We need a better way to do discourse on the net.

See the longer version.

06/28/15; 04:45:18 PM

Yesterday's post was intended to be humorous. I don't doubt that algorithms could figure out what most people say on Facebook, and do our speechifying for us. The point behind the humor is this: No issues are so black and white that your template for discourse will spit out a useful statement just by skimming a story.

This dumbing-down of discourse is not just present in social networks, but it's also in the news. The NYT says the victories for "the left" now present opportunities to pivot for the right. Well, the victories of this last week are not for the right or the left, and some of it wasn't a victory at all.

  1. In what way are nine people slaughtered in a church in Charleston a victory for the left? Sometimes you can go too far in tallying these things up as scores for one side or another. It was not a victory for anyone, it was a tragedy, for everyone -- everyone who is not a sociopath.

  2. Government shouldn't be in the marriage business. That would have been my decision if I were on the Supreme Court. The net-effect would be the same as what came out of the court last week. I don't see how my opinion about this is left? It's actually fairly conservative.

  3. But I haven't forgotten that our society and those of all other western countries, not too long ago, didn't allow homosexuality to even exist in public, much less ratify their right to marry. It's still shocking to see two men holding hands walking down the street in the city. I don't mind being shocked, I actually like it. It's a reminder that this was a choice we made, to open our minds, to change. The fact that we can do this, so quickly, makes me optimistic about other changes, other comforts we have to give up.

  4. For example, we have to accept that it's okay not to procreate. It's actually a good thing for the human species if there were fewer of us. Let's have a holiday for people who choose not to be fathers or mothers.

  5. Or that people over a certain age are still alive and part of the world, and have aspirations, knowledge, experience, rights and want to make a contribution, too. How is that left vs right? Everyone ages.

Maybe it's time to give up that there is such a thing as "the left" or "the right". That each of us has the right and obligation to think and decide for ourselves. And for crying out loud, just because someone disagrees with you on one issue that doesn't mean they're bad, or that they might not agree with you on others. Remember how much we all have changed in the last few years.

We still have a long way to go, and framing things as a never ending battle between two non-existent forces isn't going to help us. It would be nice if social networks could help us evolve out of this mess. I still think the potential is there. But first we have to have the will to change.

06/28/15; 09:39:00 AM

Each bit of news potentially fires up a moral parade, where people recite prepared speeches.

Often the speeches begin explaining how what someone said is like this other thing, then basically recites a canned story about that thing.

You could give each story a number, and just type the number. The computer (Facebook) could then get the text and insert it into the comment for you. Discourse could happen much faster.

Eventually Facebook could predict what you'll say and just say it for you. Like the self-driving cars Google is making. You'd sign onto Facebook and see in your notification drop down menu "You have commented on Betsy Guernsey's post."

You could read it if you like, but eventually you will know that Facebook correctly stated your opinion.

06/27/15; 04:21:56 PM

In 2013 when we were getting our browser-based outliner ready, Les Orchard, a longtime reader of this blog, and contributor to our community (he wrote the initial S3 glue for Frontier, a huge gift), suggested we look at using Dropbox as our storage system.

I was already a serious Dropbox user, and loved how it virtualized my file system. Using Dropbox meant I could go anywhere, with a laptop, and have access to my full work environment. This was part of the dream of using networks since I started using them in the 70s. Dropbox was a big piece of the puzzle.

But Les had shown me how Dropbox could be even more.

Fargo, my Dropbox-based writing environment

We hooked our outliner up to their file system, and shipped it. That's Fargo.

I'm using Fargo to write this. Scripting News, my blog, is a Fargo site.

Later, I put a content management system in Fargo, so you could now publish a website without any extra server software. It still amazes me that this experiment worked.

Now I read articles that Dropbox is facing increased competition from Microsoft and Google. They need something extra, something different from the Office suites both companies offer. Imho it should be of the web, using the most modern approach to development, the single-page JavaScript app.

Developers, developers, developers

I think independent developers have the key to giving them a competitive edge.

There's a universe of possible one-page apps and a vast sea of developer creativity to tap into. They just have to help create the market, a little more than they already have.

