I've been using Facebook for a few months, and I'm sorry I ever stopped using it. It's an important product to understand because so many people use it. If I want to participate in the evolution of post-Facebook technology, I have to have a good idea of what Facebook is. I made Mistake #1 that technologists make. I ain't perfect.

Now I think I understand what Facebook is and isn't. It is a place to post pictures of family and friends, to keep people posted on what's up with you. People who you have personal relationships with. It's different from Twitter and LinkedIn, the former is for news, and the latter is for professional relationships. There probably isn't anything unique to each technology that makes it better or worse suited to one of these applications, rather it's the users who have decided how to position them.

Position. That's a very important word, and an idea that all technologists should study and understand. I first focused on it in a great book by Al Ries and Jack Trout called Positioning, the Battle for Your Mind. An even better place to start is the more refined Marketing Warfare, which explores the same ideas as Positioning, viewed as warfare, with the principles of Clausewitz, the great Polish general and writer, as the structure to hang the story off.

What Ries and Trout would tell Mark Zuckerberg, who wants Facebook to be doing what Twitter is doing, is that it can't and it won't. But there is a way to compete with Twitter -- start a new product, with a different name, and position it clearly in the users' minds as a new better Twitter. With some feature Twitter doesn't have, or better, one that Twitter can't have -- that has high value for users.

The classic example in the world of Ries and Trout are the Cola Wars. At the beginning, Coke was #1 and there really was no #2. Until Pepsi discovered that people, if given a choice, would buy as much cola as they could. If the competition sold a tasty cola beverage in a 6.5-ounce bottle, touting it as the perfect size for all, offer a 12-ounce bottle at the same price. And voila, a strong #2 is born. People really did want more. And get this -- Coke had a huge installed base of vending machines that could only serve the smaller bottles. Ooops.

So if I were advising Zuck, I'd say this. Quietly off on the side have a few of your best developers do a total clone of Twitter, but instead of a 140-character limit, make it 240 characters. Add a few nice features beyond that, like the ability to delete a message in your inbox, to get rid of turds without having to block the sender, and offer it up as your answer to Twitter. Leave Facebook right where it is, as the family-friendly networking environment. The DisneyLand of the online world. The next Arab Spring can happen on your Twitter clone.

 12/12/2013; 9:39:15 AM.

Important piece in ComputerWorld quoting General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA.

Clever technique to direct the questioning where he wants it to go. But...

That isn't where I'd begin the questioning. And I don't have any questions for a specific US general, rather for the US in general.

Do we want to trade off freedom for security? Because that's what we're giving up. Then, if we decide we'd forgo the freedom, and that has to be more than a majority that chooses it, then we can talk about what the best methods are to gather data.

We never had the first discussion. We never decided to take the kinds of risks the NSA is taking, in secret, on our behalf (supposedly) with our freedom.

BTW, I'm no expert, but I don't think the Constitution gives us the option to forego freedom. Which is wise, because how could we decide to do it? Certainly someone would object.

 12/12/2013; 9:17:59 AM.

One more post then I have to go.

Last night there was a tweet-fest with this tag: #fiveWordTechHorrors.

I kept thinking of new ones. I wanted to remember all of them here.

So here they are...

And I retweeted these:

 12/11/2013; 10:46:22 AM.

These days there's an unfortunate assumption that servers have to be for programmers only. They do not.

On the Mac in the 1990s, we had HTTP, FTP, email servers that were totally end-user. Launch the app, fill in a few blanks in a dialog, or just accept the defaults, and you've got a server.

What happened was tragic. On his return, Steve Jobs wiped the whole market out with one move, by bundling Unix servers with the OS. The message was clear. Servers are not for users.

In their defense, they might not have even known there was an ecosystem. Those were days of wiping the slate clean. Apple never really noticed the developers they had attracted. We left, shaking our heads about what could have been.

Well the art isn't lost. We still know how to do it.

 12/11/2013; 10:30:52 AM.

A niche in net marketing that hasn't yet been filled.

I'm hanging out at the skating rink in Central Park, watching the skaters.

Take a picture, post it to Twitter. "Enjoying the view at the skating rink."

Or, if I see a sign, tweet with #wollman and get a free hot cocoa.

