Scripting News

Amazon's new URL-shortener

Fri, 08 May 2009 20:44:36 GMT

In March, I observed that Amazon had already done some URL shortening on its own, meaning that a link like this:

http://amazon.com/wii

actually works. Now, apparently they've gone further and have a shorter domain, amzn.com and a huge number of short URLs in that domain that take you to product pages on amazon.com.

Mike Koss wrote a script that worked its way through a dictionary trying all the different words, and published the list. (That's what I call investigative journalism, so much for bloggers being lazy.)

I'd love to see an official word from Amazon on this. How is a user supposed to go from a page on Amazon to a short URL? Even better, suppose they had a bookmarklet that would automatically populate the Twitter "What are you doing?" box with some text and a copy of the short URL? Might be a real money-maker, and we know that Amazon likes to make money! (And Bezos is also an investor in Twitter.)

Nothing from nothing

Fri, 08 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

RSS is dead? My ass...

Thu, 07 May 2009 01:48:08 GMT

I've been programming like a bat out of hell, in one of my most hectic spurts of creativity in a very long time. Not much time for blogging.

One of the results is a site where you can view the tweets of the 100 most-followed people and corporations on Twitter. These really reflect the friendships and choices of Twitter the company, pretty sure they're all on the SUL. But they're using Twitter, and it's fascinating to see how. Esp to see this as a benchmark, a beginning. What will the tweeting of the top 100 look like in a year? Already you can see it's very competitive.

It's coool. There's a lot more coming, if any of the other stuff I'm working on reaches fruition.

I'm singing a happy song! I love the work I'm doing.

I'm thinking of Mick Jagger and the band, warming up, and some drunken asshole is yelling at him from the audience. Jagger says, in his inimitable Jagger style: "Everything okay up there in the critics section?" And then they swing into a great rock and roll song, which I could remember which one.

Steve Gillmor, writing in TechCrunch says RSS is dead. He has a nice picture of the Beatles in what must be their last year as a group. RSS ain't like the Beatles, Steve, it's more like the Stones. Rough and passionate. And still with us after all these years.

As I said in the comments on Steve's post, with some irony, RSS is as dead as HTTP and SMTP, which is to say it's alive and kicking. These protocols get widely implemented, are so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure they become part of the fabric of the Internet. They don't die, they don't rest in piece. They become the foundation for everything that follows.

When you reboot your computer, whether it's a Mac or Linux machine or Windows box or netbook, probably even your cellphone, they all first load some ancient code written in the 70s by some guy no one remembers. That's the way software works.

Mick Jagger didn't say Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry are dead. He loved those guys. Their work lived on in his music, and he was good to them. It's time for the tech biz to learn about love, Steve. Open your heart and sing happy birthday to RSS. It's been very good to you. You should be good to RSS, though god knows most of the icons of tech have been really unappreciative at the gifts RSS brought them. It's really sad what grumpy pissy jerks these guys are.

There are bursts of inspiration with wide open fields in front of you, huge memory spaces, and then things get crowded and we move on, looking for new frontiers to explore. The early years of the web, the early-mid 90s were like that. It was in that environment that RSS sprouted, after a few failed attempts with too much hype. I feel like we're there again, and it's not like the 70s, it's like the 30s. The film industry of today is still refining the art that was invented in that period as the next decades will be spent building and revising that which was defined in the last few decades.

That's why I love Joan Crawford, btw -- she's one of the very few stars of the silent era to blossom in the talkies. You can see her in this clip from The Hollywood Revue of 1929, along with many of the stars who didn't make the transition. Can you see the charm in the young Joan Crawford, and why it worked so well in both the new and old media?

PS: Just got a funny DM from Anil Dash. He says: "Just call their bluff! Anybody who thinks RSS is dead should stop publishing their feeds or shut up. Easy!" Hmmm. That's a good point.

Gadget talk with Scoble

Tue, 05 May 2009 15:46:29 GMT

I was browsing FriendFeed yesterday and saw Scoble had started a thread on the new Kindle, which was being dismissed by the tech press as a "Hail Mary pass" to save the news industry. I don't see it that way. I like the Kindle, esp for reading the news, but a Kindle with a bigger screen might make the news even more attractive. Do I think it will work? I don't know, but why not give it a try.