06/25/15; 08:21:24 AM

The other day I released riverBrowser, a JavaScript toolkit, for browser apps, that renders JSONP files produced by River4.

I also released outlineBrowser. It does for JSON outlines what riverBrowser does for rivers. The two are a pair, because outlines can appear in rivers, you need both to display a river. I wanted to separate them, however, because outlines can appear outside of rivers.

With outlineBrowser, I could add a feature to PagePark, my easy to use Node.js web server. Now, if you put an OPML file in any folder that's served by PagePark, renders it through a user-specified template and it's then passed through outlineBrowser. The result is quite functional if not yet beautiful. It also handles includes, which is fairly difficult to do in JavaScript, with all the async michegas, but I figured out how to do it, and it works.

I have tons of content in this format. Frontier, OPML Editor and Fargo outlines are all stored in OPML. It's the standard format for RSS subscription lists. There's a lot of OPML out there. And PagePark should be able to do a nice job with all of it.

Slowly and surely it's coming together.

PS: Here's a short demo of an outline in a river.

06/24/15; 06:45:50 PM

This morning I spilled a whole cup of coffee, a big one, on my work desk. The one with all my computers and wires and disks.

I immediately went into action, throwing everything of value off the desk as quickly as I could, including both my cell phones, an iPhone and a Nexus 6.

I then cleaned up the mess, thankfully none of the equipment appears to be damaged, and I went and read for a while. To try to calm my nerves.

Then, I got a phone call. My iPad was ringing. Someone was calling my iPhone, it said. But where is the iPhone???

I still can't find it. Oy.

Eventually the battery will die, and when that happens, how will I find it. And I have this great Apple Watch that's useless without the iPhone.

Oy. Oy. Oy.

PS: Shortly after publishing this, I found it. It was in the pile of rags I used to mop up the mess. Whew.

PPS: There are little dried drops of coffee on my monitors.

06/24/15; 10:45:38 AM

This morning there were two excellent essays from leaders of the open web, David Weinberger, one of the Cluetrain guys, and a longtime friend and colleague, and Dries Buyteart, founder of Drupal and software entrepreneur. Both are beautifully written and honest appraisals of why the open web is losing to the silos.

Both are optimistic and doing the best they can to help the open web be the powerhouse we all thought it was a few years ago. And the one we still hope it can be.

I would like to elaborate.

Working together

The promise of the open web was and is this: collaboration.

But it's always been a promise, and many have acted in their own self-interest only, and forgot that in order for the open web to thrive we must feed it.

They have taken out of the web without putting back.

Use it or lose it. That applies to muscles as much as it does to the open web.

The rule of working together

Working together means this: If someone else has a good-enough way to do something, rather than reinvent what they do, incorporate what they do into what you do.

There's a flipside. If I have to reinvent your whole product just to get a feature, you're not part of the open web.

An example of working together

When I was getting started writing server software in JavaScript, I had a thought not unlike the thought that probably happens at many silo companies. The process went like this: I'm going to need an RSS feed parser. A friend of mine, Dan MacTough, had created one and released it as open source. I found it confusing. So I decided that this was important enough that I should have "my own" feed parser.

However, before I started writing my own, I sat myself down and asked if it would be better for everyone if I created yet another feed parser, or if I used Dan's. I decided, no matter how much work it would be to learn his way of doing it, even if it took longer to use his than to create my own (which also would have been more fun) I would be doing good for the net if I just used his. So I did. No regrets. I still don't understand how it works internally, but I've helped build a network of software, instead of creating another software island.

And in practical terms, an island is just as isolating as a silo.

Working together means APIs

One of the things that's wrong in today's software is people tend to leave off the APIs. Or, if they're VC-funded, they're likely to have the APIs in the beginning, to help attract users and developers, but as they want to become profitable, they restrict the APIs. So much so that many developers no longer trust corporate APIs. Me too. I much prefer open cloneable APIs, with more than one implementer. That makes it impossible for a platform to screw its users and developers, because if they do, no problem -- I'll just use another one.

