Here's an example of an application of the idea of a personal nest. #

Little Pork Chop allows you to create a paragraph-length tweet, which it breaks up into 140-character packets that Twitter can process. #

I'd like to add a feature that creates an archive of your writing. So maybe someday you'd be able to review them all and see the progression of your thinking. Or possibly make them public, so they can appear in other places (such as your blog, or Facebook, or some new aggregator that might show up).#

Where to store it? Today's Little Pork Chop is a free app. It costs me nothing to run it, and even if it grows huge, it still will cost very little. It's good advertising for me, keeps my work on people's minds. Totally worth the effort for me, and almost all the code runs on your machine. My server just acts as a conduit to shuttle your ideas to Twitter's cloud. But adding permanent storage to this app makes it much more complicated and problematic.#

On the other hand, if you had an online nest, you could create a folder there, call it Short Ideas, say, and give my app access to it. Then when you post something, it would automatically deposit a copy, in a standard format, in that folder. Even if you stored it there for 100 years, the cost probably wouldn't add up to more than a penny. Today's servers are very good at storing small bits of text cheaply.#

However, we don't have such a place. So if I wanted to implement the feature, I would have to store the backup for you, probably in Amazon S3. It would work fantastically today, but wouldn't be much of an archive because I'm just a person. How long would it last? Not very long because people don't last so long, or they lose interest, move on, etc. So it gets expensive to try out a small idea, so we don't try so many, and progress slows, or only progresses in directions that allow startups to make money by aggregating data about us, or selling access to to advertisers. Seems silly to trade all that for a simple archive of your paragraph-length ideas.#

The nest approach would be easy. Any other approach would be, it seems to me, unworkable.#

I just got a link from United asking for my feedback on a recent flight. It so happens I have feedback. But first I had to answer questions I was unwilling to answer. So I decided just to post a note here. If they see it great, if not, no problem.#

The idea is about their wifi service. I basically always want to use wifi. The process of signing up for it was unbelievably tedious, and when I finally did get through, the service was unusably slow. It was only $3. I watched a movie instead.#

On the way back, I started the signup again, maybe the slowness on the wifi on the way out was a fluke. It wanted me to go through the whole signup process again. It hadn't remembered any of the data it made me enter, plus all the CAPTCHAs to make sure I'm really a person. That's ridiculous. I didn't bother.#

Here's the idea. 1. Let me use my frequent flier number to sign up. Because it already has a credit card attached to it, I wouldn't have to enter that. 2. Let me use miles to pay for the service. Isn't that consistent with the way they think about perks like this? Then the low quality of the service might not feel so bad. #

Like everyone who was alive in the summer of 1969 I remember where I was when Neil and Buzz got out of the LEM and walked on the surface of the moon. I was 14 years old, on a trip with my summer camp to the Newport Folk Festival in Newport, RI. #

It was an amazing experience, in so many ways. I saw Muddy Waters, BB King, and Johnny Cash, and so many more (my memory is pretty weak) and then on the evening of the 20th someone put a small black and white TV on top of a VW microbus, and everyone left the show and gathered around, to watch, and even though we couldn't see much, we felt a part of something amazingly great. #

1969 was a pretty amazing year. The moon landing, Woodstock, the Miracle Mets. At 14 I didn't fully appreciate that life wasn't always like this. #

1. Rex should read this post Mike wrote about cycling in Kansas. #

2. Scoble is missing his calling.#

3. The Facebook editor is dangerous to ideas!#

Including them here gets them into my RSS feed, much on-topic. #

Far West#

Great Plains#

Mid-Atlantic#

Midwest#

Mountains#

New England#

South#

Southwest#

Please excuse the construction. #

Sorry for any inconvenience. #

Dig we must.#

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Western states#

Mid-Atlantic states#

I'm the last person to defend Comcast, but I just want to say that the behavior that Ryan Block documented in his taped conversation with them is industry standard. #

AOL and MSN both did it to me ten years ago when I wanted to cancel my accounts. I hadn't used either account in years. But I dreaded interacting with them so much that they got a bunch of extra money from me. It's part of their business model. #

It's great that people are tuning into this now. Let's clean this cesspool of shitty customer service up. Get the FTC involved. (BTW, to all the libertarians out there, this is what you get from a "free" market.)#

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Western states#

Mid-Atlantic states#

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Lately I've been working on software snacks. But there's some serious platform stuff coming too, soon. pic.twitter.com/ByyWJU2P55

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) July 12, 2014

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Yesterday I wrote a piece that explained, among other things, that I see software as a performing art.#

This led Jhay Em Calderon to ask "why develop in an environment where [one of the platform vendors] will eventually shut you down for going over an unknown line?"#

The conversation was interesting, and ended with me saying I'm not worried about getting "shut down" by Zuck or Dick Costolo, because shipping software is only the visible part of what I'm doing. The important part is I'm (hopefully) getting a fan club together.#

I'm like a dancing bear in a circus. Twitter and Facebook have great tents. So I'll use them as long as they'll have me, and hopefully the fans will like what they get, and remember that if I have to go to another tent, or create my own.#

I think perhaps the tech industry may have matured to the point where they get that a guy like me isn't doing what their employees do. Analogously, the NBA employs a lot of people. They get paychecks year-in-year-out, while the players may only get a season or two in the league. There's more risk in what I do. And these days, the employees make more money. I think that's a bit out of balance, and that things will even out over time. #

Other people have said that Twitter is not a good bet, just look at their stock. But I am looking at their stock and that's why I feel especially comfortable with Twitter. They need new ideas. The market knows this. I believe the management knows this about the market, and may even feel they need new ideas from outside their company. #

In any case, that's one reason why it's good to have two legs, and I haven't forgotten that underneath it all is the web, which no one owns, and Linux and JavaScript, Node.js, cheap cloud servers, etc that make all this stuff possible today.#

I feel it's a good time to get in the sandbox and play a bit. And if it all blows up, well that's happened before. I don't like the feeling, but I'm still here. #

PS: It's worth pointing out that today's new release, thesaurus.land, relies on neither Twitter or Facebook. #

Update: Thanks to my friend Sarah Pressler for showing me that my outliner thesaurus wasn't just a toy. #

She said: "OMG will use this all day long. Generally use thesuarus.com but it's so cluttered that I cringe every time." I realized how right she was. That's why I didn't use thesaurus.com. I had forgotten!#

I also realized that with the cute name I gave it, it would never show up near the other thesauri on searches, so it would be much better to change the name now, at the beginning so it would be more visible and memorable. #

So that's why the name just changed to thesaurus.land. #