So I called BlogTalkRadio, then called Scoble and we did a quick podcast, that started out talking about the Kindle, but turned to gadgets, the iPhone, the MIT Tech Review slam of Clay Shirky and myself, and on to opportunities for the Palm Pre to zig where Apple zags. They could let the software market run without control from the mother ship, see what happens. Maybe there are some great X-rated apps for mobile devices?

As always, you can subscribe to my podcasts using a podcatcher or iTunes.

Tricks your mind plays

Tue, 05 May 2009 02:57:00 GMT

It's confusing when your mind plays tricks because it's playing many roles.

1. It is the subject of the trick (it's doing the tricking).

2. It is the object of the trick (it's being tricked).

3. It is perceived by the mind to be something other than what it is (the trick worked).

4. And the mind perceives itself misperceiving (it's aware the trick worked).

5. You can see this never ends.

In the early days of the blogosphere we called this: watching them watch us watch them watch us watch them watch us. We're still doing it, many years later -- and it was going on long before the blogosphere. Humans are all about watching, mostly watching other humans, and in doing so hoping to learn something about themself. To the extent that we're aware that there are things that are not human, we tend to anthropomorphize them -- treat them as if they were human.

Sometimes the tricks are willful, but usually it all happens below the consciousness. I play willful tricks all the time. To quit smoking there's a lot of trickery involved. My mind has trained itself to believe many things that are untrue about smoking. Some examples: Without smoking I will die. I use smoking to solve problems. I can't quit. Of course you can. If you put your foot down and said "Enough of this foolishness" to yourself, as an adult to a child, there would be no argument. But you never say that, because you don't want to quit and in order not to, you have to believe you can't.

It's so incredibly complicated. Mostly because there are so many observers all in one body. With so many different versions of the truth it's hard to sort it all out.

Now when you add millions of people to the mix, as you do on the Internet, without the normal cues and gestures that give you some idea of where the other people are coming from, the amount of trickery, conscious and unconscious, goes way up.

When someone says something emotional about another person, based only on knowing them through the Internet, they're really describing how they feel when they're reading what that person has written.

When someone says "He's really angry" what they really mean is "I feel angry when I read his writing."

There's no way you can know if someone is angry or not, esp if you're just reading. And if you were right, you're talking about an emotion that occurred in the past, when he or she was writing what you are reading now. To respond to this person as if he is angry now would be a mistake. Think about how quickly emotions pass. I can be angry or scared and in five minutes be relaxed and feel safe. Watch a child, their emotions shift in fractions of a second. All you can be sure of is how you feel. And given all the tricks you're playing on yourself all the time, maybe you're not actually so sure.

Rebooting the News #8

Mon, 04 May 2009 02:56:43 GMT

This week's podcast with Jay Rosen is up.

Topics: Jay opted out of Twitter's Suggested Users List, he explains why and we discuss. His choice for Inspiration of the Week is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo.

As always, you can subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes.

Conflicts of interest in tech

Sun, 03 May 2009 23:25:19 GMT

It's Jay's week for the source of inspiration, so I'm bringing a different topic to our weekly potluck of speculation about Rebooting The News.

Obviously we're going to talk about Twitter's suggested users list.

Last week: 1. Jay was put on the list, 2. Got the surge in new followers, then 3. Asked to be taken off, and 4. Was taken off.

You can see the effect on his follower count in this graph. I took a screen shot because it will scroll off over time. It's stunning. Very clearly, being on the SUL has a dramatic effect on your count.

We've talked about conflicts of interest among journalists, but haven't talked about the same thing for tech people. Mike Arrington tried to ignite a scandal around me over something that happened at UserLand in 2002, when I was on the vendor side (and a blogger, which is part of what blogging was and is about). I responded, not with a blanket dismissal such as "Vendors don't have conflicts of interest" -- because I believe they do. They can get themselves out of conflict by divesting and/or disclosing. I guess most people felt that what I did wasn't so bad, because the hatefest never came about, and Mike looked bad, as if he was trying to deflect attention away from an article I had written the day before, about the conflicts that arise from accepting a large gift from a vendor you cover, without disclosing it when you write about them.

Today we'll find out, from Jay, what it means for a professor of journalism, and for an ordinary human being to receive such a gift.

