The commissioner of the NBA had to say something yesterday about the interview Donald Sterling gave to CNN, and it didn't fit into 140 characters. So they posted an image of the statement on Instagram and distributed links to that. #

I feel like a foodie living in a world where everything has to be able to be served by McDonalds in order for people to eat it (which isn't far from the truth of course). I have a kitchen where I cook the nicest meals, and they can cost $0, as normal longer-than-140-character text does, but no one will see it because it has to fit through a 140-character pipe that isn't really 140-characters if you can translate your words to JPG, which is very inefficient and inflexble way to ship text.#

100 years from now someone will have to explain why all the written artifacts from 2014 are stored as images. I would love to be around to hear the explanation. #

I just have to say this as a technical guy, there's no reason they can't broaden the pipe to include longer bits of text. I can only imagine the reason is management paralysis at Twitter. No one who has an idea how to do it is empowered to do it. Something like that. #

But enough. It's ridiculous. This must be fixed. It's been going on like this for far too long. Thanks for listening.#

Yesterday Ars Technica had a story saying that YouTube's RSS feed service was broken. There apparently has been no announcement from Google. My first reaction was this has to be a bug. Of course it would be helpful, if the change is intentional and permanent, that Google make a simple announcement to that effect. #

Vimeo still supports per-user feeds. For example, here's my page on Vimeo. And down the left edge are links to my feeds. In this screen shot, the arrow points to a feed of my subscriptions. I think you can see it. Here's the feed itself. I had been using YouTube for my videos, because it seemed to be the standard place to host videos. But if this change from YouTube is real, services like Vimeo will quickly become the standards.#

Also, if Facebook wanted to make inroads here, they could offer RSS of videos I upload there. I can't imagine they'd lose a lot of users if they did, and doing so would probably create some new developers, and products that mainly work with Facebook. This is what Google appears to be walking away from. #

It seems to me that if a company can compete without locking users in, they have a much stronger opportunity to grow.#