Scripting News

Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:23:52 GMT

I read Farhad Manjoo's piece in Slate about Twitter. It's the best of a class of commentary that says that Twitter is something you can skip if you aren't interested in periodic 140-character reports on mundane people's lives. As I read the piece it made sense, so I was left wondering why I was and still am attracted to Twitter and use it, daily.

When I took a picture of the shark tank at the NY Aquarium, or the Cyclone at Coney Island or the traffic on the Belt Parkway, I had a background script on my server that automatically published a pointer to each picture to Twitter. I feel the pictures are more interesting because people see them while I'm still there. It's a very small window into my mundane life. I post them not because I think anyone cares about my life, rather because I want to see what ideas it gives me for next steps.

In a way, as a user of Twitter, I have the same business model as the investors in Twitter. I don't know what it is, but I have a feeling there's something here. I look at it this way, if you tried to tell me what we're doing on Twitter has nothing to do with what we'll be doing with networks in the future, I'd be 100 percent sure you were wrong. There's something here. The challenge is to figure out what it is.

However increasingly I'm sure that Twitter itself is not it.

If it were, by now we'd see one killer app built on Twitter that was as game-changing as Twitter itself, if not more so. I think this is because they have put limits on what developers can do, trying to save the good stuff for themselves. The danger in doing that is that you leave nothing juicy for developers. And you leave the door open for a competitor who will take advantage.

Things I'd like to see -- unlimited, open architecture metadata hanging off the 140-character messages, payloads for Twitter. And open access to the firehose by anyone who wants to develop on it. Both these things would guarantee Twitter, Inc. a role in the future. Without giving up control of both, they leave opportunities for others and make it more likely they will be a stepping-stone.

BTW, I was able to finish this post on my 1000HE on the Jetblue flight while it was waiting at the gate. The free wifi from the terminal is strong enough to be accessible on the plane. It's amazing how quickly you can write when you're under deadline!

Marc Canter's vision/nightmare come true

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:52:24 GMT

15 years ago Marc Canter was a cashed out ex-founder of a Kleiner Perkins startup, rushing through his money in the lifestyle of a rich and famous rock star Hollywood movie mogul. It was a huge bonfire, built around a spectacular vision of commercialism, entertainment, network technology and physical venues like bars, football stadiums, bowling alleys and restaurants.

Marc turned his house on Potrero Hill into a demo for his vision.

I'm writing this from the JetBlue terminal at JFK which is a total realization of the vision. And I totally hate it!

In front of me is a HD video screen I'm trying hard to ignore, but it won't let me. All around me are similar screens with people sitting around them trying to ignore them. Hanging off the ceiling everywhere are more HD screens showing sports, news, commercials, schedules announcements. Off in the distance is a ruckus of a central hallway, total confusion, people unable to figure out even the most basic things like how to get a coffee and blueberry muffin. I don't dare go into the men's room!

On the monitor in front of me is one of Marc's favorite ideas. I can swipe my credit card and go to a menu where I can choose from all kinds of food that they will bring right to where I'm sitting. I didn't try it.

In a few months I'll probably love this place, but right now -- I'm Mr. Luddite. Give me a plain Jane terminal anyday!

Update: On the other hand, one thing everyone who reads this blog will appreciate -- free wifi, and it's good.

This week's podcast with Jay Rosen

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 02:42:10 GMT

I spent 40 minutes this evening talking with Jay about news, tech and the future of journalism. As always it was a great learning experience with the NYU journalism professor.

A frequently asked question -- what feed should I subscribe to to get the flow? The answer -- the feed for Scripting News. When I do a podcast it's included as a standard RSS 2.0 enclosure.

At the end of the show I promised to create a room on FriendFeed to post links to stories we'll discuss on future shows.

Does Mashable have credibility re Twitter?

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 16:28:44 GMT

This article by Pete Cashmore at Mashable is now the top item on TechMeme.

Cashmore is one of very small number of users who Twitter includes in their Suggested Users List, which has resulted in huge growth in their number of followers.

Three months ago, he had 28,621 followers. Today he has 417,347. In the same timeframe my Twitter feed grew from 16,062 to 21,108, which represents something of a baseline for users not gifted by Twitter with placement on the SUL. (Source: twittercounter.com.)

Did Twitter favor him with this gift because they like what he says about them, or to encourage him to be more favorable in his writing? Or some other reason? Did he pay for this placement? (Note that would, imho, be the ethical thing to do, and the same deal should be offered to everyone.)

Would Cashmore withhold or temper criticism of Twitter because he fears they may cut him off?

