alexa or Siri. #

It's possible that Elon Musk is happy with his purchase of Twitter even if the market cap is down by a lot by some measures. It's still the place of record on the net. Nothing else comes close.#

Pretty sure there's no truth to any of the news about Russia this weekend. It's a stage play probably orchestrated by Putin himself, or two or more stage plays written by some oligarchs, Putin and whoever.#

I'm seeing this meme all over the place today. The fighting in Russia is thought to be the first big news event in the time of Twitter that Twitter (collectively) did not deliver the story. No one knows if it's a combination of bad algorithm or lack of participation by news sources.#

Journalists are trying to discredit AI the same way they discredited Facebook. The same way they tried to kill the Mac in the early-mid 90s. They don't report on anything other than their own dreams.#

There's a whole new season of The Bear on Hulu. My. Next. Binge.#

RSS is a starting point. What you add to it is what makes it interesting. We've used RSS to convey news articles, and we love that, and will always support it, but there are breakthroughs to come.#

What people love about Bluesky has nothing to do with the software or federation, or Jack Dorsey. It's the people, stupid. What a lovely group of people. For whatever reason the people who are there now are creative, interested, and stimulated because they sense the presence of similar people. Kind of like Clubhouse was a few summers ago. This tells me something I've suspected, that small-size social networks have a place. They shouldn't just be an accidental thing that disappears because growth attracts less interesting, anti-creative people. #

I've been taking it relatively easy on the blogging the last few days. Must be thinking. I'll be back when I'm back in the writing groove. #

New feature in FeedLand. Timeline updates are more humane. 😄#

I'm was looking for a new show to binge the other day when I saw a tweet from an old Silicon Valley friend Mike Arrington, who now is a crypto VC in Miami, recommending an AppleTV show, Swagger. That was good enough for me to give it a try, that and it got excellent ratings via Metacritic. I'm now most of the way through the first season, it's really good, kind of a cross between Friday Night Lights and The Wire, with a bit of Atlanta. Takes place in Baltimore, the story centers on a 14-year-old star-to-be and his life in the same city as The Wire, during the early days of Covid, based on the life story of NBA star Kevin Durant. An urban version of Friday Night Lights, which I had been working my way through, loving the first two seasons but the show got pretty bad by the third imho. Season 1 of Swagger is very good. I'm on episode 7. Season 2 starts tomorrow. #

Marc Davis: "The more I use ChatGPT, the more I feel it calls into question our models of human language production. How much of how humans use language is based on pattern matching and prediction, and does not rely on what we would consider to be awareness or understanding?"#

This is the roadmap from the RSS 2.0 spec written in 2002. "RSS is by no means a perfect format, but it is very popular and widely supported. Having a settled spec is something RSS has needed for a long time. The purpose of this work is to help it become a unchanging thing, to foster growth in the market that is developing around it, and to clear the path for innovation in new syndication formats. Therefore, the RSS spec is, for all practical purposes, frozen at version 2.0.1. We anticipate possible 2.0.2 or 2.0.3 versions, etc. only for the purpose of clarifying the specification, not for adding new features to the format. Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names."#

It worked. RSS 2.0 has stood the test of time. Lots of innovation has taken place in the namespaces, and the core has stayed intact. There were a lot of people who wanted to control and own RSS when I wrote that. If it hadn't been frozen they'd still be fighting over the basics. We've made a lot with RSS and we're going to make a lot more. It'll be important in the evolution of social media, podcasting, blogging and more. This is what the roadmap says. It worked and continues to work. #

To this day there are people who want to own RSS. That must never be allowed to happen. #

Playing around with DALL-E. "Mark Twain on a porch overlooking the Mississipi River with a steamboat going down the river. Must look like it was drawn as an illustration for a book 100 years ago. The picture should be wider and relatively short.” #

A bug report was filed by AJ-Ianozi re the W3C hosting of my RSS 2.0 spec, with my name, copyright and CC-BY license removed. I posted a comment in that thread, and I really hope that's all that's needed to put this behind us. #

Ask ChatGPT: "Suppose I had written a story and published it on the web. It is clearly stated that I am the author, and it is published using the Creative Commons attribution share-alike license. Suppose someone else publishes the story on their own website, removed my name and replaced it with theirs. Would the license allow them to do that?"#