In the course of the public discussion last week, I said that if I were put on the Suggested Users List, I would ask to be removed, and if the request wasn't honored, I would delete the account. I don't want the distortion it causes. I don't see Twitter as an advertising medium, I am not a journalist and could ethically receive a gift from a vendor, even so I would refuse it. I don't believe that Twitter should be getting in the middle of the relationship between users of its service. That's sacred territory. This is a matter of net neutrality. Could someone like Mike, who writes passionately about net neutrality in his TechCrunch column, possibly not see this?

Anyway, all this is a preamble for where I want to take this, because while these ethical issues are central to the trust between writers and readers, the economics of the web are goverened by another conflict, one that is very rarely talked about. I'd like to get it out there.

Here's the story...

1. Google makes a lot of money from advertising.

2. If one were to define advertising, it seems to me you'd have to include the idea of intrusion. An ad intrudes on your experience, it's a sidebar, it's something you wouldn't think of on your own. If you're already humming my jingle, I don't have to pay someone to play it for you. Or so it seems.

3. As search gets better, it will obviate the need for intrusion. A perfectly targeted ad at some point stops being intrusive and starts becoming information. If you get me the commercial fact that I need at precisely the moment I need it, you don't have to impose on me, I will welcome that.

4. Google is in the business of getting you the exact fact or link that you're looking for as quickly as possible.

5. Its advertisers pay money to get you their link before you find one in the search results.

6. But if they're the same link, maybe the advertiser will stop paying? Or if the customer believes that a better link is in the first search results rather than on page 5 or not there at all? The customer, perfectly happy, never has a reason to go where the ads direct them.

Now, I know that there are other forms of advertising, ones that program you to think a certain way, but you don't see those kinds of ads on Google. Maybe they'll have to change, because as the search engine gets better and better, which it should (right?) the ads will play less of a role.

We know that companies don't always play fair.

There was the case of GM sabotaging the public transit system in Los Angeles.

A lot of companies profited from the war in Iraq. If you don't believe they helped get that war going, I have a nice bridge to sell you. Special price. Just for you.

Closer to home, the recent price drop in laptops, the netbooks, show that there was some kind of price fixing going on before that, a collusion between the vendors to keep prices high. So we know that the tech industry is capable of the same dirty economics as other industries.

When Google has to cut its own revenue stream by enhancing search, will they do it? So far the competition has made this easy for them, but just this week Wolfram Research has been wooing the analysts with their new way to do search. Maybe this isn't the challenger that will push Google to seriously upgrade search, if not, surely at some point it will happen.

I don't know how you feel, but it seems to me that search has been pretty constant for the last few years. It's been a long time since the quantum improvement that Google offered over Infoseek, Alta Vista, et al.

New iPhone

Sun, 03 May 2009 19:22:44 GMT

It was raining on Friday, and I went for a long walk up and down the hills, very vigorous -- but I got soaked and so did my iPhone. After taking its last picture and uploading it to Flickr, it died. It wouldn't respond to attempts to revive it, so I took it down to the AT&T Store in downtown Berkeley and bought a replacement for $199.

My old iPhone truly was old, this bright shiny new one is so much nicer -- and faster. And the restore process worked flawlessly. Everything from the old phone was backed up on my Mac, and when I inserted the new one it asked if I wanted to restore it from the old image. I said yes. It took a long time, but I lost nothing, except passwords, which is the right way for it to work.

So now I have a new iPhone and where almost everything was broken on the old one, nothing is broken on this one. So the iPod functions work, and it can play videos -- the old one couldn't do eitehr of these things. All my headphones work with the new one, the old one had a non-standard jack for headphones (yes, I know I could get an adapter, but I can't manage to keep track of things like that, it was pointless).

But I still want to bring a music/video player with me because the iPhone, apparently -- can't multitask! If I'm watching a movie and it's going through a boring spell, or I just want to listen to the dialog, why can't I check my email or Twitter -- or look something up on Google? When I use my laptop I can do all these things and watch a movie.

And I'm reminded how shitty the keyboard is on the iPhone, and think it's a paradox that Apple's COO says netbooks have "cramped" keyboards. The iPod has the worst keyboard. Even if I type something correctly, there's a pretty good chance it'll change it to something ridiculous. When the Newton first came out people used to laugh at how it would mess things up. The iPod really isn't much better, but people stopped laughing. I wonder why? Cook is wrong -- my Eee PC has an infintely better keyboard than the iPhone, and you know something -- it costs less than an iPhone too.

