Scripting News

My new news page

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:29:31 GMT

I have a new publication that I produce in collaboration with the people who follow me on Twitter, and the people who follow them, etc. It's really interesting from a human standpoint and also from a tech standpoint.

But first, here's the end result:

http://twitter.scripting.com/daveTopLinks.html

It's updated every five minutes. The list contains the last 25 links I've pushed through Twitter. How fresh they are is a function of how active I've been. Right now the oldest link was posted 30 hours ago.

They are ranked by the number of times they have been clicked on. So if they are retweeted with the link intact, the clicks on those count. If someone clicks on a link from the toplinks page, that counts too. So it's collaborative, and the ranking tells you something about what people who are in my cloud are interested in. Tech news ranks high. Not sure what other conclusions to draw (too early). A top link gets about 800 hits.

How it works -- I have a little web app behind a bookmarklet that makes it easy for me to post a link to my twitter account. Here's a screen shot. It shortens the URL with tr.im, which has an API that I call every 5 minutes to find out how many clicks each link has received. My app generates the report and saves it to Amazon S3 which is where twitter.scripting.com runs.

I think of it as a "Personal Digg." I nominate the links, everyone determines how they rank. It might just catch on.

Hey Sulzberger, there's money over here

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 03:13:30 GMT

I was talking with Scoble on the phone today, and said some things there that bear repeating here.

1. I wasn't happy in the 90s with the way Microsoft reacted to Netscape and the web. I thought they were being too aggressive, great creative stuff was happening -- we didn't need a destructive force. I liked how the web broke away from the tech business, I didn't want it to get sucked back in. Microsoft tried, and for a while it looked like they had quelled the rebellion, but then it broke loose again, for good.

2. But... There is something right about an industry realizing its turf has being invaded, and acting to defend it. Because now we're seeing it another way -- the tech industry is clearly stepping on the turf of the publishing industry, a new company has started that is sniffing at a billion dollar valuation, and with all that money flowing around it, and all the red ink in newspaper publishing, you shouldn't have to be Puzzlemaster Will Shortz to figure it out. But they're talking about closing down the Boston Globe, and the SF Chron, when they should be thinking about ways to grab some of that wonderful PE ratio that Twitter is swimming in. I try to telegraph it every way I can, but they don't seem to get the clue. Hey Sulzberger, there's money over here. Get your head out of the box or cut some holes it in, or whatever.

3. Japan can lay broadband pipe for $20 per houshold and it's much faster than anything we have in the US. It costs us $800 per household. Maybe we should steal a page from Microsoft's playbook and start getting aggressive in ways that would have frightened me in 1995. As a country, we need to be more competitive. Start right there. Bluntly: Why can't we lay broadband pipe for roughly the same price Japan does?

4. Maybe Bill Gates should offer his services as a competitiveness consultant.

Josh is right, URL shorteners are risky

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:46:31 GMT

Right now, these days, URL shorteners are a necessary evil. It's part of the price we're all paying for Twitter's building on SMS, I guess. I hardly use SMS, so this is a price I'm not happy about paying.

Joshua Schachter writes today about their dangers.

We need to prepare for the day when N of the URL shorteners go out of business. When that happens a large part of the web will die. It will not be a good day.

Plan on it, like we should have planned on housing prices turning down, and the economy falling into depression as a result. Plan on it like we should plan on the polar ice caps melting and the oceans rising 100 feet. Let's get used to planning for the obvious failures in our future. We're going to get good at it, or suffer.

One easy way to lower the cost of URL-shortening is to use our own domain names in place of tinyurl.xom, bit.ly, tr.im, et al. Any one of those services could take the lead here by allowing for that. Let me map my own domain onto theirs, easily back up all my data, and give me the ability to switch services when I want, or when I need to.

PS: Twitter could fix this problem right away if they wanted to. Jason Kottke explains how.

Why people care how Twitter makes money

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:45:26 GMT

First a story.. I went to grad school in Madison, which is a great place except in the winter, when it's realllly cold. But it's still great then, if you know what to eat.

You want to fill your stomach with something dense and warm. There was this place down the street from where I lived that served something called a Myles Teddy Wedger. I have no idea how it got its name, but it's a pastry, filled with meat, potatoes and onions, served really hot. You could buy one of these and carry it to class with you, walking even a mile, and when you got there it would still be hot! That's how dense it was.

So as you're walking you can think of the MTW in your knapsack and psychically the thought would keep you warm.

Okay that had nothing to do with why people want to know how Twitter is going to make money.