My location has to be attached, so they know which table to bring the cocoa to.

Easy way to encourage first-person tweeting.

This has got to be the next step, imho.

Sorry to have mentioned it.

 12/11/2013; 10:13:19 AM.

I want to be able to pay a price to reserve a domain for perpetuity.

That way we'd be able to build structures that had more longevity.

Right now everything is relatively ephemeral.

This is the kind of thing a service bureau could do.

Don't need to wait for ICANN to do it.

Or an "Internet Banker" would do (another missing construct).

 12/11/2013; 9:18:25 AM.

I used to evangelize blogging the way people now promote the idea that everyone should "learn to code." I never said learning to blog would mean people would listen to you -- they're separate things. Blogging, imho, is good to do even if no one but you reads what you write. You formulate your thoughts in a different, more complete way, when you write as if someone else could understand them. But people didn't hear that. They thought if they blogged they would become influential. That people would read them. And when they realized this wasn't so, there was a backlash.

I think when people hear "Learn To Code" they think "Get rich like Zuck or Steve Jobs." When they learn to code their next question likely will be: "Where do I collect my millions of dollars?" Of course most people who code, if they make any money at all, make a modest living. When you reach a certain age, you're put out to pasture to fend for yourself. People seem to think "coding" is a young person's activity (even though it isn't), and if you're lucky enough to get a job doing it, you'll have to find something else to do when you're 35 or so, and that's not going to be so easy.

Learning to code is good if you have a calling, if you feel it's what you must do to express yourself. If you have ideas that you can implement in code that no one else is doing. Or if you just love the puzzles that programming is constantly presenting you with. You have to have a certain amount of self-hatred to love programming, btw, because it's a grind. And to do it well you have to have a lot of all of these things.

You might think that by learning to code you get to be the Man Behind the Curtain, the all-powerful person who makes the digital world work. But that's not what coding is about. If you want power, and I've said this many times -- rather than learn to code -- first learn to run a server. That's real power. And it's far easier than programming. You can learn to run a server in a few days or weeks. There's not much to it. Servers are just computers, like a laptop, that are always on and have a net connection that never goes away. They run software that's a little different from the stuff you run, but if you can install a word processor or a graphics program, you can learn how to run a web server. And you will be able to publish whatever you want. But then you kind of have to be a blogger to appreciate that, so we're back to the beginning.

Also, running a server is a good gateway to becoming a programmer. Sooner or later you'll want to customize your server and that's done (drumroll please) with programming!

 12/10/2013; 12:46:20 PM.

Yesterday I did a 1-hour podcast interview with Megan Murray and Euan Semple.

I really like the way it came out. We hit on a lot of important points. And I got to pontificate a bit on art, education, and media hacking. And punch cards.

I'm subscribing to their podcast.

 12/10/2013; 12:12:56 PM.

A great story from The Paper, a 1994 movie starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei, Randy Quaid and Robert Duvall.

The characters played by Duvall and Close are in this scene.

Bernie: In '68, a bunch of us went to cover the Olympics in Grenoble. Decided to go to the best restaurant in town. Now, the menu didn't have any prices, but we were all on expense accounts so we figured, fuck it, got drunk. Well, somehow there ended up being, I don't know, fifteen or sixteen of us at the table, and when the check came - ooooo, it was nine thousand dollars.

Alicia: Whoa.

Bernie: Yeah. [chuckles] So, now we're all starting to point fingers, we're trying to figure out who invited who. And just when it was starting to get really embarrassing, this funny-lookin' old guy at the next table calls the maitre-d over. [mimics writing] Ehhhh, he did a couple of squiggly lines on a napkin, signed his name, winked at us - that was it. The old guy was Pablo Picasso, and that napkin paid our bill.

Alicia: Did I miss the segue here, Bernie? What's the point?

Bernie: Well, the people we cover - we move in their world but it is their world. You can't live like them, Alicia. You'll never keep up. Now, if you try and make this job about the money, you'll be nothing but miserable, 'cause we don't get the money - never have, never will.

 12/9/2013; 12:49:54 PM.

Last week I started an NBA River.

I'm loving it. It's already improved my appreciation for the sport.

To build the river, I visited the newspaper sites of the home cities of all the major teams and found their feeds, and thankfully -- most of the have feeds for their team.

