Evan Williams vs the Internet 

In October 1994, at the dawn of blogging, I wrote a piece that actually shook the software world. At the time, the idea of a mere software developer expressing an opinion in public, unedited, in his own words, without the help of a major publication, was unheard of. It had never happened.

The piece was called Bill Gates vs the Internet. The thought was pretty simple. The tech industry was mired and exhausted. Too many BigCo's struggling to be the one who controls the future. As if a company could control the future. But the headlines in the business press encouraged them to think this way. Much as the leading tech blogs encourage Schmidt, Zuckerberg and Williams today to think of themselves as masters of the universe. They aren't and it's a losing strategy today as it was 15 years ago.

The problem for Bill Gates in 1994, the newly crowned King of Tech, was the Platform Without a Platform Vendor, the Internet. The difference between the Internet platform and the Microsoft platform was this: No Microsoft. No one to hold on to the family jewels. No one to put a developer out of business if they personally offended Bill. No one to keep the personalities of developers under control. No one to cut off their air supply.

In 1994, there was a revolution brewing. Bill didn't believe. But it happened anyway, even though he struggled mightily against it.

Blogging is one of the things that came out of this revolution, and along with it archives. So I can point to a piece I wrote in 1998 and it's still there. It was systematized, in software. This idea didn't come from a BigCo, and it didn't get killed by one. The free Internet solves problems pretty well. BigCo's don't solve problems.

So now instead of Bill Gates it's Evan Williams.

I read the piece on TechCrunch and thought it sounds like the transcripts of conversations from Microsoft in the mid-90s. Both were trying to compete with the Internet. Ev's problem is how is he going to keep his key engineers from defecting to the competition. How are they going to let developers use the "firehose" without using it to kill TwitterCorp. These are problems the Internet doesn't have. It doesn't employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet. On the Internet no company owns all the data, so no one can control it. If you don't like the way a service works, use another.

The tech industry keeps having this argument with the Internet. It keeps thinking "this time we gotcha" but nahh, the Internet keeps right on going.

Moral of the story: If you find yourself in competition with the Internet, you should find a way out. Imho.

Frontier bug 

Wanted to record this to be sure I get back to it some point.

Problem is with all HTTP requests emanating from tcp.httpClient.

Setting the timeout has no effect when its not possible to open a connection on the server because tcp.openStream doesn't take a timeout parameter. It's always 20 seconds, near as I can tell.

Once I get back into the C source again I'll have to check this out.

You can see the problem on the log page for rssCloud -- when testing the link back from a remote app registering a handler, the timeout is never less than 20 seconds, even when it's unreachable. I have the timeout param in tcp.httpClient set at 180 ticks (3 seconds), which is plenty to find out if there's anyone at the other end.

Dumb XML question 

0. I know about View Source.

1. I use Firefox.

2. When I view my site's RSS feed I want to see the XML, not a stylesheet rendering of the XML.

3. To be clear, I want to see the actual XML.

4. Is there some way to force the browser to do this?

5. Please no lectures on how this isn't the way it's supposed to work. TIA.

6. I know about View Source.

7. I know about View Source.

Update: This post seems to explain what's going on. Most browsers do funny stuff with RSS.