One company that's generating a huge unicorn-level market cap is Slack. Hats off to Stewart Butterfield, the founder, and his team, who seem to have managed to create something that's both part of the open web and enormously profitable for investors. Please study this Ms and Mr Venture Capital. Note that strangling your community isn't the only way to get rich.

Working together means using open software

This is the hardest one to explain, because users seem to think they have no power re the open web and no responsibility. But the toys you love, Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, etc, couldn't have existed if they couldn't have siphoned power from the open web. If you think the toys are getting more similar and perhaps a bit boring, this is why: there hasn't been enough investment in open web tech in the last few years. Not enough know-how for the merchandisers to commercialize.

When a developer ships a tool that doesn't lock you in, it's worth using it, even if there is a "free" one that works a little better or has a nicer design. Because the open one, the one that lets you leave when you want to, preserves freedom, and the others consume it.

It's really rare in today's world when a normal person has such power to affect the outcome, but every software developer needs users. Even just a few. Without users, how can you tune your software up to fit people who think differently from yourself. And creating new software, at this point in the evolution of this art, is still relatively easy and inexpensive. So a few users can be very powerful, but you have to choose to be. That choice is itself an act of creativity, and working-together.

How silos can help

Make it easy for people to post to your site and to sites they, the users, control.

For example, Facebook posts are notoriously difficult to find after they've scrolled too far down the timeline, or aren't favored by the algorithm.

Yes, Facebook let's you download your archive, but what if we could echo our writing to a personal blog, as we're writing or updating? One that would provide us or our children and grandchildren a place to look up our writing years or decades from now?

It's likely this would increase use of Facebook, because people would post stuff there to make notes to themselves and future generations. It certainly wouldn't hurt. And since Facebook has profited so enormously from the open work of others, it would be a mitzvah, something good they can do to help repay the generosity of those who came before them.

Summary

I'm illustrating the idea of working together by pointing to Dries' and David's pieces at the beginning of this post, and then elaborating on the ideas they present. I could have left the links off and pretended I was the only person thinking this way. But that wouldn't have been very powerful, and it wouldn't have helped the open web.

When you have a choice, instead of re-inventing someone else's work, use it.

That's the simplest and most powerful way to help the open web.

06/24/15; 09:33:41 AM

When you wake from a multi-year coma and your first question is Are the Knicks the NBA champions? I have created a wonderful and easy to use site that will give you the answer in an instant!

http://aretheknickschampions.com/

It probably won't require updating for years, if ever.

It was inspired by Scott Knaster's fan site for the Warriors.

It was also the content of my 100,000th tweet.

06/23/15; 07:43:07 AM

I spent a some time in northeast Florida a few years back. Every so often a bit of the rural culture would show up there, though mostly it is an expensive coastal enclave, separate from the rural South in central Florida and south Georgia. The confederate flags didn't bother me much, I was told they were about heritage, and who cares if people in the South want to remember the Civil War as a rebellion, not a war to keep slaves.

I didn't wonder what it would be like to be black and see this symbol of their enslavement in everyday life, until I saw a man with a swastika tattoo in a convenience store in Palatka, an inland town. His van also had swastikas, confederate flags, slogans about white power. Then I understood how disturbing it must be to be black and to live among people who advocated your extermination so openly. The swastika conveys all that, for my people.

Disturbing, until last week when nine black people were killed in a church in Charleston, by someone with the same political values as the man in the Palatka parking lot. Now they're killing more than a random man, they're killing women too, in a church. Good people, really the best of America. Dead. In the cause of hate.

As long as the confederate flag is a symbol of government in the South, flown over one state capital, in the flag of another, on state-issued license plates, the message is clear to white supremacists. We are with you. And that's why, as long as the confederate flag is a symbol of government in the South, the South itself is a hate crime.

I know there are good people in the South, thoughtful people, who care about others. Think about it this way. As long as the rest of America tolerates this hate, we're standing with you, in inaction.

06/22/15; 07:45:24 AM

This is a test post to verify that the implementation of rssCloud in Fargo works.

When it works, you will be able to get instant updates to Scripting News, for example, if your RSS reader supports the rssCloud interface.

River4 supports rssCloud, as does WordPress.

Fargo v1.71 is now released.