I added national pubs like USA Today and Sports Illustrated. And I asked a friend who works at the NBA for pointers to his favorite blogs. Now I want to open the appeal up more broadly.

If you have a favorite NBA blog or journo, please send me a pointer, either by posting a comment here or by email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com.

I'm looking for great commentary and observations, whether from fans or reporters. Biased is definitely okay.

Thanks!

 12/8/2013; 4:21:24 PM.

This piece on Pando is an example of real journalism that is so rare in tech. A vendor makes an assertion that doesn't sound right to a reporter. So he gets the story on his own. It isn't a story created by a vendor. It isn't a subject that the vendor wants to discuss. It informs the reader how the market is developing, despite what the vendor wants us to think. And it says, in the headline, that the vendor is doing what all vendors do, leading reporters astray. And why shouldn't they? The tech press generally lets them get away with it.

The Pando piece taught me something, painted a picture I didn't have before. And most important, it makes their case. I'm left wanting to know more, for sure, but all details. I got the kind of overview a good journalistic effort should provide.

Add to this that Pando, alone among tech pubs, has been willing to ask challenging questions about the new Omidyar news company. That's the state of tech journalism in 2013. Now where are the other tech pubs on the Omidyar story?

I said to Paul Carr, a reporter at Pando, that I was surprised, and he asked why. I thought Pando was the worst of the insider tech news sites. I saw them as a PR mouthpiece for the Silicon Valley investor community. That they've been willing to challenge Omidyar, a tech multi-billionaire, and AirBNB, another huge Silicon Valley success, says that they're wanting to do journalism, not just get rich. Which, by the way, is probably why you read so little about Omidyar's company in other tech pubs.

Update: Maybe Pando is hedging a bit.

 12/8/2013; 1:07:50 PM.

Apparently Feedly is changing links to content on blogs and news sources to point at their own pages. I want Scripting News readers to know, if they use Feedly, they will be missing all kinds of good stuff we're doing here.

If that's what they (people reading my site through Feedly) want, then it's okay with me. What's not okay is if Feedly somehow represents their pages as mine. If that's what they're doing, or planning on doing, then I ask you to find another way of reading my site.

There's no excuse for representing links to other people's writing as your own. It's one of the ugliest sides of the web. That Feedly, which has up to now been a fairly classy company, would contemplate this, makes me think they must not understand.

 12/8/2013; 10:37:50 AM.

There's a bug in my outliner.

It's an encoding bug. I write something, save it -- everything's cool. But if I reload the app, thus forcing the file to reload, what I get back isn't what I put in. It shows up when I'm writing complex code that does stuff with string constants. It has to reach a certain level of complexity and use single and double quotes, left angle brackets and equal signs. I have been unable to trap it. Probably because my focus is elsewhere. When it comes to encoding issues, the mind always is elsewhere if you know what I mean.

Anyway, I decided I would work around the problem instead of trying to find and fix it. Even this was problematic. Every approach I came up with fell into the same trap. Until I thought of another approach entirely -- if this editor is screwing with the text, I'll use another one that doesn't have the problem. I saved that file in a folder and now load the code in via a script element in the head of the document. Hey it's a better solution anyway, reusable code! At least I tell myself that. But it works. So there's that.

I call it the Indiana Jones Method, after that famous scene in the first Indiana Jones movie, where Indiana comes face to face with a sword-wielding giant in the bazaar. The giant is twice his size. And he's got a huge sword. And he's good with it. There's a crowd. Foreboding music plays. How the hell will Indiana get out of this one!

I don't want to spoil it in case you haven't seen the movie. But it's clever. He does it much the way I solved this programming problem.

 12/8/2013; 4:24:33 AM.

The Knicks were tied for the worst record in the NBA going into the Thursday night game with the Nets. But now they've won the last two games both by blowout scores.

What happened? I think you have to take it at face value. Carmelo Anthony figured something out that has up to now eluded him -- that he plays on a team. I know that sounds flip or sarcastic, but it's actually the most direct way to say it. I'm sure he's a very smart guy (again, no sarcasm) because to perform at the level he does requires not just great physical ability, he's got to have a great computer upstairs. But things elude even very smart people. I speak from experience, with all possible humility. Sometimes the truth is hiding in plain sight.

