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

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

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

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

 11/5/2009; 10:21:56 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also: Transcendental Money.

 11/4/2009; 3:47:25 PM  

Here's the Suggested User List as a list.

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

How I produced it.

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

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

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

 11/4/2009; 7:09:36 AM  

A new feature of listbrowser.org.

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

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

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

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

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

 11/3/2009; 3:27:31 PM  

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

http://listbrowser.org/

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

Username:  

Here are some interesting jump-off points.

My Berkman Center list.

Tweetdeck's Team list.

Patrick LaForge's Breaking News list.

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

 11/3/2009; 8:51:22 AM  

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

On PCs it's C:

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

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

Where would you begin?

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

That still leaves me with the problem...



 11/2/2009; 7:44:04 AM  

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

The site is moving to wordpress.com.

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

The feed is located here now.

http://rebootnews.com/feed/

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

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

 11/2/2009; 7:32:28 AM  

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

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

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

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

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

 11/2/2009; 5:15:27 AM  

First, thanks to Jeff Pulver for a fantastic conference earlier this week and thanks for letting me keynote it. Putting it in L.A., away from the distortion field of Silicon Valley, made it a lot more interesting and less of a festival of wiener-boys. I fell in love at least five times in 24 hours, that's pretty good. First time I spoke at a tech conference since LeWeb in 2007.

Technorati rolled out a new version and completely lost track of Scripting News, so I took its icon off the home page of the site. I used to check it every couple of days to see if it found anyone talking about something I wrote here. Nowadays it comes up with nothing. So goodbye Technorati.

I added links to my newest projects in the right sidebar. Makes them easier for us to find and of course adds juice to them in the search engines.

That's all!

Happy Halloween! (And Let's go Phillies. Teach the Yankees about philosophy.)

 10/31/2009; 8:07:24 AM  

This began as a response to a comment left by Marshall Kirkpatrick to an earlier post of mine.

My belief is that it's content that drives the apps.

You need something or someone to go first. With RSS it was Wired, Red Herring, Motley Fool and Salon then the early blogs then the NY Times and it blasted off.

With podcasting it was IT Conversations, the Gillmor Gang, Morning Coffee Notes, Daily Sourcecode, the community, then NPR and it blasted off.

This confluence has not (yet) happened for directory structures. It's not immediately obvious who the big drivers are going to be, but if they're out there, the Twitter lists feature is getting them to think about this stuff. I don't doubt that OPML will be part of the bootstrap and that people will quickly want to make lists that include resources that are not (just) Twitter users or lists of Twitter users.

In other words, this is the most promising moment for OPML directories that's come so far.

 10/30/2009; 2:47:23 PM  

So many things to say about where Twitter's lists point, the thing is, I've said them all already, many times over many years. There's a whole architecture already designed and deployed for lists and lists of lists. And they form directories that are much more open than the original Yahoo directory or DMOZ. I know everyone thinks DMOZ is the most open directory possible, but it's not.

The list structure of the Internet should be a open as the web. That is to say no one gives you permission to create a web page on any topic you like. So if you want to create a list of resources, that might include Twitter users, but might also include many other things, go ahead. Be the best you can be. You don't need anyone to let you do it.

If you're good, I might include your directory within mine, thereby delegating that topic to you. If something better comes along, I might unhook yours and replace it with theirs. Or I might get fancy and join yours with theirs, forming the sum of two lists.

If you want to see this working, here's a directory rendering of the archive of Scripting News. Look at the white-on-orange XML icons in the upper right corner. They, as always, link to the XML version of the rendering. In this case instead of being RSS, they are OPML. Every page has a way to suggest a link.

How do you edit these structures? In the OPML Editor of course. Here's a screenshot.

The OPML Editor allows you to build these attributed hierarchies but it also includes a full web server and CMS. And a lot more. And because it was built to run on the computers of the mid-90s, it's pretty fast on today's machines. The download is the size of an MP3. Takes a minute to install.

I may try one more time to push these ideas out there. It may finally be the time. If anyone wants to get something entrepreneurial going, I'm up for it. I'm not just doing this stuff out of the goodness of my heart.