How to test

  1. Make a change to one of your public outlines.

  2. Look at the RSS feed. View source if the browser is hiding the XML.

  3. There should be a <cloud> element in the feed.

Scripting News

My blog, Scripting News, is published with Fargo.

Here's the feed.

06/21/15; 08:17:37 PM

Rivers are very important structures in my 2015 world, as it's shaping up.

They appear on the home pages of Scripting News, Podcatch.com. Subsets of rivers are on every page rendered by Liveblog.

Rivers are not only important here, but they also form the central structures of Twitter and Facebook.

Doing a good job of generating and viewing rivers is a pretty big deal. However, until now my work in this area was not organized. This open source release in an attempt to add organization.

GitHub repo

Here's a link to the GitHub repository for riverBrowser.

The readme explains how to call its main routine, httpGetRiver.

Sites that use this toolkit

I've converted most of my river sites to use the new toolkit, including:

  1. Scripting News

  2. Podcatch

  3. TechBlast (a new site for tech news)

  4. Radio's Rivers (my original collection of rivers)

The other side

Rivers are an open format, defined by the spec on riverjs.org.

River4, a Node.js aggregator that's also open source, generates rivers.

Still to-do

The rivers that are integrated in River4 have not yet been updated. I wanted to give the community a chance to review the implementation here, and try it out on their own rivers, before taking a chance on breaking people's installations. So this review is important if you want a relatively breakage-free update.

06/19/15; 01:25:57 PM

Imagine if Germany flew the swastika over its main government building.

That's pretty much analogous to South Carolina flying the Confederate flag over their state capitol building.

Also, the official state flag of Mississippi contains the confederate flag within it. Alabama and Florida have the bars.

06/18/15; 04:35:05 PM

Everywhere I look individual programmers are getting on board with JavaScript. It really is something. After a couple of decades of fragmentation in the development world, we now have what I called, in 1995, a consensus platform. Chances are pretty good if you and I are working on server code, we're both working in Node.js. And if you and I are writing code that runs in the browser, the chances are 100 percent that we are both working in JavaScript.

Yet almost all the big companies are trying to create their own languages, presumably with proprietary or patent secret sauces, that are not JavaScript.

If we were healthy as an industry in ways that we are clearly not, we would see this coming-together as an opportunity to become more efficient. We'd be looking for opportunities to factor redundancy from our platforms, for example reducing our reliance on CSS and HTML, and perhaps eliminating the need for server code. These are serious possibilities. There isn't much functionality left that must be on the server. If we concentrated real hard, we could make those go away.

But the BigCo's seem to want the chaos? And as a result they'll need lots more programmers to maintain all the incompatible stacks. I don't think this is driven by business needs, rather it's programmers trying to be sure they continue to have jobs. Re-inventing stuff that already works pretty well. Job security.

Reminds me of all the incompatible BigCo networking products that were swept off the table by the emergence of the web as the consensus platform in the early 90s. JavaScript is that strong a force in 2015.

06/18/15; 01:26:17 PM

This sounds like a really useful feature.

How it works: You set up a request on dropbox.com, and people can send you files via a web form. They show up in a folder in your Dropbox.

For example, here's a request where I ask for a nice picture. I emphasize the word nice. Thank you. Let's see what happens.

I can see this becoming part of a CMS.

Any other ideas??

PS: Paolo Valdemarin uploaded this pic probably from BloggerCon IV, with Marc Canter, Susan Mernit, Richard MacManus, Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor, Lisa Williams and myself.

06/17/15; 03:28:57 PM

Posted on Facebook yesterday.

What if you could put a dialog-based spoiler alert on a post.

A picture named noSpoiler.png

You wouldn't be able to read the comments until you confirm that you know there are spoilers below, and be given a chance to know what the spoilers relate to.

Or -- even better -- I could say the post is only visible to people who have declared in their prefs that they've already seen the season finale of Game of Thrones season 5.

Think of all the new metadata you'll get.

Of course if HBO NOW had community features, it would be killer there, because they would know that you've already seen the episode, without the user doing anything. Or Amazon or Netflix, for their shows.

