9/3/2010; 9:20:47 PM.   .

The launch of Ping, following the mis-handling of Antennagate, show that Apple isn't ready for the success they've already achieved.

The problems with the iPhone 4 antenna were easily handled, with an apology and a little grace. Show some concern for customers and the investment they make in these products (very substantial if you add up the monthly fee over the life of the contract). Most other companies Apple's size would have handled it without skipping a beat. Some companies even look for situations like this to demonstrate very visibly an alliance with their customers (thinking of Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol scares).

Now Ping, which, if it were what it appeared to be at rollout would be a total game-changer. Because Apple failed completely to create a social network, and then made the mistake of calling it a social network. The inability to like a song as you listen to it, the assymetry of features for stars and users (they get all the Facebook-like features, we basically get to admire them). And today, it becomes clear that they didn't even anticipate spam.

It's not that they're ill-intentioned, they're just ill-prepared. More than their users, they live in a Reality Distortion Field, and the people who make the Computer For the Rest of Us have no clue who the rest of us are and what we're doing. But that's okay, there's a solution. Do some research, ask some questions, and listen. Apple desperately needs to do that. The world has moved on, they have a lot of catching up to do.

 9/3/2010; 2:50:36 PM.   .

Whatever Earl turns into as it brushes by the east coast, it's starting to be here in NYC. A few drizzles. A bit of wind. And a general semi-stormy atmosphere. Then the power went out in my apartment, unrelated to the weather (construction in the building) so that was my cue to get the fuck out of the house and onto the best bike in the world and go for my daily ride.

As I headed north the intermittent drops turned into a steady rain, so I turned around at the Intrepid, but by the time I got back to the Village the rain had stopped, so I headed to the Battery where I stopped for a rest and checked in at Facebook.

Got a cool video of a water taxi!

Stopped to take a picture of a ghost bike that comemorates a biker killed riding in NY.

The map. 53 minutes. 9.4 miles.

 9/3/2010; 12:50:15 PM.   .

I'm going to put a couple of hours into trying to resurrect FriendsOfDave. I miss it too much. I want to know what Om and Matt and Bijan and Fred and Sylvia et al are posting to their blogs. So here's the deal. Are there any services that watch an RSS feed and post to a Twitter account when a new item is available? I'm going to turn FOD into a feed, and when that's done, I'd like to hook it up that way. And if none of them are still running, at least you can hook in via your RSS reader app.

The dwcodeupdates feed is already available in RSS, here:

http://bits.codecasting.org/rss.xml

Back in a bit with some links. And in the meantime if you know of an RSS-to-Twitter web app, please post a pointer in a comment. Thanks!

rsstotwitter.com is no longer running.

Looks like TwitterFeed is still running.

Update: Here's the feed for FriendsOfDave.

Update: I set up TwitterFeed to publish updates from the feed to the Twitter account. It works. Nice!

However, it's slower than the original way. It only catches 5 updates at a time, and only checks once every half-hour. But it's better than nothing.

Update: I also set up TwitterFeed to handle dwcodeupdates.

Update: I added rssCloud support to the FriendsOfDave feed, in case TwitterFeed supports it, or would care to support it. I would like things to update faster. This is how you can do that.

 9/3/2010; 10:53:25 AM.   .

If you want an idea of what the Instant Outliner is, check out this excellent survey by Hutch Carpenter.

Very quietly, and I mean very quietly I've been working on rounding out the features of the latest OPML Editor-based implementation of Instant Outlining. This one is a keeper, I think -- more so than the previous releases.

The realtime updating code is pretty good. Based on long-polling and mailboxes. It works even if you're logged on at more than one location. Even if they both have the same IP address.

There's now a follow-unfollow paradigm, so not everyone is hooked in by default with everyone else. It works like RSS. The person being followed is not aware who is following, and does not have to give permission. However the updates are restricted to a single server.

The server is also part of the implementation. You can't get the client software without getting a server. However the server is disabled by default. The point is that is should be very easy to set up another instance.

Federation isn't implemented, but it is being thought about.

And the protocol is open. To prove that it's open, I've been working step-by-step with Marc Barrot, who is implementing an instant outliner that works with mine in his Javascript outline editor, iJot. It's important for a lot of reasons. For me, selfishly, it means I will be able to edit my instant outline on my iPhone or iPad, which doesn't have an implementation of the OPML Editor.

And I hear that might not be totally impossible.

Next week I'm going to Seattle to hang out with my old programming partner, Brent Simmons, and his lovely wife Sheila. We're going to get me booted up on kernel development. It's been way too long since I've gotten in there and been able to fix bugs and add new features. Funny how time flies when you're having fun.

If you want to try the Instant Outliner, let me know, send an email. All I have to do is create a username and password on my server. All the software is released.

 9/3/2010; 10:06:58 AM.   .

A fascinating post on Ars Technica on the Twtiter implementation of OAuth.

It confirms a concern I had. Since the OPML Editor is open source, and it supports Twitter's implementation of OAuth, I didn't see what good it did to pass around "secrets" in the source code. But I did what I was asked to do. I wasn't watching the developer mail list closely so I didn't see the discussions Ryan Paul mentions.

The more I read about what Twitter is doing these days, the more I see the shift away from developers and toward internal development. When people "argue" with me or have a "difference of opinion" about OAuth, they seem to only look at the technical issues. As if every developer could pour infinite resources down every hole. In practice, you only have so many hours in a day, and worse, you have fewer and fewer remaining hours in your life. So you have to choose carefully where you spend your time.

There are lots of ways for platforms to fail, and it can be hard to parse when the platform is failing, but the platform vendor is prospering. Sometimes that growth comes from eating the developers, which seems to me very much like what Twitter is doing now.

So the OAuth transition will be the first of many hurdles for developers. I choose not to jump over hurdles for platform vendors. I learned a long time ago that the only platform that actually works is one with no vendor. The more the vendor controls the developers, the less I want to be part of the community.

At the same time, I was running out of clever ideas for projects to do with Twitter. They haven't added any functionality that I'm interested in in a long time. I was at the point last year where I felt that everything interesting that could be done with Twitter had already been done. That every nook and cranny of their API had been explored. It seems they agree, more or less, because their approach is to try to capture the developer growth from two or three years ago. At the same time, no new territory is opening up. That, and the new controls, say the Twitter coral reef is no longer attracting much new life. With the caveat that that's how it seems to me, and I've been wrong many times before.

 9/3/2010; 8:59:06 AM.   .

Another in an endless series of test posts.

 9/3/2010; 2:27:34 AM.   .