Techies, read the OPML 2.0 spec to see how the pieces fit together. My software is all replaceable. The formats are open and lightweight. And there's some great connections to search engines possible. I pitched Google on this in 2002.

 10/30/2009; 11:57:37 AM  

Once again the Bay Bridge is in the news, and this time it seems obvious it's going to be in the news for years to come. So, what to do?

http://baybridgeblog.com/

Start a blog, of course !

 10/29/2009; 3:48:00 PM  

Okay things are getting interesting now that 50 percent of the Twitter users have the lists feature. And now it's getting pretty obvious that there are some serious omissions.

First the fun part.

I started a Twitter Babes list, but got really nervous about it, fearing backlash, so I deleted it and gave it some more thought. It came back to life as my Entourage list, very much gender-neutral, there are men and women on the list.

http://twitter.com/davewiner/entourage

These are people who I admire for their intellect, big heart, creativity, willingness to take a chance. Some I would trust my life with and others I'd trust my heart. They're good people to hang with. I don't agree with them all the time, I even compete with some of them. Some I don't know well but find interesting.

I'd love to say all this on the list, but there's no way to. That's feature #1. You must be able to explain what a list means. Even if it's only a link to a web page where you explain it.

A list is like a Twitter user. In fact some of my placeholder Twitter accounts will now go away. I no longer need the page of NY Times twitterers, or the Top 100, or even the Berkeley folk. So it makes sense that all the annotations, all the metadata that goes with a user, should also go with a list.

People are going to want a way to suggest a new addition to a list, and people with lists are going to want a way to have new additions suggested.

It should also be possible to include a list within another list. My friend Cori has a list of Bay Area people. She should be able to include my list of Berkeleyites, since Berkeley is in the Bay Area (of course). That way when I discover someone in Berkeley she automatically gets updated with that person.

All the ideas that we had for OPML directories apply to Twitter lists.

In fact there should be a way to export a list as OPML, and I think Twitter ought to do this, as a way to create systems that bridge in and out of Twitter hierarchies dynamically. Very powerful stuff. If they won't do it, I'm going to suggest that Matt get on top of this asap.

I'm doing so much stuff with WordPress these days, I'm starting to see it a bit as a platform the same way I view Twitter. I wonder if that's why Matt embraced rssCloud so quickly? Heh.

Anyway I have projects I'd like to try, but I'm really busy and probably won't get to them soon enough. If I were viewing lists as an entrepreneurial opportunity, the first place I'd explore is doing a list browser and editor, with a Suggest-A-User feature. If you want to start one of these, I'd be interested in participating, for equity.

BTW, lists are obvious gold for search engines.

 10/29/2009; 12:52:24 PM  

It's been a long time since an operating system had a feature compelling enough for me to justify an upgrade. But last night I thought of one.

The web is totally getting reverse-chronologic and imho that's a good thing. It's becoming easy to find the new stuff everywhere. Everywhere but on my local area network, that is.

When something new arrives, a podcast or an enclosure, or I download a new app or a song or TV show, on any of my machines, I'd like it to roll up into a list that I can scroll through, and have a blog-like calendar structure that I can search.

That's all -- nothing more.

Also a follow-up to the post about the battery needs of my MacBook vs the Asus Eee PC. Jim Roepcke thinks it's somehow my fault that the MacBook either has a weaker battery or uses more juice. And that they decided it would be better if I couldn't buy a spare battery to travel with. I have no idea which it is and I don't care. I'm a user. He thinks it's the OPML Editor that's responsible for the disparity. But that's just plain wrong. I run exactly the same software on both the Mac and the Asus. Further, if you look at the performance monitor, Firefox is the hog, not the OPML Editor. It's generally using five or ten times the CPU that OPML is.

Another clue is that at the conference, the last row of the auditorium, the one with the power strips, was filled with Mac users. I didn't see a single netbook user back there. That's unscientific of course, but it was pretty shocking nonetheless. Traveling Mac users are drawn to power outlets much more than netbook users are. It's just a fact.