Another good cold weather food is pizza. But Madison is in the midwest where they don't know how to make pizza. The best pizza you can get comes from a chain, Domino's, and it's actually not that bad. I got in the habit, until someone told me that they used the profits to fight Planned Parenthood, which if you're a heterosexual male grad student, is a really bad thing, not just because you support a woman's right to choose (I did then and still do) but well, you don't want your girlfriend to find a Domino's box in your kitchen, if you understand what I mean.

See, their business model conflicted with our values.

So it's possible for a business to use its profits for evil. And we couldn't buy Domino's pizza and keep a clear conscience. And it could turn out, when Twitter reveals its business model, that it's something we don't like. We won't know where we, the users, fit in -- until they tell us how they're going to make money. And when they tell us, we may not like it.

PS: There's a myth in NY that Ray's makes the best pizza. Which one? Ahh. Practically every pizza place in NY is named Ray's. Then there's Original Ray's. Quite a few of those too.

There must be some way out of here

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:40:57 GMT

According to the authors of Battlestar Galactica, Bob Dylan was tuning into a cosmic song that drives the universe when he wrote All Along The Watchtower. There are so many great scenes in the BSG series that revolve around the song. In the last episode Starbuck has seconds to jump Galactica away from the exploding Cylon death star, she's fumbling at the controls and says "There must be some kind of way out of here" and then proceeds to transport us to a magic place (no spoilers). In the background The Song is playing.

I'm getting that feeling about Twitter.

BookOfJames: "Maybe it's good for Twitter to burn bright and fast. Once the fad is over, things may settle down for the better. Who knows?"

Maybe so.

Maybe Twitter is just a crude child's drawing of the promised land of online communication.

Another step on the Yellow-brick Road? If so, I think we have, for sure, taken a detour into the land of the poppy flowers or the Wicked Witch of the West. For me, the real eye-opener was this tweet from TheEllenShow, promising a treat to all her munchkins if they drove her follower number over 500K. Think about it -- that's asking for people to spam on her behalf. I follow a lot of people (more than Ellen, for example) and that meant I got a lot of people retweeting her pitch. And while it's true I can choose not to follow Ellen, there's no way to not-follow all the spam. And with a half-million followers, that's a lot of spam.

All this predicts what we have to expect when Oprah joins the mess. And when the Congressional elections are fought in Twitterspace. All of a sudden the lovely patch of green, the bright optimistic future we had for it has turned into the key phrase in The Watchtower.

"There must be some way out of here..."

Said the joker to the thief.

Increasingly, I don't think it's Laconica. I think they have the wrong idea about who their potential users are and what they want, and what to expect from them. Their plan came out a few days ago, and if I want to operate a twitter-like service, I'm stuck with limited customization options and I have to pay to bring customers to them. I don't think this works.

No one has figured out how in this space to enable an honest non-spammer type such as myself to build a nice little business off this technology. Even worse, no one has figured out how to sell a service to a mainstream publication that wants to establish a news network without all the crap that's showing up on twitter.com.

I mentioned this briefly in a post a few of days ago. Let me elaborate.

I'm pretty sure the FriendFeed guys have missed the mark, and also pretty sure they know it.

Here's how I'd look at it if I were on their team.

1. Our key strength: We know how to scale systems. (Based on experience at Google with Maps and Mail.)

2. Our big opportunity: People want to start their own twitters. (This is my assumption. Unproven. Risky. Who? A-list bloggers, struggling news organizations, visionary networks of bloggers wanting to form new kinds of groups. AOL. Yahoo. MSN.)

3. Another strength: We know how to design APIs. (They do, the FF API is very nice. Could be better, and from what I've seen they know how to make it better.)

So, in case it isn't obvious by now, I'd counsel them to get into the platform business. Enable guys who have mastered AppEngine and EC2 to build front-ends for their back-end, provide a toolkit for building your own twitter and then let a thousand flowers bloom. I'd also raise more money so I could acquire the winners, suck their features into the platform, and then do it again. I think this is the winning strategy. If Twitter had FF's strengths (don't think they do) I'd counsel them to do the same. And for gods' sakes, stay in the background, don't compete with your users. More on this in the next paragraph.

One of the reasons Twitter is so demoralizing (at least for this Twitter user, ymmv) is something Jean-Louis Gassee once taught me by asking a question.

"David, are you a pimp or are you a whore?"

It was a good question. And one the Twitter owners would do well to answer.