06/17/15; 01:49:26 PM

In an op-ed piece in today's NY Times Tamara Winfrey Harris explains: "Racial identity cannot be fluid as long as the definition of whiteness is fixed."

It's rare that a moral argument has such a precise and simple resolution. You can only go one way if it makes sense to go the other.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who is over 7 feet tall, made a similar analogy in a Time essay. You can allow a white person to self-declare as black, if he can self-declare as 5 foot 8 inches tall.

We may want to live in a world where a black person could decide to be treated as if they were white, but we do not live in that world.

In other words, there are some things about us that are immutable.

06/17/15; 11:30:58 AM

I posted this on Facebook on Sunday, and sent it to Uber via email. Haven't heard back from them.

I didn't rent a car in Seattle last week, I thought I'd do better with Uber.

I took a total of three trips, one of them was pretty bad, and the other two were fine.

The bad one involved two drivers.

The first car smelled of cigarettes

The first car that arrived smelled of cigarette smoke. As a former smoker, I don't like the smell of cigarettes, especially stale smoke. I told the driver that he should probably have smoked outside, not in the car, and I asked if I could get out of the car and get another ride. They charged me for the ride, even though we didn't go anywhere, but I sent an email asking that they issue a credit and they did.

The driver of the second car drove to the wrong place

The second car smelled okay, but the driver took me to the wrong address way out in Woodinville. As he was pulling away, after I got out of the car, I realized I wasn't where I was supposed to be and got back in the car, told him about the mistake, and requested that he drive me to the correct address.

He said that I would have to pay for another trip. I said that was wrong, because I had given Uber the correct address, and verified it, and showed him, over and over. But he seemed to forget each time and kept demanding that I pay. I told him I was going to rate him at one star, he said I shouldn't threaten him, and I said that wasn't a threat, that was my right. So he took me there.

It was a good thing I had some time to kill at the airport just now, otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed that he requested that Uber charge me for the extra trip, and they did. Although to their credit, the email did say I could contest it. Of course I did.

Under normal circumstances I never would have noticed the email with the extra fare, so I decided to write this up publicly. Two bad Uber rides in one day. I haven't used Uber that much, but I've never rated a driver anything other than 5. Two one-star ratings in one day. Not very good.

Follow-up

As of Tuesday night, as far as I know I'm still paying for the mistake the driver of the second car made. Haven't heard back from Uber. It's not that much money, but it's kind of disgusting that the guy wouldn't make good in the first place, and then lied about whether he was making good. I gave the driver a 1-star rating so that should help others be warned, but why Uber is holding on to the money? Well, I'm not going to use them again after this experience.

06/16/15; 06:42:50 PM

Blog editing APIs

One of the things we did in the early blogging days was come up with a web API that made it possible to hook up a desktop editor to a blog. This allowed the full fidelity of the graphic desktop to be applied to blog post editing.

There were a few iterations of this API before we arrived at the Metaweblog API, which was supported by all the major blogging tools, Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress and my own products, Radio UserLand and Manila.

Editing APIs for Wikis?

So if blogs have editing APIs, are there equivalent APIs for wikis??

I did a little searching and asked a few friends, and so far, I don't think they came together as well as they did in the blogging world, but it seems there would be value creating the link between desktop editors and wiki software on a server. I could hook up an outliner, for example, to the GitHub wiki. Or to Ward Cunningham's new Federated Wiki. If the goal is to get the RSS and blogging worlds and everything that's adjacent to them to hook up with the Wiki world, it seems that editing APIs might a promising place to start.

So let's figure this out. What's out there to build on, or to serve as prior art?

06/16/15; 11:55:30 AM

In a word, no. He's a force of nature. A wonderful leader and role model. An amazing basketball player. But not the series MVP.

As any player will tell you, the competition is about winning, as a team, and if your team doesn't win, you might have been valuable, but you're not the most valuable. Almost by definition.

So you know where my loyalties lie, I've been rooting for the Cavs because they feel very much like the Knicks, grown up and working right. With leadership, not dabblers and daydreamers. People with their bodies in the actual game, on the court, and driving to victory.

