Scripting News

Programming wisdom

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 19:18:52 GMT

Three bits of wisdom I keep forgetting to write up in a blog post.

1. The second time you write a piece of complicated code it will work much better than the first time. Especially if there are a few years inbetween and the original code was in production and you had to live with its flaws. Sometimes you have to write it a third or fourth time to really get it right.

2. Every year or so, re-read the docs for your programming environment. You'll always find a feature you didn't quite grok the importance of the last time you read the docs. It may make your code simpler, or enable you to approach a problem you previously though unsolvable. (I did this the other day for Amazon S3 and sure enough figured out a way through a tight bottleneck.)

3. This is the most important one. If you're planning on competing like a mofo in the tech industry to make billions of dollars, and then give it all to charity when you're middle-aged, instead, find a way to contribute to the ecology of the web while you're young, and make a bit less money (I suspect you won't actually make less money). We have much higher leverage on our home court and can do more good for the planet than we can, later, in medicine or politics. Obviously I'm thinking about Bill Gates, but I'm also thinking about Evan WIlliams and Biz Stone who are already worth huge money, and on their way to making a lot more. Guys...

Deal with the URL-shortening issue now. It's an Exxon Valdez waiting to happen. You won't be able to make excuses that you didn't see it coming, cause I'm telling you now.

There are already protocols in place that allow web apps to tell you how to shorten urls that point into their space. Wordpress.com took a huge step this week, doing their part. It would take about one hour of programming, if that much, for Twitter to look for the metadata and use it. If I had a Twitter client, I'd support it in a heartbeat. If I were Twitter, same deal.

Shortlink: "URL shortening that really don't hurt the Internet."

But for some reason the business types at the companies never want to do anything good for the web. They just take for themselves and eat up the seed corn others put into the formats and protocols. At some point we're going to get through. These guys are supposedly people who care about the planet. Like Bill, when they retire, they'll spend huge money to try to prove it. Why they don't care about the ecology of the web now, when they have the most power to, I'll never get it. I have to assume they don't understand. It would cost nothing to care for the web. Not like carbon offsets, these aren't even hard problems. You just have to care enough to actually do something about it.

It's been a big development week in RssCloudLand

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 19:10:47 GMT

The beta release of the Twitter Subscriptions List app for your desktop.

Next thing up on my release plate, a version of River2 that fully supports rssCloud.

Lifehacker: Backup and Search Your Friends' Tweets with Google Reader

Educer: "Google Reader is almost a full fledged Twitter client."

Twitter clients -- time to start thinking about two-way RSS support.

Two-way RSS support in Twitter clients means they read real-time RSS feeds, and they generate them. A backup against Twitter's failure.

The $299 Walmart laptop

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:30:07 GMT

The tech industry keeps wanting to think that netbooks are a mistake, but they are not.

Here's a CNET article about a $299 laptop being sold by Walmart and BestBuy. They're cheap, big and run Vista.

I'll go over the specs in a minute, but first a story.

I just took a trip to New York with my new 13.3-inch MacBook Pro, which is a lovely computer. But the next trip I took, a two-day trip up north, I brought my Asus 10-inch and was much happier because: 1. Much longer battery life. 2. A lot lighter and smaller.

The Mac doesn't even have a replaceable battery. The Asus does. When I travel with it I bring an extra 6-cell, and it's still much lighter than the Mac, and it goes for 12 hours without plugging in. That's a huge important difference.

And the smaller size meant I could make the trip with just one bag instead of two.

People who think there is no reason to get a netbook simply don't have one, I conclude. That's fine for ordinary people, but if you make your living as a tech analyst, that's just plain irresponsible.

Now to the specs.

2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor 900, 2GB of memory, DVD-RW/CD-RW drive, 15.4-inch screen, 160GB Serial ATA hard drive (5400 rpm), 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition operating system.

It's all good till you get to the wireless. I like 802.11n. Much faster. And the OS -- sorry -- I don't do Vista. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft is behind all of this. For some reason they can't handle the idea that people still want their 10-year-old OS. All the R&D that went into Vista, well that's Microsoft's problem, not the users'.

They don't say how much it weighs or how long the battery lasts. Heh. I bet it weighs a lot, and I bet the battery doesn't last very long. Is the battery removable?