Would a reader question his impartiality? (This reader does. I can't see how he can help but be influenced.)

Does this kind of favoritism hurt Twitter as a medium for journalism?

Another question will likely come up at some point -- Will Cashmore have to pay taxes on this gift? It could turn into a pretty big liability, even in a non-ethical sense.

I wrote about this previously on March 12.

There must be some way out of here, revisited

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:03:06 GMT

Last week I wrote a piece that was only superficially about the finale of Battlestar Galactica, it was also about Twitter -- as almost everything seems to be these days.

There's been an interesting discussion that started on Twitter but developed in FriendFeed, about historic parallels, wondering if Netscape was to Microsoft as Twitter will be to Google.

I reserved judgement on BSG, I think I have to watch the whole series again to figure out what it was about. There's some stuff I don't understand, for example, at the beginning they make it plain that humans created the Cylons, in relatively recent history, but as the series progresses they go back further in time, and it seems there were Cylons long before humans had the technology to invent them? Weird. But I'm sure there's an explanation. Maybe you can offer a clue in a comment?

Anyway, I'm halfway through the first part of the opening miniseries, and as the bombs were going off, as Caprica is being destroyed, Balthar says: "There must be some way out of here."

Holy Hannah!

I stifled a shriek when I heard this (it would be unbecoming for a person of my stature and girth to shriek). What craftwork. Even if they went back and watched it and decided to make Watchtower the theme song, or if they planned the last episodes as they were writing the very first one -- it's amazing continuity and attention to detail. Now I really want to watch the whole series again..

Anyhow, I'm totally loving the 40-twits project. I'm looking for two or three other prolific Twitter linkers who cover tech and politics to join our little club of curators. Be sure to say what your Twitter account is. I have lots of ideas for continuing the development. It feels like a project with legs.

Progress in the 40-twits app

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:11:54 GMT

1. Yesterday was a rough day because the tr.im service had a lot of outages and that made my 40-twits app unreliable. But it's now updating consistently, so I hope the worst is over.

2. I've added a second user, the prolific linker, atul. His report is here. He's an amazing guy, if you're on Twitter and you like tech news you should follow him. He's the source for a lot of the links on TechMeme. He's also a joy to work with.

2a. I call his site AtulMeme. Which led me to call mine DaveMeme. Maybe I should call the software MemeMeme?

3. The fact that I have a second user is kind of a big deal. That means the software has been generalized, so adding the third and fourth user and so on is easier than it was to add the second.

4. I added another column -- RT -- for retweet. When you click on it, no surprise -- it directs you to the Twitter home page with status box pre-populated with a retweet. Easy.

An apology to Radio users

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:45:08 GMT

About a month ago, Mike Arrington ran an article at TechCrunch about a deal we did at UserLand in 2002 with Adam Curry, to include his RSS feed in the set of default feeds for Radio 8.0.

Mike, who used to be my friend and my lawyer, and who believe it or not I still feel affection for, said about me: "Credibility = Shot. Permanently."

When I read that I felt like Mike was aiming an ethical bullet at my head. Luckily I was wearing my bullet-proof helmet that day.

I wanted to let the accusations settle in before responding in detail. This really was between me and the users of my product, and possibly people who read my blog. After giving it some thought, I believe we should have disclosed that Adam paid us for inclusion in the OPML file, and we didn't. I apologize for that.

I explained further in a post on FriendFeed, earlier today.

Journalists need to learn about bootstraps

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:14:28 GMT

New 36-minute podcast explains why New Journalism won't appear in a big bang of epiphany; but will boot up, iteratively.

What's New Now

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:24:29 GMT

In yesterday's piece about the AP fighting last century's battle, the big story is not that AP has missed the Internet opportunity of the 21st century, it's that everyone has.

No one, and I mean no one, has the site that everyone goes to to find out What's New Now.

The holy grail is the What's New Now page for everyone.

The place we go to find out what's happening in the world.

Someone will crack that nut and make the NYT, CNN, Google, Facebook and Twitter look like stepping-stones.

My point yesterday was that, in theory, it could be AP. Too small a point.

Adrian Palacios asks if there will really be a single source. "Yes I think at least for a while there will be one What's New Now site that we will "all" use -- in the same sense that everyone got their news in the early 90s from CNN. Of course there were exceptions, but it had the aura of being the place to tune in when something is happening. Nightline played that role in the early 80s. There is nothing now that does that, there's a void. But people still want news. And the Internet has great potential for news that it hasn't lived up to yet. Probably because people who love news and know it best have been scared or shouted down or some combination of both. I think the shouting is about to stop and I think a consensus will emerge. I think AP and CNN and Twitter will all kick themselves for not having focused on this."