I think I'm going to do an A-B test. Put an Asus next to a MacBook, kill all the apps, unplug both, and see how long it is before each of them dies. That ought to put it to rest. (And don't forget that while the Mac is a nicer computer with a bigger screen and keyboard, it's also heavier and costs five times as much as the Asus. And it runs hotter too, your lap gets scorched using the Mac.)

Update: I see in his follow-up comment he thinks I'm sniping at Apple. That's nuts. I spent $1700 on the MacBook so I could snipe at Apple? I actually bought it because I hoped to take it on trips like the one I took to LA this week. It didn't work very well. You want I should say it did?

 10/29/2009; 10:11:00 AM  

Interesting thread on FriendFeed about the next evolutionary step for C. I wrote a comment that I felt deserved to be elevated to a blog post.

Start by creating a really lightweight and easy to use development environment. I should be able to teach Jay Rosen to program in it. Back in the 80s there was serious competition in this area -- from Borland with Turbo Pascal and on the Mac, from Think Technologies with their C and Pascal systems.

The languages aren't the issue, at least not for me. I want to program in C again, but the curve is too steep in all the environments. Give me a Turbo tool and some nice libraries, and lets go!

 10/28/2009; 2:33:56 PM  

Eric Schmidt says he can search real-time stuff, but how to do ranking?

Good question. Would have been easier had Twitter not polluted the follower-count measure of authority. But you can still do it by making it relevant on a personal level. Someone I follow is a lot more relevant than someone I don't. After that people who are followed by people I follow. That immediately cuts down the power of the super-elites with millions of followers (they tend not to follow many).

Google is onto it with their social search. I've been asking for that, but in a different form. I want to tell them that I'm the author of this blog. Now they know a lot more about what my interests are.

7/26/09: Two-way search.

So it would be nice if ranking were a personal thing. Keep going the way you're going Eric.

 10/28/2009; 9:29:51 AM  

A bunch of random notes on returing from the #140conf in Los Angeles.

Next time I go to a conference I'm taking the Asus, not the MacBook. You're always looking for a power outlet with the Mac and that sucks. I'm also going to actively look for a replacement for the Sprint MiFi and my AT&T iPhone, both of which have terribly spotty coverage. I couldn't get online in LAX last night, even though my iPhone can tether and I had the Sprint. If you can't get online in one of the largest airports in the world, what is the point of carrying this thing with you. SFO wasn't much better. And I couldn't use either of them in my hotel room in the biggest hotel in Hollywood in the middle of a shopping mall and convention center. These are places that by now these cell providers should have the best coverage in. The question is -- is Verizon any better?

Great Rebooting The News with Jeff Jarvis as the guest. Lovely rapport betw Jay and Jeff.

At the conference yesterday they explained the vague announcement made by YCombinator and Twitter over the weekend -- YCombinator startups will have access to Twitter's firehose. The audience heard "startups get help from Twitter" which they reacted to as if they said "Twitter feeds stray puppies." I hate to spoil the party, but not all speculative investigations are done by "entrepreneurs" -- and not all entrepreneurs are part of YCombinator. This is just more of the lunacy that comes from building an industry around a company instead of an open format or protocol. Paul Graham hypes it as Twitter having discovered a protocol like SMTP or HTTP. That's pure bunk. When there's a protocol, no one will own the firehose, and no one will be granted access (and no one will not be granted access).

I'm continuing to love my linkblog. I've gotten nothing but complaints from readers. Eventually you all will love it too. I'm sure of it. In the meantime, my work is 100 percent more valuable to me, and my incentive to remember a link by pushing it through Twitter (and my linkblog) is greater than ever. So I'll do more work for you, you'll be better informed, and happier and more productive. I can't promise you'll live longer. We'll feed some stray puppies too.

Reminder to subscribe to this feed not the one that WordPress provides. (Note to Matt and the WP community and company, as I use WP more and more I'm hitting limits we never had in Radio or Manila. You guys should seriously look at stealing some ideas from those products. I'll help you find them, because I'm starting to depend on this software.)