In any case, I'm not surprised the $299 "craptop" sells. But -- I'd also be surprised if they do anything to slow down sales of netbooks. They're in a different class. And it's valid. Get used to it, netbooks here to stay folks. And the big, heavy, Vista class? Well they're probably here to stay too. (And I still love my Macs, and wish they'd make one that was really in the netbook class.)

A boy named Sue

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:52:38 GMT

Had a lot of fun with the Scobles today.

At one point I said to the elder Scoble, you know people's last names seem to mean something. He smiled. I said I know I have a funny last name. Like the Boy Named Sue, my father should have sat me down as a boy and said "Son, with that name, you don't get to complain."

It was nice going to Germany where my last name means, roughly, "Person from Vienna."

I enjoyed calling room service, ordering Wiener Schnitzel and really hamming it up and no one seemed to notice or think it was strange. When the waiter brought the food he pronounced it the same way.

The right and wrong way to do tech

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 08:30:46 GMT

Consider these two examples:

1. Amazon: "Using a workflow similar to the one you'd use to import data, you prepare a manifest file, email it to us, receive a job identifier in return, and then send us one or more specially prepared storage devices. We'll take the devices, verify them against your manifest file, copy the data from one or more S3 buckets to your device(s) and ship them back to you."

2. Apple: "Rising Card is a magic application developed by Theory11. The reason it was initially rejected after a long period of hearing nothing from Apple was that they felt the app would be confusing to customers. Of course, that was the point of the app as it's a magic trick meant to confuse people. The developers wrote Apple to explain that to them, but heard nothing back. They figured all hope was lost as this was hardly a high profile application, and Apple clearly didn't seem to care too much about it."

Amazon creates a service for developers, charges them money, and never asks what you're using the service for. They're happy to help, as long as you pay your bill.

Apple hires people who do the best they can to follow the orders from the top, and end up rejecting a magic trick app because it confuses the user (which of course is the point). Because there's no money in rejected software they can't afford to spend time with the developer to figure out whether they made a mistake.

Apple would do well to throw in the towel on this system, they're in a no-win situation. They're spending money to lose money. Amazon is making tech, and money, and their VPs are enjoying their weekend while Phil Schiller is hearing tales of woe from developers (and presumably from people inside Apple as well).

I wish Amazon would make an iPhone-like device that ran the same software as EC2. No, it wouldn't replace the iPhone, at least not right away. But what a test-bed for innovation it would be. Get down to the metal with a platform and distribution system that delivers software to users for pennies (if that much) integrated into the world's largest online store, that takes no stake in the products you're offering. Geez that sounds a lot like the PC or Mac market. Of course that can't work.

BTW, Joe Moreno of Adjix may have found a breakthrough in URL-shortening that solves all the issues we covered in Thursday's Bad Hair Day podcast. I mention it in this piece because it's the incredibly flexible S3 architecture that makes the solution possible. If it actually works, and I believe it will, I'll write it up next week.

Netscape and RSS

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:08:20 GMT

Interesting sequence of events.

Marc Canter writes a blog post asking if we should trust Marc Andreessen, after the hole Netscape left its users in when they sold out to AOL. He makes some good points about the browser, esp the part about how they blamed Microsoft for their demise. I think they could have survived it, if they had gotten their software act together. Instead we had five or six years of Microsoft dominance of the browser market, and those were not good years for the web.

But Canter overlooked one thing, without Netscape there never would have been RSS. I said this in a tweet. "Really???" asks Rbonini. Really.

Here's the sequence of events that led to RSS 0.91. Obviously this is from my point of view, but all these things did happen and all were necessary for RSS to become what it is today.

1. In 1997, as an experiment to satisfy Adam Bosworth, who was pestering me (jn a nice way) about XML, I produced a syndication of my "news site" -- Scripting News. I called the format scriptingNews format.

2. In 1998, almost nothing happened with this format. A few experiments, but it looked like it was going nowhere. I had other XML-based projects that appeared to have much more promise.

3. Then in 1999, Netscape comes out with RSS 0.90. It does most of what scriptingNews does, and a few things it didn't do. And vice versa. At first I was upset, they had mostly ignored my work, been incompatible when it would have (imho) been easier to be compatible.

4. Then I did one of the smartest things I ever did. I surrendered unconditionally. They didn't even ask me to. I adopted their format. Wholesale. Discarded my old format. The way I figured it, I had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Because, and this is the key point -- they had support from content companies, notably Wired, Salon, Red Herring and Motley Fool. In one step, swallowing my pride, little old Scripting News and all the allied sites that used my software, could join the club. So I did it. Goodbye scriptingNews, hello RSS. (It's a little more complicated, I left out a few steps, but this is the net-effect.)