Anyway -- net-net -- it's a nice new toy to have. In a way I'm glad the old one broke.

Posting to twitpic and posterous?

Fri, 01 May 2009 20:26:02 GMT

I'm having the damndest time figuring out the APIs to these two web services. I just want to post a picture. I already have code that does multipart forms, for Flickr and the now-defunct Pownce. These guys seem to be doing it in a non-standard way. Anyone with a clue?

Update #1: I got it working with Posterous, but I get image not found from Twitpic. Here's the request I'm sending to Twitpic, with the password xxx'd out.

Update #2: Don Park debugged it, now it works with both.

Maybe it should be social from the start?

Fri, 01 May 2009 20:18:56 GMT

Seeing the first-time Twitter user experience reinforced an idea that's been lurking in the background. Since the magic of Twitter is, theoretically, in its limits, perhaps they should have a limit on who can join and under what circumstances. Perhaps before you can create a new account you have to name 20 people with Twitter accounts who you want to follow. They could be celebrities if you want, or spammers -- then at least the recommended users could be tailored to your interests. The algorithms that suggest new feeds kick in, and they are well understood, once you have a few seeds to get started. The one-size-fits-all approach obviously isn't working.

What a first-time Twitter user sees

Fri, 01 May 2009 19:10:53 GMT

I'm doing some work with a Twitter app that wants my username and password so I needed an account to test with. I created one, and accepted the 20 users that they suggested. This is what I saw:

http://tr.im/keiv

There's a lot of spam in there, and little that's coherent. This is the best they could find? Are they even watching?

DiGiorno pizza is tasty food

Fri, 01 May 2009 03:38:44 GMT

We don't have ads on Scripting News, but from time to time I put in a plug for a product I really like.

A few weeks ago I got a fantastic toaster oven, and I've been looking for food it cooks well. I picked up one of these DiGiorno pizzas and man they are some good food.

It's not Ray's, it's not NY pizza, which is still the best. Yeah it's made by Kraft and it probably is junk food. But it tastes soooo good!

Breakage in the new Twitter UI

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:49:13 GMT

I happy to report that I have the new Twitter user interface on my account and it's nice.

However, apparently the "status" param is no longer recognized.

http://twitter.com/home?status=thisusedtowork

That would put "thisusedtowork" in the "What are you doing?" box. URL shorteners redirect to Twitter with the new shortened address in the "status" param.

This change breaks users. Any help would be much appreciated...

Update: Just got a direct message from Twitter, they fixed the breakage. That's excellent turnaround. Thanks!!

Impressive

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 19:44:33 GMT

Jay Rosen: "I got put on Twitter's official suggested users list last night. I asked them to take me off it today and they did."

We. Are. What. They. Are. Going. To. Sell.

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:38:26 GMT

When people say they don't know what Twitter's business model is they're being silly. They know. We all know. "Let us reason together," a US President once said.

They call it User Generated Content. We're the users. What do we do? Generate. What do we generate? Content. We're like the bacteria that make beer or yogurt. You put in the basic ingredients and out the other end comes content! It's cooool.

It all came to me last night while I was sitting in a theater watching a really bad movie, a remake of a totally excellent BBC mini-series. You can tell it was bad because instead of being wrapped up in the plot or studying how they crafted the movie, I was trying to figure out how they got me in the theater. They got me in with celebrity hype. There were two great stars in the movie. I thought it would be great. I was wrong! I bought two tickets, they got $20 from me, and we walked out it was so bad. (In one scene Mirren walks off stage saying "Fuck you very much," which I thought was a perfect summation of the movie.)

Someday, probably very soon, a movie studio is going to rent Twitter for 24 hours to do a special event for their movie. On that day 1/4 of the tweets you see will be about how great the movie is. You think you'll quit, and maybe you will, but a lot of people will think it's cool and they'll buy the product. Marketers love that kind of stuff. They pay big bucks for it.

So if you think that having a lot of celebrities doesn't have anything to do with you, you're wrong. The point of celebrities is they say things that everyone hears. That's what makes them celebrities. You may not want to hear it but they're going to say it anyway and in the end you are going to hear it, like it or not.