It is very easy to defend against the Knicks if there is only one strong shooter on the team. So when Melo is the only one connecting, the Knicks lose. Over time, they start losing a lot. That's what happened in the first sixteen games in this season. What happened in the Nets game, and it worked, is that other guys got hot, and Melo let them have the ball.

If the Knicks want to try a really radical approach now, they might cast Melo not as a forward, rather as the point guard. It's his job to bring the ball back on the offense. Then he calls the play and gets the ball to the open man. He's watching the defense as much as the offense. Who have they left open. Bing. That's the guy. That's a good next approach, imho in redesigning the Knicks with the current roster. Don't trade anyone.

The last two games have been fun to watch. That's all I ask for as a fan. Sure it would be nice if the Knicks were to go deep into the playoffs. But I know I'm going to see good basketball in the last couple of rounds no matter who makes it. In the meantime, they're my neighborhood team. They play just down the street. It would be nice if their games were fun and interesting to watch.

In any case nice job!

PS: Now that I have an NBA river, I'm getting more of the good gossip. I realized I needed it when my building super knew more about the Knicks than I did because he reads the NY Post. Even though their politics are offensive, their Knicks reporting is good. Anyway, they say that Melo is trying to recruit Rajon Rondo from the Celtics to play on the Knicks. That actually would be a good move, imho. A strong fast even explosive point guard to go with Melo would probably work really well. Like OKC with Westbrook and Durant. You need both to make it work. I think oddly, the Knicks would be much better off if they had kept Jeremy Lin, and if Melo had been willing to work with him (he was clearly offended by his presence). But Rondo, Melo and Chandler (if he gets healthy) would be a pretty awesome combination.

 12/7/2013; 10:27:47 AM.

I could put some really nice software in it.

Two-way communication in and out. I send a structure across to Evernote representing a notebook, get one back. I give the user a nice browser-based notebook editor. Totally ready to do this.

Help me.

 12/6/2013; 5:54:30 PM.

Lots of people want to learn to code these days, and that's great.

However, as a 40-year programmer, I think it would be even more useful if people learned how to run a server first.

That's real power, because with a server you can communicate without going through Facebook's filter.

It's really not that hard to do, or expensive.

Run your own server. That's power.

PS: Or use Evernote. They don't publish a feed at all. It's a good platform to build on, imho.

 12/6/2013; 5:50:07 PM.

A new Coen Brothers movie!

Luckily I had hit a milestone on my latest development project, and it opened today in NYC, in two theaters, so I took off and walked downtown to see Inside Llewyn Davis on Broadway and 14th St. It was the right place to see this movie because that's the neighborhood where it largely takes place, fifty years ago.

What to say? It's not like any other Coen Brothers movie. It's not a slapstick comedy like Raising Phoenix or Fargo or Burn After Reading. It's not as dark as No Country for Old Men, but it is a dark movie.

Is it worth seeing? Of course. It's beautifully made, with lots of music, and small roles for big stars like Justin Timberlake, John Goodman and F Murray Abraham. Goodman's role was especially good, so depraved. Deeply depraved.

There's a lot of symbolism in this movie that I'm going to have to think about.

A nice touch, they gave us a CD with the soundtrack. We've been saying this for a long time, movie producers ought to upgrade the experience with something you can only get if you go to the movie. However, a memory stick would have worked better for me.

Go to this movie if: 1. You are a devoted Coen Brothers fan as I am or 2. You love folk music or 3. You love NY. I was living in the East Village when the movie was made, so the locations are mostly quite familiar to me. I went for a walk in the Village after seeing the movie, to complete the experience.

And here's the NY Times review, which I can now read.

 12/6/2013; 4:53:23 PM.

I've now had two back-and-forths with Glenn Greenwald on Twitter, and I gotta say this guy stonewalls like Nixon. Like a politician who's hiding something and who is trying to confuse matters so that you don't know which end is up.

He asks what's the difference between the Washington Post getting a copy of the Snowden Docs and his startup getting one? Well, we know something about the Washington Post, and we don't know very much about his new venture. To a man as smart as Greenwald this must be obvious. I've seen him dodge a barrage of hard-ass questions on TV shows. His brain functions at a high-enough level that he certainly knows it's a bullshit question. And he must know what the issue is, but he'd dodging it.