The better business for them is to be pimps not whores. Fade into the background. Let Twitter become infrastructure, a platform for impressarios. Biz and Ev just can't compete with the dazzling personalities they've attracted. Yet geez Luigi, Biz is going on Colbert tonight! That's a bad idea. It's going to make Ellen and Oprah jealous, Leno and Letterman, Barbara, George Will, etc. Wait until there's competiton, and networks own twitters. The stars (whores) are going to get paid big bucks, like Howard Stern, to draw in users. And they're not going to want to compete with you on a personal level. And Ev and Biz just aren't that interesting as celebrities. But as pimps, maybe...

BTW, to answer JLG's question, 25 years later -- I'm a whore and I know it.

Not a big-time one. Just an average one. Nothing special.

Of course that's going to get quoted.

Digg has a URL-shortener

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:53:16 GMT

TechCrunch has a story announcing that Digg's expected URL-shortener is now open for business.

I asked on Twitter if there was an API, and heard back that there is. I quickly write a driver for it for the OPML Editor, and hooked it into my TwitterRiver app, and now the Friends-of-Dave feed and the NY Times River all are running on the Digg shortener. They have, over the last few months been running on a variety of shorteners.

Digg, like BurnUrl, frames the page being linked to through the short URL. An example.

See also: My work at bit.ly is done.

Krugman v Geithner?

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:24:39 GMT

A three-part exchange with Jay Rosen and Lance Knobel, via email, that would make a good blog post.

I began with an observation...

I was listening to the podcast of This Week, and listening to George Stephanopoulos mangle the interview with Geithner, who was doing the usual thing that politicos do when interviewed by politicos, he mouthed platitudes and ignored the questions, which GS just repeated. They were stupid Russert-like questions, basically amounting to: Did you change your mind?

Then Krugman comes on, as part of the panel, more nonsense, Krugman is actually trying to say real things, but the conversation keeps coming back to impressions and gotchas and lies.

Then it hit me -- Krugman should have interviewed Geithner.

Lance responds...

Absolutely, but I suspect Geithner would never agree to it. Major political figures learn pretty quickly that they can bamboozle the supposed professional interviewers. So there's very little downside to going on the Sunday shows, 60 Minutes or whatever. Experts and, even more, complete amateurs, are far more dangerous.

You see this occasionally during campaigns. I remember in one of Tony Blair's campaigns he was asked some absolutely direct, specific question by a woman on the street which completely stumped him. He was absolutely at sea. That never happened with the professional journalists, even though Britain has far tougher inquisitors than the US. (See Jeremy Paxman famously torture then Home Secretary Michael Howard.)

The ease with which politicians evade questions is what led to the idiocy of Russert. Instead it should have/could have led to questioners who bothered to learn a subject in depth and would probe through follow-ups and persistence. What I love about the Paxman interview is that he never allowed himself to be brushed off. Stephanopoulos and the others may repeat a question a second time, but then they'll move on.

Jay responds...

Great idea. Only reason it doesn't happen is the limited imagination of the show's producers. They are masters of a form. They do not want to change that form for all the obvious reasons.

Also, Krugman screws with their "sphere of consensus" mindset. They don't know what he's going to do, or say. That is seriously scarifying to them.

See: Audience Atomization.

Lance adds...

Incidentally, one reason why Rachel Maddow is so good is because she's both very bright and incredibly well-informed on the details of so many issues. Having a doctorate in political science can be an advantage. She hasn't yet sunk into the standard form that Jay identifies.

One more thought from Jay...

You'll notice, as well, that an arched eyebrow and a "flip flop, Mr. Secretary?" question can be asked without running up any bills in knowledge acquisition costs for the particular issues the Secretary knows about. Whereas Krugman is up to speed and does not need to rely on one-size-fits-all questions.

A bit of Twitter wisdom

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:15:57 GMT

Aliens will land on our planet one day...

It's the little things...

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:45:44 GMT

Tomorrow is a milestone -- it was on April 1, 1997 that a weblog called Scripting News first appeared at www.scripting.com. It wasn't my first blog, it was the continuation of a stream of writing that began in October 1994. And it doesn't really matter what day it started, because there is a continuing thread that ties it all together. It began with how to romance developers, and how Apple wasn't doing it, and how the leaders of the software industry were missing the big opportunities presented by the Internet. Today not much has changed. Silicon Valley still doesn't understand how its products are used, and doesn't do nearly all it should to be sure its interests are aligned with its users' interests.

But there are exceptions.