I started to watch the video of my presentation at 140conf, which everyone says went well (it was widely quoted on Twitter, of course). That's good, cause I couldn't stand to watch it because I'm frowning too much because there's a light shining in my eyes. We have to come up with a better way to do this, so it doesn't feel so much like "I'm up here and you're out there." I have to be able to at least abstract the audience when I'm speaking. That's why I much prefer the interview format, because I can talk to another person. It's part of the theme of my talk, we're just people, I'm not Mike Wallace and you're not really an audience. It's a brave new world and we should have the courage to accept it for what it is. And please believe me that I'm smiling as I write this. I wish I had been smiling more while I gave the talk.

And don't forget to feed the stray puppies.

 10/28/2009; 8:15:40 AM  

If you haven't been following my linkblog, it's time!

http://protoblogger.com/

If you want to follow it, don't subscribe to the wordpress feed, follow this feed.

http://static.lifeliner.org/dave/rss.xml

Dave

 10/27/2009; 2:55:48 PM  

I chose to travel with my newish 13 inch MacBook Pro instead of my newish Asus Eee PC. It's just a one-day trip to LA and I figured I wouldn't be needing the 8-hour battery, but there is a fundamental difference between the two computers. With the MacBook I'm always looking for a power outlet. With the Asus, you know you're going to make it all the way without a charge, so you can relax about power. Apple may think they have the battery issue licked, but they don't. And the fact that you can't carry a spare battery for this computer is a real step backward.

The computer also likes to randomly reboot. It's happened four or five times so far. Just happened a few minutes ago. Luckily I didn't lose any work.

Also the computer just disappears for a minute at random times. Computers have been doing this for 25 years. When will someone make an operating system that's always there for the user, no matter what crazy thing the OS has to do to keep itself running. All the michegas about Macs working better, that's a half-truth and half-lie.

Speaking of lies, the lies caused by the Suggested User List are approaching epicness. CNN ran a piece today that profiles five unknown superstars of Twitter, all with over a million followers. They only mentioned the SUL once, in passing, when they were describing Veronica Belmont. So the myth created by the SUL, that there are superstars and the rest of us, keeps growing. And then you have to wonder how much of a tool the SUL is for Twitter, to keep people in line.

Pierre Omidyar is on the list now, and he wonders how many of his 99K followers have any idea who he is. He has Fuck You Money so there's no way he's controlled. But Anil Dash is now on the list too and has 99K followers, and he's a working man, and I'm sure he can be influenced. I unfollowed Anil when he made a joke about how it feels like being on the Yankees. Exactly. That's what I dislike intensely about the Yankees. Their sense of entitlement. Maybe not so much by the players, but by the fans. Twitter is like blogging, it's best when it's just people. The people with millions of unearned followers must be uncomfortable, wondering when the millions are going to catch on.

Is 20 people enough to get started with? That's what a new user gets by default. I seriously doubt it. My Berkeley page is just starting to get interesting, and it follows a list of 167 people. And they weren't chosen at random. They all have one thing in common, they're neighbors of mine.

The other day I said I was starting a linkblog. It's now visible at protoblogger.com. I really like the way it feels. I'm using the LifeLiner tool so it's hooked into rssCloud and it publishes through wordpress.com and I can route a link to Twitter with a single click.

The idea of restarting our blogs came up on today's Rebooting The News, with our guest this week, Jeff Jarvis. This is how I think we will restart them. By making websites that carry the kind of content we're flowing through Twitter.

I was wrong the other day about what the BuddyPress theme is for. I'm still confused about the layers of WordPress. I'll figure it out.

 10/26/2009; 2:26:58 PM  

A market develops, a bunch of people get it started, then someone at a big company discovers it, changes its name (sometimes they don't even do that) and relaunches it as if it were something wholly new. The press, many of whom were aware of the earlier efforts, goes for it. "Everyone knows" that it only matters when a big company does it. However, if you look at history that's often not true, it's often the small guy who ends up defining the market, despite what the press thinks.