He says they haven't started yet, why can't we leave them alone until they do. Well, it's not so much about his company, which I said would be interesting but not questionable if it weren't for the Snowden Docs. He says there are fourteen hires at NewCo and only two have anything to do with Snowden. But the Snowden Docs are their biggest "hire." The elephant in the room. Why doesn't Greenwald see it? (I'm sure he does.)

Finally Omidyar weighs in, saying "reporters manage and control their relationships with sensitive sources, not owners." But I don't think Greenwald is just a reporter at NewCo. My primary question has been this -- is he a principal or a mere employee. Different rules apply in either case. His role at the company is a basic question that they won't answer.

Last night I read a series of posts on an anonymous bloggers' site named Tarzie, and saw that this is an ongoing story that I'm coming to late. I never wanted to dig in this deeply. I thought of myself as a sort-of friend and ally of Greenwald and Omidyar (I am an actual friend of one of their hires, Jay Rosen). I just wanted answers to basic questions about the way the Snowden Docs are being handled, and deal with questions that would inevitably come up, from less friendly sources. At this point I'm no friend of this venture's. I think it's ill-conceived at best, and at worst, a way of Greenwald et al sacrificing the truth behind the Snowden Docs to help build their personal wealth and influence.

This is a very important point. There's a scandal revealed by the Snowden Docs. It should result in reform in the US government, really the world government, because the disease seems to infect all of them. If it doesn't happen, because the custodians of the docs were more focused on getting rich (or richer), then that's a terrible outcome and one that's as corrupt as the corruption that Snowden exposed.

They are often compared to Woodward and Bernstein, but remember what the outcome was there. Nixon resigned. A new President. A country shamed, and a long period of healing, that may not even be over yet. At least we addressed the problem. I was alive then, and was old enough to understand what was going on. The situation was untenable. Had Nixon stayed, the result would have been worse. He had to go.

In a parallel sense, if the Constitution is to mean anything as we go forward, the NSA has to get on a helicopter like Nixon did, and ride off into the sunset. And it looks less likely, and it also looks like Greenwald et al are complicit. This is not good.

I don't care one bit about their company. I care about the truth coming out and correcting the situation. If they aren't going to do it, they must get out of the way, without further delay.

 12/6/2013; 9:45:47 AM.

One of the things I enjoyed the most about the CBS re-run of the coverage of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy was how little deference there was to news sources by the reporters. They asked the questions I would have had asked, as the story developed. Nothing about how people feel or what the "optics" are.

In a follow-up int erview with Walter Cronkite with Terry Gross in 1993, he explains how hard it was for him to put aside his own feelings to do his job, but he was satisfied that he had. This was 24 years before the famous scene in Broadcast News (1987) where William Hurt airs emotions that he doesn't have.

 12/4/2013; 6:49:20 PM.

A quick follow-up to Sunday's post.

There's still a question that's unresolved, and it wouldn't be important, or anyone's business really, if it weren't for the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that were and presumably still are part of this new venture. If it was just Greenwald, Omidyar & Co -- it would certainly be interesting, but it wouldn't be so questionable (I use that term literally, no implication of wrong-doing, just saying that it's something that we have real questions about).

The main question is this: What happened?

The NSA documents still seem to reside at the Guardian. Are there now two copies, one with Greenwald and one with his (former) employer? Does he still write for the Guardian? I'm not clear about that either. What's his status at the Omidyar company? Is he a journalist-only, or is he also a principal of the company? When he speaks, is he a company spokesperson or a journalist discussing his journalistic work? Will we know when he's wearing which of these hats, if he actually has two?

Again, this wouldn't be important if he were writing about the Knicks or the weather, but he's reporting on issues of importance to people all over the world. How this is handled, the custody of the Snowden documents, and what's to become of them, is the matter of importance. It's not just important to the government and Greenwald, it's important to everyone. And it's not okay to just brush the questions aside, as they have, so far.

I can't imagine Greenwald accepting the answers his company gave to the questions we asked here. Regardless, I don't accept them. They're valid questions, and deserve a thoughtful response.

 12/4/2013; 10:50:22 AM.