Today I got an email from Amazon that said something simple that almost everyone likes to hear: Thank you. It's something that Twitter never says. In fact they seem to go out of their way to chase off the people who helped them build their network into the powerhouse that it now is. Much the same way Apple, in 1994, before Jobs came back, was trying to chase off its developers. Every day Twitter does more to tip the table away from the individual and more toward the media industry. Right now there's not much the users can do because there aren't any realistic choices, but if there ever are any, I'm out of there so fast -- don't blink cause all you'll see is a tiny cloud of dust where I used to be.

Same way I got off Apple's platform as soon as I could.

And who knows, it could happen that Twitter wakes up before they have major competition and decides to do something to glue the users to them. But given the tradition of Silicon Valley of keeping its users at a great distance, I wouldn't bet on it.

Deer Valley trail map

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:58:25 GMT

When I was skiing last week, I was surprised that there weren't any readable Deer Valley trail maps on the web. I promised when I got home I'd scan one and post it.

Click on the picture for a full size rendering.

BSG finale, Coraline, the Wizard of Oz

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:13:57 GMT

Dear readers, I owe a review of the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but I'm still thinking about it, and I may have to watch the whole series again, from beginning to end, to be able to write my finale about the finale. Suffice to say that I thought it was great. Not profound, but I don't expect or even want profoundness. I like art, and as art -- BSG was first class. I'll have more to say for sure.

Over the weekend I saw a movie that I really loved, enough to want to call out special attention to it while it's still in the theaters so you can see it. The movie -- Coraline.

The plot is Henry Selick's vision of The Wizard of Oz, which coincidentally I have just seen for the first time since I was a child. Both are stories where the central character is a girl who loses her way from home. Both are children's fantasies, and I'm sure Wizard was a marvel of its time, but what a delicious movie Coraline is, for our time. Every morsel is so detailed and filled with satire and irony, yet still taps into the wonder of the child still within all of us.

If you've seen it, let me know what you think. If you haven't -- hurry -- while it's still in the theaters.

Encarta, then and now

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:04:32 GMT

Bill Gates, 1994: "The Internet is a great phenomena. I dont see how the emergence of more information content on a network can be a bad thing for the personal computer industry. Will it cause less personal computers to sell? I think quite the opposite. Less copies of Flight Simulator or Encarta?"

PaidContent, 2009: "Microsoft will discontinue both its MSN Encarta reference Web sites as well as its Encarta software, which have both been surpassed by rising competitors, like Wikipedia."

I get ideas driving in snow storms

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:58:36 GMT

Ideas come when you upset your routine. Your brain, now accustomed to dealing with new places, people, cities, concepts, tries to find the patterns that are familiar, fails to find them, copes anyway, and thus activates your creativity. Once relaxed, that newly stimulated creativity is available for other tasks.

For example -- this morning I left my hotel at 5AM to make a 7AM flight at SLC, to find it had snowed about a foot overnight and my rental car was covered with a huge amount of the stuff. So I wiped off as much as I could with my hands, trying to use the sleeve of my ski jacket as much as possible, but in the process my hands got incredibly cold. Too lazy to dig the gloves out of my ski bag, stuffed with all kinds of stufffff. Now I could see, so I skidded the car across the very wide street to a gas station to fill up, where I used their squeegee to wipe off the remaining snow. Filled up the tank, and drove a few blocks to get on I-80W to the airport. As I was getting on the freeway I realized I didn't have headlights. But I'm now in the middle of a huge cloverleaf, there's no place to pull over, so I decide to risk it, the airport is just a few exits down the highway. As I'm driving I realize now I have a little bit of headlights. Weird! Then a little more and then more, and then finally I realize what happened. When I knocked the snow off, they covered the headlights. This car, a Mercury Marquis, wasn't designed for snow?

Anyway it's been a long time since I had a snow driving adventure. I'm sure this will give me some ideas -- what they are -- don't know yet.

Jay and Dave ride again!

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 03:01:32 GMT

Four weeks in a row, the clicking and clacking blogging brothers talk about the reboot of journalism, the news of the week, and a new $1.75 million fund for investigative journalism that Jay is advising.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/clickClack09Mar29.mp3

Hope you enjoy!

Spyware Protect 2009 strikes again

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:33:53 GMT

Earlier this month my netbook was infected.

Yesterday, after checking into my Salt Lake City hotel, I wanted to see if their wired Internet was faster than my Sprint EVDO. So I did a Google search for "speed test" and clicked on the first three tests, Speakeasy, Speedtest and CNET. I wasn't expected to get infected, wasn't even thinking about it, so of course I didn't take notes. But a couple of them came up with empty frames after running their tests. I assumed this was because I had Java turned off. I decided the tests weren't worth the trouble so I just used the EVDO. After a bit of putzing around I went out to dinner.