I love LeBron for making JR Smith and Iman Shumpert better players. I hope the team stays together next year and thereafter, so he can work his magic with their talent. They weren't getting that on the Knicks, obviously. There were times when the Knicks did bring out the spark they both have, basically when they had older players around who could teach them. Melo is not that guy. But Jason Kidd was. And Rasheed Wallace and Marcus Camby, Kenyon Martin, lots of them. The Knicks loaded up on veterans. I didn't understand why then, but I do now, now that I've seen what a difference teaming with LeBron has made. JR is a great technical player but he gets lost in his own mind (famously). And Iman is a very young player, with lots of talent. I could go on and on about this for pages.

Imho, the obvious choice for MVP is Steph Curry, that is, if the Warriors win, and I want to keep emphasizing that, it hasn't happened yet. It might not turn out that way. All it has to take imho is JR Smith having two halfs like yesterday's first half. At home, in Cleveland that would have made the game turn out the other way, and we would be having a different conversation. With JR hitting his threes, the Cavs would be unstoppable.

Ooops, I promised not to talk more about the Cavs/Knicks.

Steph Curry should win, because he was the difference in all the games the Warriors won. It was his spark, the dramatic beautiful shots. He is the most elegant, smooth, smart and lethal point guard I've ever seen. He's poetry in motion, when it's working. But he's also young, and it's easy to get inside his head, and make all that confidence work against the elegance. To be the Curry he must be to win the title, he had to sober up. He has. Now we get to the real part of the competition. It really is not over. Not yet.

But if it is, and the Warriors win tomorrow, the way they won on Sunday, the creative and interesting choice for MVP, that says something about how the game really works, would be, please hear me out, Andre Iguodala. Until they started him, the Warriors couldn't get around the Cavs on defense, they couldn't get good enough looks for their bomb throwers. With him in the game, they still had a lot of trouble, but they got just enough further for Curry to take his ridiculous circus shots, that happen to go in.

If "most valuable" means "made the difference" then it really is Iguodala.

06/15/15; 11:04:11 AM

I wrote a tweet yesterday, from the airplane home from Seattle, just to see what would happen. I also posted it on Facebook. It was a conclusion I reached after reading Brent Simmons' latest post, which included a section about HTTP deprecation.

Here's what Brent said

"What upsets me about this issue in general is that it’s anti-democratic: it can make writing for the web more expensive and difficult for individuals. As a writer, reader, and open web partisan I dislike everything that shifts power away from people and toward entities with greater resources. What you end up with is corporate speech rather than the voices we know and love and need to hear."

I've written about this issue, here and here.

It's about our speech

In the tweet, people thought I was writing about protecting whistleblowers, or circumventing the control of the entertainment industry, both worthy causes. But what I am protecting is much more fundamental -- the right of the people to use the web as a space to speak their mind without interference from government and corporations. It's as fundamental as the First Amendment of the US Constitution. I've created dozens of websites over the 20-plus years I've been writing on the web that don't support HTTPS and never will. It would be too much work, and too expensive, and would cede control of the content to yet another administrative body. I refuse. You should too.

Let's study Wikipedia

I would love to see a study of links emanating from Wikipedia that are HTTP vs HTTPS. The equivalent of an environmental impact study that companies are required to create when they want to alter the environment for commercial purposes.

Let's see if we can even find the owners of those sites to ask them when they're going to invest the time to support HTTPS. If they don't understand what's involved, offer to teach them, see if they are willing to listen, or can even comprehend what's required of them. How much more will it cost, and do they feel the cost is justified, and will they actually pay? And who will they be paying the money to, that is, who stands to profit from this change?

I suspect you'll never find a person responsible for most of the content, much less find a plan to migrate to HTTPS. Under the planned deprecation, all those sites will become inaccessible. Why? What's their crime? And what would be at risk at allowing continued access? (Answer, none and none.)

This has gone too far

Tech companies are totally out of control, and people are too naive about the use of the Internet, too trusting, too believing of the commercials and PR. Yes we love tech products, but please don't turn that into trust of the people running the companies. They totally do not deserve it.