I just added this to my non-existent coding diary, and the specifics won't make much sense to anyone but me. But the experience would be immediately recognizable to anyone who has worked on a complex project for any length of time. As usual, ignore what you don't understand.

I recognized the pattern, there was spaghetti starting to envelop my new CMS code. This happens when you add special cases by adding boolean parameters to routines. That happens because when you wrote the high level code initially you didn't fully understand the problem.

The question is did you leave yourself the room in the schedule and with regard to potential breakage to actually rebuild the code so it correctly achieves its purpose? So when you read the code it looks like the pseudocode you'd write when conceiving it? If it's complicated enough and important enough -- it's worth the time to factor and re-factor until it reads like documentation of its functionality.

Too often you can't go back and re-engineer it, and you live with the bad construction. Then the code is fragile its whole life, so you don't build new layers on top of it, or if you do they're either inefficient or missing obviously valuable features.

I decided to rebuild this time. The problem was confusion over how and when index files would be built. What I realized was the code was optimized for minimizing the amount of stack building. When I got to that point in the rebuild, I added a cache, so the upper level code could be totally simple and natural. It worked!

Now the question is can I use the software for its intended purpose? I was able to do that before. Can I still do that?

See also: We Make Shitty Software.

 12/3/2013; 1:22:40 PM.

I know the Dolan family owns the Knicks, but they don't own New York.

They can keep playing here if they want, but if they want to call the team the New York Knicks, they have to sell the team to someone who will build something New York-like, something that works, and isn't built around one very inadequate person's ego.

If anything about New York has been constant for all its history is scale, longevity, audacity, philosophy and sheer excellence when compared to the rest of the country. The Knicks make more sense in a city that's famous for humiliating itself. I'll leave that to your imagination. But they've had their chance. It's time for the Dolans and New York to take leave of each other.

Maybe Staten Island wants them?

 12/2/2013; 5:12:30 PM.

I've started to eat coconut oil on the recommendation of a friend. I'm on my third jar of the stuff, each from a different manufacturer. I was reading the label on the most recent purchase, they told a nice story of how they make the stuff. You can see little bits of coconut in the oil, which is solid at room temperature and doesn't require refrigeration. Then I wondered what the factory looks like and and the process of making it. Then I realized in the times we live in, it would be totally reasonable to be able to go to their website and watch a video, perhaps taken by an objective third party, that shows the factory is like, and how they make it. I would find that interesting. It seems totally possible, and if companies start doing it, it could be a reason to buy their product.

 12/2/2013; 4:28:54 PM.

A quick note about the Pando piece and Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden and the new journalism startup founded by Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar.

1. Is Greenwald a principal in the new journalism company, or an employee?

2. Of course it would have been impossible for Snowden to profit from the leaks, or even be compensated for them.

3. So while, of course, it's not wrong for Greenwald to be paid for his journalism work, it does seem wrong for him to get rich off it, in this case.

4. Would Omidyar have rushed to start a business with Greenwald if he didn't have the scoop on the Snowden leaks? No one knows for sure, but in journalism appearances are important.

5. I am a longtime fan of Greenwald's and honestly I've never liked Pando -- but I did not like the way Greenwald dismissed their criticism. I thought they asked important questions. It didn't seem likely other journalists would, given their conflict of interest. As Greenwald himself said, reporters would likely be interested in working for a fresh startup founded by an Internet billionaire. I don't think people take this into account, but reporters tend to go easy on rich tech people because they're potential employers. Reporters are human beings too.

6. How news organizations deal with criticism is crucial. This is not a good start!

 12/1/2013; 9:06:50 PM.

Last night I had very vivid dreams.

In one of them I was sitting in a friend's house, in a new addition, hanging out for a long time, when my friend tells me that this used to be the patio in back of his house that he enclosed. I was genuinely shocked. Astonished. Surprised. I had not seen this coming (I know it makes no sense to be so emotionally attached to the integrity of a patio, but it is a dream.)

This is not the first time this has happened in a dream of mine, where a truth is revealed that is surprising, that I did not see coming.

Here's the question -- since I am not only the person viewing the dream, but I am also the author of the story -- how is it that I am so surprised? How does one part of myself keep the other part in the dark?

 11/30/2013; 12:48:18 PM.