When I came back, there was a familiar malware dialog on the display, warning that my machine had been infected and wanting me to install some software to fix it. Yeah yeah. This time I didn't click any buttons, I just let it keep warning me.

I had Avast installed, but a week or so ago I had turned it off, it was too annoying. At that moment of course I wished I hadn't. I ran its scanner, it found the virus, said I had to reboot, which I did, and when it started back up it did a scan of the hard disk, but found nothing further. Then the malware started acting up again. I ran the Avast scan again, and it found it, recommended I reboot, this time I didn't.

I did a Google search for "spyware protect 2009" found a Yahoo Answers page that suggested doing what I had started doing, plus running one more program, Superantispyware, which I downloaded, but chose not to run. I remembered from last time that this rootkit virus patches the hosts file, and I didn't trust anything I had downloaded after the infection. (Later I found that it had patched the hosts file, but not for this domain, so the download was likely safe, I trashed it anyway and redownloaded.)

I then ran Malwarebytes, it found the virus, asked me to reboot so it could remove it, I did, and this time, no more dialogs. Even so, when I did another scan of Avast, it found the rootkit, and at this point I was beginning to think there was no getting rid of the mess, but it did get rid of it. Another scan by Malwarebytes found nothing, and then Avast found nothing. I ran Superantispyware and it found nothing. So at this point, I'm convinced my machine is clean again, and I have Avast turned on.

Lessons learned:

1. Java is not the root of this problem.

2. Both times my machine got infected I was using a speed test site to evaluate the performance of someone else's network. My guess is that it isn't the speed test site, because Google has a pretty strict policy about malware sites, and it seems pretty unlikely they'd point to an infected site on the first page of hits on something so common and important as a network speed test.

3. Using Firefox is no longer a protection against malware, if it ever was. It's now popular enough that the nasty people target it, in addition to MSIE.

4. While I was fighting this I was thinking this is the last time I travel with Windows. But now that things are working again, I don't feel that urgency. Human nature at work!

Product idea: Digg for ads

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:25:00 GMT

Today was the best day of skiing in Park City. The sky was clear. It wasn't too warm, and it wasn't brutally cold. When you stopped, breathing hard, the air had a refreshing crispness to it. There was packed powder everywhere. No lift lines. The scenery gorgeous and I was skiing beautifully. It was also the last ski day for this trip. Tomorrow and Sunday I'll hang out in Salt Lake with friends and return to SFO on Monday morning.

The ideas kept coming -- one was a meta-idea -- an idea about ideas. It seems we should have an industry retreat at Park City some year, no sessions, no formal meetings, just ski groups, people who ski together, a few hours at a time. It might pump some fresh blood through tech and/or media to do so.

Another idea -- a web service that's all about making money and pleasing users and marketers all at the same time. Pretty sure it doesn't exist, so as you're evaluating the idea, don't assume it's just like something you've already seen.

Imagine a new Digg-like site where marketers submitted ads. The ones that moved to the top would of course get more views. That would encourage advertisers to learn what viewers liked, if getting more views was one of their goals. At first there would be no cost to placing an ad. But after a time advertisers would pay a flat fee to place their ads on the service, say the cost of running an ad on a non-post-season football game. The great ads would make a lot of money because they would get far more viewers than the not-great ones, but all would pay the same.

The people who ran the site would make a fortune, assuming it bootstrapped well.

Have I ever seen an ad I liked, one person on Twitter asks. Yes of course. Many. Have you ever watched the Superbowl?

The thing is that ads don't have to be bad, they can be funny, interesting, informative, inspirational, and sometimes so good you can't help but watch them over and over.

Why it matters that Twitter is a news platform

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:40:48 GMT

Because here's a second shot that traditional media has at usurping the control of the tech industry over the future of news. They've been like kittens up till now, and of course there's no reason to believe they could get their act together anytime soon. But the major media companies should think of Twitter as another Napster, not as a threat (that was the mistake they made in 2000) rather as a Hulu-like opportunity to build their own platform that's more friendly to news.

What do the media companies do well? Have they innovated even a little in the new electronic media? What right do they have to demand our support if they won't take any chances?

I think it's clear that Twitter-the-Company has proven it doesn't understand news. Do the media companies understand it? If they did, they'd be all over this.