A classic case is P2P. Ten years ago there were all kinds of early efforts, some remarkably popular (thinking of Napster) and the industry launched a huge hype balloon. Conferences, white papers, press tours, alliances, books, VC, startups, etc etc. Billions of dollars thrown at it. What ends up taking the prize? BitTorrent! An open source project launched by a bunch of nerds, without much PR. I don't know if it was the best technology, but it certainly was good enough. It wasn't glitzy or even particularly easy to to use. It worked, and most important, you could get the music and movies and TV shows you wanted.

It's a good bet that in five years we'll look back and most of the companies staking out realtime today will be forgotten and something like BitTorrent will rule this space, gently of course.

 10/25/2009; 1:17:53 PM  

I've been amusing myself with illogic this last week, at times giggling with the relief I feel at the passing of my father. I finally found a way to explain it in words.

When I was a kid, like every other kid, when the parents went out and left me alone, I'd do stuff that I wasn't normally allowed to do. But I had to be sure to cover my tracks so my mischief wouldn't be discovered. The lessons learned from the failures were incorporated into my future exploits, I'd never get caught the same way twice!

So all through my life I've been preparing for my father to come home and catch me doing whatever it is is I'm doing. Whether I was aware of it or not, I was always covering my tracks. My subconscious can't get rid of this. It's a program I'll be running forever. But now it has a different ending. He's never coming home.

 10/25/2009; 10:14:49 AM  

I've been putting off programming with Twitter lists, but I shouldn't have.

They did a really good job, as usual, with the API.

The project -- convert the page of Berkeley people's tweets to run off a list instead of a special Twitter account. It turns out there's an API call that retrieves the timeline for a list, and it works exactly like the API call that retrieves the timeline for an account. So much so that I didn't even have to change the glue script, I pass in a different URL and it just worked.

It Just Worked™.

That's the Holy Grail of APIs.

I am happy to criticize Twitter when I think they made a mistake, and I'm even happier to applaud when something works incredibly simply, and well.

Thanks!!

 10/25/2009; 9:49:58 AM  

These days my blog posts are always essays, but it wasn't always so. In the beginning they were all links, with pointers to articles both on this site and off-site. Example.

Then it became a hybrid, at the top of the page were the links and at the bottom were articles. Example.

Then in early 2007 (Jan 6, to be exact) I went all essays, and then a few weeks after that, started using Twitter. It's funny how one event followed another.

Anyway, this article by Rex Hammock is so lovely and so vindicating, I'd do a special post just to link to it.

Rex Hammock: Facebook goes River of News.

And one little thing, I'm going to have a linkblog up in the not-too-distant future. Again. Everything is new again, every few years, it seems.

Also it's sad that my friends, people like Rex, have to hedge so much because of a handful of stinkers who follow me around on the web. I'd like to encourage my buddies to just go through it, and say what you want to say and let the stinkers stink up some other place. Life is too short. With much love, Dave.

 10/24/2009; 2:20:45 PM  

When Matt told me that WordPress was going to support rssCloud that got me started using WordPress with new purpose. I've been learning to use the product through wordpress.com. I haven't yet started my own installation. My attention is focused elsewhere.

Anyway, the point of this post is to get help learning how to use BuddyPress. I don't want a huge hosting obligation. Ideally I want a freemium deal like the one at wordpress.com. However, it doesn't seem to exist anywhere, yet.

I just came across a site that says it lets you test BuddyPress.

http://testbp.org/

I was expecting to have to create an account, but it (apparently) found me on Facebook, and I'm already leaving a trail there. Totally not happy about that, but I suppose my gripe is with Facebook, who somehow has decided that they own the web and can give access to my account to anyone who asks for it? I was never asked to opt into this. Unless I'm missing something this seems just plain bad.

Anyway, I thought BuddyPress was supposed to be like Twitter. It doesn't look anything like Twitter. There's no box at the top of the page that asks What Are You Doing? Without that it's not Twitter-like.

Confused.

Update: I found my "wire" page -- and on that page, there's evidence that I had been here on April 30. So that lets Facebook off the hook. I must have created the connection then.