AP is fighting last century's battle

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:31:08 GMT

First, I've had very good experiences, personally, working with the top people at Associated Press. They sponsored the third BloggerCon at Stanford in 2004. They, along with AFP, have generously given me access to their photo flow as part of an experimental project. I have advised them, at no charge, on RSS and podcasting. So I'm pre-disposed to like them, and to defend them, even though many of my colleagues in the blogging world are less considerate.

That said, it took me a while to come to some conclusions on their mysterious new "strategy" for doing online news. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. It's a Hail Mary pass. Financially, things are looking terrible at AP -- as at other news organizations. There's a general downward trend in the economics of news, and that's amplified by the downturn in the economy. If we could see AP's balance sheet, we might conceive of something desperate ourselves.

2. So their response, near as I can tell, is to renegotiate their deal with the Internet, Google primarily, and change the unit of content they share. Instead of it being a "story" they want to share topics, much like Mahalo. And it's likely to work as well as Mahalo, which is to say, not at all. Here's why. Google is a search engine for people, and people know what they're looking at when they see an SEO-optimized page. They correctly conclude the page wasn't designed for them and hit the Back button. Google, whose indexing algorithm does its best to emulate a human being, isn't fooled by such simple attempts to fool it. Maybe at first, but they soon catch up. You don't see many Mahalo pages in the top search results on Google, and you won't see many AP category pages either, nor should you. Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the news people to think about their users and what serves them. He was giving them good advice, and it's likely advice he gives his own people, including the people who write their search algorithms.

3. But -- even if somehow they could fool Google's algorithms, Google is already undermined by the real-time web. I think they see it, I hate to say I Told You So, but I've been writing about this since 1996, when I called for Just-In-Time search. People want to hit the Internet to find out what's new. No one, and I mean no one, has the site that everyone goes to to find out What's New Now. It's weird that AP singularly has the best resources to create such a site, and get way out in front of the Internet industry, including Google. Esp if they partnered with some of their competitors like AFP and NYTCO or Bloomberg. Then it all comes down to UI. Have a look at Twitter or FriendFeed and you'll get some ideas right off. River Of News. That, my dear friends at AP (no sarcasm) is where you should be pouring your energy, not trying to take back what you think Google took from you. That happened a long time ago, and the toothpaste ain't going back in the tube.

4. I've said it many times before, no one seemed to hear, so I'll try again. Focus on what you love about news, and then bring more of that to the insatiable users of news. If you're making people happy, they'll find a way to keep you doing it. It's like Napster in 2000, the music industry was complaining while millions were freshly excited about music, for the first time in 25 years. People were talking about music on airplanes, in supermarkets. There had to be a way for them to make huge money from that, instead they tried to stop it. AP -- same thing, now in 2009. We love news. We don't love what the cable networks are providing us. The papers are folding. Get on top of the Internet, don't try to crawl under it. Best advice I can offer.

Black sky

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:05:49 GMT

Podcast with Chris Brogan

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:47:33 GMT

I did a quick 1/2 hour podcast with Chris Brogan this afternoon about "100 Twitters" -- a topic we have both recently posted on.

Confusing the cause with the effect

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:35:02 GMT

I guess I should be flattered that some professional reporters are mistaking my writing for the cause of the problems in their industry, when my work is a reaction to what's happening.

They could also react to the changes, instead of waiting for the wave to roll over them. Don't brace yourself against the wave, that doesn't work -- it's better to be limber and be ready to surf.

I once described the change as jumping out of a plane with no parachute. The chances of a safe landing are virtually nil. The challenge is to prolong the ride, and to have fun while rushing to your demise.

I once wrote: "Fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists."

This didn't in any way put even one reporter out of a job.

The reporters were going to lose their jobs anyway, as people's attention moved to the net and away from papers, and the news organizations braced instead of surfed.

There was an opening, and some of us rushed in to fill it. It meant our ride was more fun and rewarding, but it didn't change the outcome, for us or anyone else.

Same thing happened in my industry, software development, when I was in the middle of my career. Most of the stuff people use now is either free or very inexpensive. I used to earn my living by selling packaged software that costs between $99 and $249 per copy. It was all less capable than the software I give away these days. I give it away because I am a software writer. I can't not write software and feel fulfilled. But I share the frustration of today's writers. I've lived it.