And if I were advising FriendFeed, I'd make a platform for Twitters, make it really easy for a developer with a minimum of programming, almost all UI coding, to develop something that does exactly what Twitter does. And of course let them add whatever else they like from the FF bag of tricks. Think of a thousand flowers blooming instead of being so vertically integrated.

Is Firefox slower than other browsers?

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 22:06:18 GMT

In the last few days there's been a discussion in the blogosphere as to the future of browsers, and the continued charm of Firefox, or whether there's any serious movement to Chrome. My original piece basically said that no matter how attractive Chrome might be, I can't switch because so much of what I do depends on plugins that are only available in Firefox.

But part of the the discussion centered around whether or not Firefox is slow relative to the other browsers. David Naylor posted a series of tests that show that, if anything, it's getting more efficient. His numbers are impressive. Less than half a second to launch. I've never measured the performance of Firefox or any other browser, and I don't plan to. But when people talk about the speed of a browser, I don't think of how quickly it launches or even how fast it renders a page right after it launches.

Here's what I do care about -- how slow it gets after it has been running for a number of hours with a full complement of tabs. That's the A-B comparison that we should be looking at. I think that's the subjective measure people use to say whether a browser is fast or slow. Ideally you only launch a browser once every time your machine boots. But how often do you have to quit the browser because it has become so bogged down and is using up so much of the machine's resources? I wonder if most users know that you can make the browser faster by quitting and relaunching?

It's also possible that people who use Chrome fit a different profile and don't load it up with a lot of tabs, or the UI of Chrome discourages lots of tabs -- I don't know since I have only tried Chrome, I have not used it as my daily browser.

I get ideas when I ski

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:24:37 GMT

I'm taking the day off skiing cause my legs hurt and it's snowing like a mofo outside. And I'm writing post after post, finding they're already written. How did this happen? I went skiing yesterday. It's been so long, maybe as much as 15 years -- I don't remember the last time I went skiing. But it all comes back, esp the part about how many new ideas come from the simple act of going up and down the mountain.

I think it's because of the pace of the sport. Going downhill everything is in motion and your brain is processing data at a huge rate. Emotionally it's exhilirating, no matter how you're skiing. If I'm skiing poorly, like the first run of the day, I'm fearful of breaking something or looking terrible and wondering why I even came. But if I'm hitting all the marks, as I was toward the end of the morning, I'm feeling svelte, alive, on top of everything, important, masterful -- all kinds of very positiive stuff.

And then there's the ride up the mountain. The blood is rich with oxygen, the muscles have this incredible sense of well-being, endorphins are flowing, and that's when the ideas come!

I know how long it's been since I've ski'd -- I've never blogged about it. So I stopped skiing right around the time I started blogging. I wonder why.

Anyway tomorrow I'll be back on the mountain, so expect some more good stuff after that.

Me, Amazon, Scoble

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:11:24 GMT

Gosh it's almost as if I work for Amazon. How the heck did that happen. There was a long time I didn't like them, because of the 1-click patent. I was afraid they were going to be a big black hole in the middle of the net, where open ideas went to die. But they haven't seemed to be bullying people with the patent, and then an off-hand comment by Matt Mullenweg about how he was furnishing his whole life with Amazon got me to try them out and I was hooked.

The thing I like best about shopping at Amazon are the user comments. They really are good. And I often base purchasing decisions on what the other users say. It got so bad that when I went shopping at Fry's for some sound equipment I fumbled around until I realized what I was missing was the advice of other shoppers. I did the unfair thing, listened to a bunch of stuff and then went home and bought what I liked and what the others liked, from Amazon.

Now onto Scoble.

I've been reading Scoble for a very long time, but he never wrote a post as insightful as the one he wrote about where Facebook is going. He says the goal of Facebook is to improve on the experience that Amazon provides (he didn't say it that way, but that's how I read it). Not only will I be able to rely on other users to tell me which products are good, but I'll also know what products my friends are buying and liking. Scoble's example was picking a sushi restaurant on University Ave in Palo Alto. I could find Scoble's favorite, and Mike Arrington's, and Steve Jobs's, etc. That would carry extra weight, if I knew who the people doing the recommending are, even though Amazon's reviews are generally so good, I can get by without knowing who the people are.

So this insight led me to wonder if Amazon, being the smart, ambitious, rich company that it is, has already figured this out and is lying in wait to pounce on Facebook, or maybe buy them if the price gets attractive. I can't imagine that they're not on top of this.

The point is this -- if you're not thinking of Amazon as a social networking company, you should.