Update: Some free advice for the BP designers. The home page of my site has to look more or less exactly like the home page of the Twitter site. Any difference is going to equal pain for users, and pain for users means slower adoption. Later, when and if you achieve dominant market share, you can slowly evolve the UI, if you really feel you must. Users are less interested in innovation in the UI than you would think they are.

 10/24/2009; 8:22:52 AM  

First thoughts on our San Quentin field trip.

I went for a late lunch in Sausalito with Scoble after spending most of the day inside the walls at San Quentin state prison. We were sitting on a quiet beautiful street with healthy, well-fed people walking by, driving in to eat at the Indian restaurant, riding bicycles and stopping to ask for directions. Scoble entered our location into Foursquare and a few minutes later a clean, friendly young man showed up with an infant wrapped in a blanket. He greeted us with a smile, Scoble instantly knew he was. We didn't in any way at any time feel we were in any danger. I was pretty sure most of the people with us there had never killed anyone.

That may strike you as an odd way to describe a lunch in the center of high-tech land, because that's our normal reality. We expect so much, and we get it. We live the all-you-can-eat lifestyle. But just a few miles away reality is very different.

We met a man who had never used the Internet, had never seen a cell phone, had no clue what Twitter is, and probably a million other things we talk about all the time. He's been in jail since 1987. He talked to us for a while in the courtyard just inside the entrance gate. He's in a "program" and my guess from the way it sounded, will be paroled in January. He murdered his little sister when he was 18. Blew her head off with a shotgun. He did it because she and her brother and mother hid his money and drugs. He told his brother that he'd kill his sister if he didn't tell him where the stash was. The brother said he'd never kill her. He did.

He didn't tell us this, Rudy Luna, the assistant warden who was taking us on a tour, did.

The warden said that, ironically, that prison is a revolving door for people who commit minor crimes, but for murderers like the guy we were talking to, sometimes they get out and stay out. He says there's a point, usually at 11 years, where they realize that they could change. The guys who get sentenced for smaller crimes don't get there.

The guy we were talking to might not commit another murder, but I don't see how he can live with himself.

Everwhere we went we were being watched.

By everyone.

That may have been the oddest thing. I am accustomed to leading what I think is a fairly anonymous life. Sometimes on BART a stranger is staring at me, I imagine they recognize my face from my blog. But most of the time I move around without anyone paying much attention. Not inside the prison.

And it's not just us they're watching, they're all watching each other, all the time. Because prison is a dangerous place. Everything they do seems to be about keeping from getting slashed or beat up or killed.

We saw thousands of people in tiny cages.

We saw the outside of a building where people are locked up all the time, their crimes so heinous or infamous, or they attract so much attention, or they are people who will try to kill anything that they possibly can.

It's the contrast that is so striking. And what it tells me about who I am.

Having just lost my father, I'm thinking about what death means in a much more real and present way these days. Our guide tells us at one point that most of the people we're looking at, and there are hundreds of them, killed someone. And they're walking around like you and me in a park. Except it's nothing like the way we walk around in a park. Everyone is watching everyone. All the time.

I'm sure there will be other insights. Coming out of it, I think none of us knew what to write. That's the sign that we were doing something very different, something very very outside our normal experience.

 10/24/2009; 4:44:38 AM  

Yesterday the earth shook, and at first glance you might think it just shook in Silicon Valley, but I think a few years from now we'll look back and realize that the earth was shaking just as hard in the media industry.

I've had this really strong feeling ever since I got enamored of Twitter in 2006 that it was something the news and entertainment world would jump on if it had leadership that was as bright and ambitious as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at their prime. Alas, those days must be long gone, because they busily tried to litigate peace in the old war, which they lost long ago, looking for the reparations that are due the loser who manages to make the victor feel guilty. (In other words the crumbs left on the table after the meal is over and after the cleaning people have made their first pass.)

"Look over here!" I've said over and over. "You should be competing here."

"We don't see why," they respond.

Here's why.