Even so reporters look for scapegoats -- and increasingly I am one of those people. So be it. I started claiming the title of Most Hated Person on the Internets, and life got a lot easier. If hate makes you happy -- enjoy.

I've also put free ideas out there that might help with the aggregation or curation of news, which are now super-hot topics, but areas I have been active in for about 12 years. Maybe if instead of villifying me, you did more listening, we could fly together instead of falling faster? Just a thought.

Links on Twitter, day 3

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 10:11:29 GMT

When Scripting News started twelve years ago, it was a link blog, the only kind of blog that existed at the time, and of course they weren't even called blogs, a term that wouldn't come along for another three years. Over time I started including "posts" -- longer essays, following the form of other bloggers. Just before I started using Twitter, early in 2007, I made a conscious decision to stop linking from Scripting News, and to make every bit of content here a post. It wasn't doing any good to be the only link blog. When I started using Twitter it provided an outlet for links, I pushed the links I'd normally post on Scripting News.

I tried a lot of experiments with links, but they all came up short. Either I didn't have enough people following to create critical mass, or the attention span of Twitter users is too ephemeral to make it worth the effort. You could see it in the read counts of things I point to on Twitter. In the first few minutes there would be hundreds of hits, then the traffic would fall off immediately. For most people Twitter scrolls fast, it seems a waste to put much thought into linking, because it doesn't seem to generate much thought.

Now I think I've hit the sweet spot, for a variety of reasons:

1. No special feed, the links go out to my main Twitter account, so the most people see them. This means I have to be the only editor. The feed has my name on it, so the links come from me.

2. I have a very sweet editorial tool. It's so simple and effortless I actually look forward to pushing a link cause it's so much fun.

3. The links are not ephemeral, they accumulate on a page of the 25 most recent links ranked by the number of clicks, thanks to the facility of the tr.im API. I find myself going back to that page as part of my rotation, along with GMail, Twitter and FF -- I want to see how each topic is viewed by the people following the flow. There are real differences. A link to me singing Green Acres with Amy Bellinger didn't rank so high (shame cause it's funny) but a Lifehacker article about running Ubuntu in a Window on Windows ranked very high with over 1000 clicks over a long period. Clearly this link was passed around. I think more people are going to tune into this list, esp as I branch out and do it for other prominent Twitter linkers, and it gets included in something bigger I'm playing with.

I (still) want a toolkit to make twitters

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:12:59 GMT

On Wednesday last week I got an invite to visit FriendFeed headquarters on Thurs to see a demo of their new user interface. I declined -- it's a lot of travel from Berkeley to Mountain View, and for a few days advantage, I didn't think it was worth it.

A number of people including Steve Gillmor, Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington did go, presumably because they care more, and because they live closer. I might have gone if it was a BART ride away in San Francisco. Or if I had a business reason to be there.

Where I'm at with FF. It's in the chrome of my browser (Firefox) and it's part of my regular rotation, including GMail, Twitter, FOD, Top25. It's where I go during pauses in my daily work to see what's up. I don't leave it open and let my eyes drift over there for a distraction while working on other stuff. If I did, I'd never be able to concentrate.

Right now, in April 2009, I'm looking for a way out of Twitter. I don't like the way the company is managing it. Reading the tea leaves, which is all I have to go on, it looks like they're either going to become the current day equivalent of a TV network, or acquire or be acquired by a TV network. I might have been interested in this last year, when I was watching MSNBC 12-by-7 (gotta sleep and eat) to keep up on the election news. This year, I never watch the news. I can't even be bothered to watch the Sunday news talk. Too much nonsense, it's all too irrelevant to everything.

But I still believe in the idea of twitter (note the lowercase) even if I don't like where Twitter™ is taking it. So my number one priority is choice. I want lots of twitters, so the market approximates a Ouija board, so the ideas of a handful of tech icons can't determine our future, but they can influence it. Big diff. That's my roadmap and it's not the same road that Ev, Biz et al are on. If FriendFeed wanted to get on that road, I'd be down in Mountain View, or Bumfuck, Egypt, with bells on, at my expense, yesterday. To see another iteration of their creation, that's as irrelevant as Olbermann. I just don't frakin care.

I still want a toolkit to make twitters, so we can try out lots of ideas without having to build and run a back-end. Given the state of the economy, it's pretty clear not many people are going to get the chance to build one, and Bret and Paul know how to, and I wish they'd swallow their pride, and get to work on the ultimate twitter toolkit.

There's still a chance that's what they're doing, as far as I know they haven't revealed any changes to the API to go with the UI changes. When they do I'll probably have more to say.

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.