Twitter Annotations are coming and Google can't get their act together to compete so they try to spoil the party.

Look Twitter is a small company that struggles. They're trying to ship an ambitious, potentially revolutionary feature called Annotations. They don't have to do it. There are probably people inside the company that wonder why they are.

If you work for Google, you work for a much bigger, much richer company. If you want to take cheap shots at Twitter, at least have the good grace to quit your job and do it from the sidelines. When you do it from inside The Machine you make it look very bad. You make it look like you can't compete in the market so you try to spoil it for those who are trying.

Being-nasty-for-the-sake-of-being-nasty.

Grrr.

 6/20/2010; 9:38:34 AM.   .

This is my first fatherless Father's Day.

It's doubly weird because my father's birthday was last week. The first birthday since his birth that he missed.

I sold my house a couple of days before Father's Day.

A fatherless Father's Day isn't entirely a bad thing. It could also be Freedom Day. Because no matter how much you swore you'd never live for your father, and no matter how much he swore he wouldn't make you live for him, it happened anyway.

Giving up on the paternal judgment is like giving up smoking in some ways.

Oh, btw, I just realized June 14 was my anniversary. Eight years. I completely missed it. Sign of a truly reformed smoker.

But in my first year as a non-smoker, when my thought process came to a vexing problem, it would snap to: Oh I'll just smoke a cigarette, and I'd move on to the next step. I'd probably grab a cigarette at that point, for good luck.

I can't tell you how many times, on accomplishing something, no matter how small, my mind would snap to: Call Dad. Tell him about it.

It's like losing an uncle only worse. When my uncle died, I felt like I lost an arm. It was that big a deal. Part of my support system was gone. But with a father, it's a leg. Sometimes it's both legs.

But as you get used to it, the snap-to fades. And what replaces it is freedom. Not entirely bad, as I said earlier.

My father told me about it when his father died. It was then he told me not to wait for him to pass to take my leave of his judgment. Didn't matter. Couldn't do it. Didn't.

The last few weeks have been irritating. Messages from Amazon, every damned day reminding me to buy him a gift. What are you going to do. Forget it and move on.

 6/20/2010; 12:34:51 PM.   .

I'm writing this at SFO, waiting for a flight to NY, where I resume my life without the tether back to California. The house is sold, the money is in the bank. I already have a life in New York. Knock wood, it should all be smooth from here, even though it was rough this week in Berkeley. These kinds of transitions always are. Gotta remember that next time I'm thinking it would be fun to buy a big beautiful house. ">

I'm starting to map out the next moves with the Scripting2 software. I have to add the ability to preview a post and to delete a post. After that I'll be ready to start my second site. Once all the kinks are worked out at that level, I'll invite one or two people to try it out, the same way I did with Manila in 1999. My first three users of that software, aside from other people at UserLand, were Dan Gillmor, Jamis at Buck's Woodside and my Jamaican uncle. There weren't many bloggers back then to try out new blogging software. We more or less had to create them. It will be different now.

A couple of other things I want to do with Scripting2: 1. The ability to create documents that are not hooked into the chronology of the blog. 2. A single place to find all change notes for all the various software projects I'm doing. Right now it's pretty scattered. With Scripting2 as a foundation, I'm within striking distance of a unified, outline-based change notes tool.

I also want to integrate the Instant Outliner with the Scripting2 editing tool. I think it's time to break the connection with Friendfeed, as much as I like their API. I'll probably use the Cloudpipe protocol I created for rssCloud.

We're going to have a guest again this week on Rebooting The News. This time it will be Brendan Greeley who writes for the Economist. He's doing a piece about where blogging is at, and is almost ready to submit it for publication. He wanted to get my perspective, I don't do interviews, so I suggested he come on the show, and he accepted. So he gets to discuss this with Jay too! Win-win-win.

As always it will be carried live on BlogTalkRadio and available as an MP3 from rebootnews.com.

I know Brendan from Berkman days. He worked with Chris Lydon on his Radio OpenSource podcast. Should be fun

 6/20/2010; 11:05:45 AM.   .