Patton: "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."#

Facebook is launching an ActivityPub service to compete with Mastodon. There's a lot of talk in the webs about locking them out. Big words but not much power behind them. They will, in an instant, have millions more users than the existing ActivityPub services will, so the question really is -- who's being locked out? It was never a good bet that the architecture of ActivityPub would somehow be able to resist Silicon Valley-scale social networks. That doesn't mean there are no answers, just that bluster isn't one of them. You have to think. #

But here's some good news. There's no guarantee that Facebook will be successful on terms that matter to them. Unless a half billion people use their service, it's probably not worth continuing, for a company the size of Facebook. Podcasting has withstood countless attacks like this, and has always been left standing as unsullied as ever. But podcasting is "really simple" and the benefit of federation is well known to users. That's been what's kept it from being pwned by bigco's all these years.#

Also it'll be interesting to see how much of ActivityPub Facebook supports in their product. When Google Reader came out for RSS their trick was to break RSS by not supporting a key feature. This did huge damage that we're still dealing with long after Google is gone.#

I asked ChatGPT for 25 words: "The MetaWeblog API is a standard protocol for remotely managing and posting content on blogging platforms, enabling cross-platform compatibility and streamlined content management."#

A response from Coralie Mercier at the W3C and my response. I'm hoping they'll point to the actual RSS 2.0 spec instead of hosting a hacked version of the spec. You can't ethically take the copyright notice off someone else's work and pass it off as your own. It happens all the time on the web, but the W3C can't be one of those places. We're talking about the integrity of the web and its history. RSS 2.0 is a big milestone. What an awful way to try to show support for a standard, esp one created by independent developers and the news industry. #

I'm doing more spelunking around Metaweblog API-land. Found a goldmine of past history in a site that I had decommissioned for some reason, listings.opml.org. So now it's back on the web and hopefully Google et al will index it soon. It'd be great to get this kind of stuff into an AI database. I hope products are coming soon to help us do this. 😄#

Developers even the best ones are terrible at compromise, that's why it's so hard to federate in a pave-the-cowpaths way and big companies run by venture capitalists and Elon Musk always kick our butts and we end up wasting 17 years losing all the good stuff we had before, with no simple path forward. If you want to know why we feel stuck, next time you decide not to be compatible with someone else, that's why, right there. It just takes two to set a standard. I speak from experience. My partner with RSS 2.0 was the NYT. With XML-RPC it was Microsoft. With rssCloud it was Automattic. See how that works. Companies that decide to partner with truly independent developers can have the agility they don't usually get with their internal processes. It's how simple stuff actually makes it into the market. Again I speak from experience. Us little guys can work together too, but I guess they don't see they could be part of getting a consensus going. But they can.#

One of the things I did this morning was carefully read the Metaweblog API docs I wrote in 2002. This became a widely supported standard almost instantly on publication. There was a demand for it. At that time, being compatible at an API level was a competitive issue for blogging software. A must-have feature.#

Here's what Evan Williams at Blogger wrote about it in May 2003. He carefully documents an important disagreement we had at the time. Lots to think about. #

BTW, this is a must-read for anyone following new development, in 2023, in social media. #

Small is beautiful. I believe it's possible to create a single, simple, easy to understand API that covers the core of all social media APIs. Analogous to what TCP/IP did to flatten the differences between network protocols forming the internet in the 1970s. #

If the non-Twitter networks want to compete, get rid of character limits. Here's a screen shot of a post to Twitter earlier today. 613 characters. I could not post that to Mastodon or Bluesky, their character limits are too restrictive. #

It’s time for the NY Times to kill itself, put itself out of its misery, or fire all the reporters and get some serious people in there, because in what demented, insane, addled, psychotic, empty brain is Trump remotely fun.#

Did you wonder why there were no Jan 6 crowds at either of Trump’s arraignments? Isn’t it obvious? Any would-be insurrectionists saw the Jan 6 folks get tried, convicted and put in jail. That makes the whole thing real. Americans of 2023 are soft. We’re the ones who got tax cuts from Bush while we were at war. We had no draft, no price controls. War was okay as long as we could ignore it. We’d rather have others make the sacrifices for us. We like to own guns to support our fantasy that we’re badasses, but truthfully we’d rather watch the revolution on TV than go to jail, esp for a crybaby snob like Trump.#