One more thing. You may groan when you hear Christmas music. But you hear it anyway. They own you for 1/3 of the year. And when you get to be my age, it's so bad that I find I'm humming Christmas songs all year round. In April I find myself singing "City sidewalks, busy sidewalsk, dressed in hoilday style. In the air there's a feeling of Christmas." And if you read that sentence, you're singing it too.

Kurt Vonnegut described a novel-within-a-novel, Now It Can Be Told by Kilgore Trout, in which the main character is the only real human and everyone else is a robot sent to test him. It's a possibility I have considered.

Doing my part to help revive the economy

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:33:07 GMT

Once again I have some money burning a hole in my pocket and I want to blow some (of course) on electronic gadgetry. And, as always, I turn to the readers of this blog for advice.

1. Is there a Linux or Windows equivalent of the Mac Mini? A headless, keyboardless, mouseless computer that doesn't cost too much, that isn't made by Apple. I already have three Mac Mini's, I love them, but I find myself interested in, even lusting for, an Asus EeeBox. Have you tried it? Do you like it? Any other choices?

2. For the same application, I've been thinking about getting a gamer platform, with a really fast CPU and lots of RAM. (An aside, the application is processing lots of text, which involves relatively little net traffic and doesn't require a persistent IP address. No need to pay Amazon $90 per month when I could buy a cheap computer for $300 and be done with it.)

3. I bought a Panasonic wifi webcam a couple of years ago, and it was pretty good, but it stopped working (maybe dropping it a few times had something to do with that). I want the same functionality without the wifi. I'm looking for Mac software that samples the built-in camera every minute and saves the result to a file. From there, I can write scripts to push it where I want it to go. Surprised to see this functionality isn't something Apple provides, but near as I can tell, they don't.

4. Still thinking about getting the FlipCam. That was the thing I didn't buy last time I tried to kickstart the economy. (Update: I ordered the FlipCam today.)

Adjix has a breakthrough idea in URL shorteners

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:26:36 GMT

Sometimes it's funny how you're led to an interesting idea when you're not expecting it. This idea arrived at the end of a chain of events started by inviting Guy Kawasaki to use my 40-tweets app. Here's the story.

1. Guy asked if I could make the app work with his favorite URL shortener, Adjix. I said I'd check it out.

2. Joe Moreno, the CEO of Adjix, emailed me and showed how to get hit stats from his service, in a manner similar to what I was getting from tr.im.

3. When I tried to deref one of his short URLs I found he was using the meta-refresh technique. I was irritated, why isn't he using the HTTP redirect mechanism like everyone else. He said it was so they could use Adsense to track clicks. Some of his users wanted it. I found a way to work around the issue without having to parse the HTML and then forgot it. (Here's the text of the page they return.)

4. A few days later Moreno mentioned in an email that another advantage is their shortener could be served statically from S3. This hit me like a ton of bricks. Say what!

Think about it. When you shorten a URL, what if instead of generating a record in a database that requires a dynamic server to stay up indefinitely, you generated static HTML and saved it somewhere likely to survive the apocalypse. It's not a complete answer to the problem presented by URL shorteners, but it's pretty great half-step. Maybe even a 3-quarters-step.

Joe wrote it up here.

Jake Jarvis calls this an Apocalypse-proof URL shortener. I like!

How to get started with Facebook's new API?

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:29:19 GMT

I'm reading the docs for Facebook's Open Stream API, with fascination. It sounds like an app can read and write to a user's stream, something like the way one writes an app to access the Twitter status stream. That's something I want to do!

But...

Say I want to write an app to access my own stream. What's the process? How do I give the app permission? What's the endpoint?

I assume FQL is Facebook Query Language? What do I do with that? I don't know.

I have a feeling these docs are written for developers who have been working with Facebook. I have never written any code to call Facebook's API.

If they want to go after Twitter developers (no one is going to like this, but it's the truth) read their developer docs, and make your API work like that.

I say no one is going to like that except Twitter developers of course.

This is why I say that to compete with Twitter you must start with item #0 in the wishlist.

Rebooting the News #7

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:10:56 GMT

This week's 40-plus minute podcast with Jay Rosen and myself.

To subscribe, add this URL to your podcatcher (or iTunes).

Sony got it right

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:25:24 GMT

The new Walkman is great. Click the pic for comments, a full-size picture, link to the product page.