Mozilla? Don't make me laugh

Some have suggested that Mozilla could be the People's Browser. Hah! Mozilla is one of the leaders in the effort to throw away open access to the web. They are the worst of the worst. Don't fall for the PR. They are driving the change, as much as Google is. They should be on the other side, speaking up for and protecting the people.

Two webs

The People's Browser very simply, will never require HTTPS. It will work with HTTPS, but it will never not work with HTTP. It would be very simple for Chrome or Firefox to be this browser, by simply making this pledge. Then we won't have to go to all the effort required to route around them.

Why are they doing this?

I don't know. I'm shaking my head. I don't want to even think what's kind of obvious, much less say it out loud.

06/15/15; 10:02:53 AM

I'm winding up a west coast trip that took me to Portland and Seattle over the last week. Lots of interesting meetings, and along the way a number of developments that inspire new thinking.

Allen & Ward

I spent two days in Portland as the guest of Allen and Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. The purpose of the trip was to get me together with Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented the wiki. He has a fascinating story, and because he's not much of a writer himself, I'm not sure if it's been told. He and I think and work a lot alike, and have been working in parallel on flip sides of the same idea since the mid-90s, without ever meeting (indicating that there may be a conference missing in the tech world). We're already working on a couple of projects and thinking about a bunch more. The goal is to connect our work in interesting new ways. And since we both abhor lock-in, and love working with other developers, the connections will be open, and our products subject to replacement. That is one way new standards are developed.

Allen Wirfs-Brock works on a different kind of standard. He's the editor of the new JavaScript spec. What a thrill to meet someone in his position. Me, the JavaScript newbie, got to ask the super-expert how to do the things I want to do. He knows. Allen and Ward have both been around even longer than I have, so the stories were fantastic.

One thing I came away with is a wish that I had made this trip, and met Ward, a long time ago. My life would have been vastly different, for the better.

Changes at Twitter

On the train Thursday from Portland to Seattle, Twitter announced an end to the 140-char limit for DMs, and also announced that CEO Dick Costolo was stepping down, being replaced, at least in the interim, by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

I'm glad they got rid of the 140-char limit, at least in DMs.

I have had a chance to think, if I was the new czar of Twitter, what I would do, and it would be this. I'd list all the limits for users and devs, and one by one, erase them. I would move Twitter into position to be the ultimate open platform for realtime communication. I would make some unretractable commitments to developers, by releasing lots of the basic Twitter technology as open source, so it could be immediately federated. It might take some time to do it well, and we would take the necessary time. It would guarantee that we'd always have the highest performance, most reliable notification system, or we'd be replaced. Honestly, I'd bet that over time we would be replaced. But the Internet still needs an identity system. And for that, I'd charge users a small yearly fee to maintain an identity that could participate in the global network that Twitter would now define. That would cut back on a bunch of initiatives, so some of the current Twitter employees would go on to start new companies. I'd invest in them, so we could participate in their upside. This would prepare Twitter for mid-life. It's no longer a startup. And now it's time to serve as a true coral reef, as an operating environment, as an organization, and as a bank account. I know this is a radical re-shaping, and it may only be possible if Twitter is acquired, and basically taken private, and I wouldn't have a problem with that as long as one of the terms of the deal is that all this would happen. The idea is to get Twitter back on track to being globally significant. To realize the potential it had when it was a startup almost ten years ago.

If the acquirer were Google, btw, I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to go this route, because no matter what their future is tied directly to the future of the open web, and the open web is suffering because of all the silos. One of them is Twitter. Desiloizing Twitter would be a brilliant move, it would strengthen the open web, create vast new developer opportunities, and investment opportunities for the new owners. Google, of course, has much more cash than Twitter, and already realizes that it needs to diversify. Here's a great way to add fuel to the fire.

Of course no one is hiring me to run Twitter, so this is all a fancy dream. But it's fun to speculate!

Apple and RSS

One more idea then I have to go.

Yesterday I, and a bunch of other bloggers, got an email from Apple saying they wanted to use our RSS feeds in their new Apple News product. There were a few conditions, very reasonable, and an easy opt-out. I was very happy to see this, and glad to have this blog participate.