Twitter got Google and Microsoft to pay for the content that the media industry should have been hosting instead of Twitter. There was money here. And as we all know, the media industry can't find enough money to keep going. They're looking for handouts from the government. Meanwhile there was money everywhere. They just had to evolve.

I'm not saying this payday means Twitter has it made, they don't. Google and Microsoft are sharks and Twitter may be a goldfish. It could be that Evan Williams and his team have the competitive instincts of a Gates or Jobs, if so, they certainly have a few tricks up their sleeves, or they wouldn't have done these deals. They better, because Google and Microsoft are almost surely executing an Embrace & Extend. What that means for Twitter is that they have clones of Twitter in development. The race is certainly on. Have they cross-licensed their streams? In other words, does Twitter have reciprocal rights to any realtime content generated by users of Google's TwitterLand? Microsoft's? Even if they do, could they handle the load? My guess is that both Google and Microsoft will quickly take the search function away from Twitter. Now everyone has the Twitter stream. What streams can Microsoft and Google add to differentiate theirs?

And what business are they in now? I believe they're in the news business. This isn't tech anymore. This is what the Times and CNN should have become, what CBS, NBC and ABC should be. What Jay calls a pro-am system where everyone collaborates to create the realtime stream of news on all levels, national, international, local, broad coverage and specialized stuff. Everything from newsletters to nightly news. Everything flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested. This is the way news is done from here-on. We're not talking about the future, we're talking about now. And the moguls of the media industry, without a single leader thinking in advance of the wave, are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will give them some money because they're such great writers or whatever it is they're so great at. Soon they'll be looking for reparations.

They should own the platform.

And it's bad for the rest of us that they don't because the moguls of Silicon Valley have a very crude understanding of what news is. Witness the longevity of the 140 character limit and the inability of Twitter to carry any type of content other than text. The horror of the Suggested Users List. I don't expect Google or Microsoft to do much better, but they'll probably have the sense to hire a few news pros to advise them on how to build a system that works for news. The Twitter guys are fumbling around, and in doing so, holding all of us back.

And FriendFeed. Oh man what a wasted opportunity that was. If they had an ounce of competitive spirit they would have noticed that the news industry wasn't seeing their way into this space, and they would have gotten on a plane and camped out in NY and found someone, anyone, with a good flow of news to partner with, to guide them toward creating the fantastic news system that Twitter wasn't building. They had the technical ability to do it, but they were too much of homebodies, they enjoyed the comfort of other engineers too much.

This is what we still have to do -- create the connections between people with technical knowhow and people who can make the news flow to create a safe harbor for the millions who want to participate in news to do so, without being owned and controlled by the titans of tech.

 10/22/2009; 12:05:49 PM  

You know what they say about hindsight being 20-20. It's that way with Flickr, which was way ahead of everyone else in the social network thing. With a few tweaks three years ago, with active entrepreneurial development and the resources of Yahoo, it could have been everything Twitter or Facebook is today.

I don't know enough about what goes on behind the scenes to know if it really was possible. It could be that the code is a mess and that the last engineer who understands it left five years ago. If so, the previous paragraph is probably nonsense. But if there are still some good people working on it, it may not even be too late for Flickr to act as a backbone for at least part of the future realtime web.

The thing that Flickr does that Twitter doesn't is, as I said a few days ago, payloads. In Flickr a payload can be a picture or a video. Another thing Flickr has going for it is a great API with lots of developer support. And while Flickr does go down sometimes, it's a lot more reliable than Twitter. And there's no Suggested User List.

What it's missing is a Twitter-like timeline. But I honestly don't think that's so hard to do. I think they already do the hard stuff. Maybe when Carol Bartz gets over the flu we could meet to talk about giving Flickr a lot of independence and a bunch of cash and letting it be free to compete in wild, free of the constraints of corporate Yahoo. Then, once it's flying, the various Yahoo properties can latch on to its growth as any other developer could.

It could be a terribly bad idea. But I still love Flickr and use it all the time. I even pay them money every year for privilege. I bet a lot of other people do too.

 10/21/2009; 3:11:39 PM