Earlier in the week when they announced Apple News, it appeared as if we would have to convert our feeds to conform to Apple's guidelines. I wasn't planning on doing that. But it's great that Apple is accepting RSS as-is, and making that support very public.

Now I think of people who thought there was no reason to have a blog and an RSS feed. To get this distribution, apparently, you need to be here. Apple just gave the open web a big boost. A big surprise, and much appreciated.

06/13/15; 03:28:14 PM

I just got a very nice email from Apple saying they are including Scripting News in Apple News, and they offer me a chance to opt-out. But if I don't mind (of course I don't) I don't have to do anything. Delighted that they have accepted the spirit of RSS, at least so far.

06/12/15; 07:40:02 PM

Yesterday I did a review of the feeds I follow for tech news, and posted a request to Facebook for people to recommend their favorites. In this review I came across a "MegaFeed" for Glenn Fleishman, a blogger who also writes for a number of publishers. The feed is stitched together by Yahoo Pipes, a service that has been around for many years. They announced last week that the site will close in September. There is a discussion on Yahoo's support forum.

I wondered what will happen to the people who follow feeds produced by Yahoo Pipes? Yahoo doesn't say they'll provide free redirection, but it would be good for the web if they did. However, even if they did provide redirection, where would people redirect to? Because Yahoo was a big company people trusted and their service was free, little if any competition developed for Yahoo Pipes. Either way, it's a clear example of why it's not good to depend on free commercial services to form critical parts of your content infrastructure.

Then I read stories on BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Fortune about recent changes at Medium, another site where people post their ideas, instead of posting to a blog that they pay for and control.

When people post to Medium they think about exposure for their ideas today, but imho they should also be thinking about how people are going to find their ideas in the future. There's no guarantee that Medium won't shift strategy again, or shut down. It happens all the time in the tech world. With no way to dual-host content, and no guarantee of future redirection, Medium is not a very future-safe place to post.

But even sites like Tumblr and WordPress.com that look stable are still subject to corporate changes or disappearance.

What we need, and still don't have, is a systematic way of publishing to the future. Such a system would allow you to pay a fixed sum to keep your content at a specific address for the foreseeable future. No one can make a guarantee, we don't know what the future holds, but every effort has to be made, upfront, to be sure that the content has the best chance to survive as long as possible.

It would be nice if a visionary entrepreneur would get involved, and an educational institution, perhaps, and/or an insurance company, the kinds of organizations our society creates to be long-lived. It would be great to get input from Stewart Brand and his colleagues at the LongNow Foundation.

I've said this many times, it bears saying again. I've been aware of this problem for a long time, and I'm hosting a lot of archives that should be preserved long-term. I want them to be, I'd be willing to bequeath the funds in my will to keep the content going for the indefinite future, but today there is no way to do it, as far as I know.

PS: People always say archive.org is the answer. Of course I'm aware of that excellent and wonderful service. But long-lived content is not the same thing as having a snapshot. We're building networks here. Archive.org is a museum. I'm very glad it exists. I want something different, a way for the actual content and the networks they're part of, to persist.

PPS: An after-the-fact open source release of Yahoo Pipes probably isn't an answer.

06/07/15; 12:31:09 PM

This picture was taken in my office in 2001.

A picture named dave2000.png

This is when RSS was just taking off. We were working on Radio 8.

I like the Windex bottle. I kept it near to clean the monitor and my glasses. I was a smoker then, so I guess things got smokey?

Gumby was part of the entourage.

06/04/15; 12:59:27 PM

I did a bad thing, I let the domain rsscloud.org lapse.

When I did that, all the rssCloud docs fell off the web. ;-(

We need them back, so I bought rsscloud.co. It isn't perfect but most of the docs now work.

The main pages

home.rsscloud.co

publisher.rsscloud.co

walkthrough.rsscloud.co

cribsheet.rsscloud.co

tool.rsscloud.co

rssCloud in JavaScript

Also, Andrew Shell released the first version of his rssCloud-server implementation for Node.js.

This is a big milestone. Thank you Andrew.

06/02/15; 07:14:40 PM

Last built: Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 4:46 PM

By Dave Winer, Monday, June 1, 2015 at 1:25 PM.