Maybe some other BigCo would have come along and do what they did, but with the benefit of hindsight, none did. It was years before the other tech companies adopted RSS, they came in after the publishing industry, led by the New York Times. It seems that scriptingNews format would have continued doing nothing. I could claim to have invented it, but no one would have cared.

Fact is, Netscape did something unusual there, something good. They were a big company that actually stuck their neck out and did something worthwhile. Did Andreessen play a role in it? I have no idea. But the company he started did it, so if he takes responsibility for the bad stuff, seems he ought to get credit for the good stuff.

Gatekeeping is a losing strategy

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:41:39 GMT

Human beings are funny. They struggle to get noticed. Only a few do. And of those only a few get powerful enough to control which other humans get noticed. These people are called gatekeepers.

The idea comes from the days when rich people had gates. The richer you were the bigger and more impressive the gate. I once bought a house that had a gate, but I had it removed. All that was left were two big stone pillars, ornaments with no purpose. They also had a gasoline pump and tank on the property. I had them removed too. Then I removed myself, and now I live in a noisy neighborhood with people walking by all the time. That's how I like it. I learned that I don't like to be isolated, even though I was raised to think privacy is a good thing. Instead we thrive with lots of other humans around us.

You know how Doc says there's no demand for messages? Well, there's no demand for gatekeepers. In fact there's negative demand for them. Because once a gatekeeper sets up shop, we immediately begin to figure out ways around them.

On the Internet we call them outages. Gatekeepers are outages. They're the connections that don't get made because someone imagines themselves powerful enough to prevent them. But it's only temporary. Like a river that encounters an obstacle, eventually water (influence) piles up behind it, and then either flows over or around it. There's not much future in being an obstacle.

If you live long enough in tech, you get to see this happen over and over. I've lived a long time already, and I can testify. I've watched people, even friends, get the idea their influence was so permanent that they, like the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld, could say No soup for you! if there was something about you they didn't like. Only in this case, instead of soup, it's flow. My advice -- don't believe it.

A long time ago I discovered this fundamental rule of the net -- People come back to places that send them away. Places like Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Youtube, even Twitter. These are the mainstays. You go there to get somewhere else. Sites that try to suck you in and hold you there, no matter how cleverly, go away. While it may seem like a good approach at first, long-term it's a losing strategy.

No soup for you

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:53:35 GMT

Every Friday, rain or shine!

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:18:45 GMT

On Twitter there's been a tradition called "Follow Fridays," where you tell your friends who they should follow. It's nice, but I've got another idea, a way to help build and diversify the Internet, and probably help preserve a record of what we were thinking way back in 2009 and 2010.

Every Friday, rain or shine, write a blog post.

These days when I think an idea needs elaboration I ask for a blog post.

When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a longer-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays.

Maybe Fridays will become #blogpostfriday.

It'll be good for the Internet!

Remember, Scoble's blog still loves him, and your blog still loves you, even if you haven't called in a while!

Loose.ly coupled 140-char message network

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 23:50:59 GMT

A few ahems...

Farhad Manjoo, writing in Slate, sings the anthem of the new republic. "Microblogging has become too important for one company to rule the field." I agree with most everything in the piece, it's largely a summary of thoughtfully chosen quotes from Scripting News. However, I vehemently object to death metaphors for software, systems and networks. The goal is vibrant, thriving, survivable networks. The headline of the piece is something I can't support. Otherwise, excellent!

A few days ago Taylor Heffernan, a student at the University of Delaware, asked if I would drop the insurrection if Twitter became a revolutionary in the cause of loose-coupling. In a heartbeat! In a blink of an eye! In a cycle of a netbook microprocessor! In the time it takes to say the "Y" sound in You Betcha Fer Sure! He reminded me of the way we pulled a fast one on Netscape in 1999 by throwing in the towel on our syndication format and using theirs instead. I'm always a sucker for unconditional surrender, even when it wasn't asked for, much less demanded.

As Michael Jackson said to Paul McCartney, "I think I told you I'm a lover not a fighter." He also encouraged McCartney to "keep dreaming."

I also love that there are bright young people with enthusiasm for the future who are happy to learn from the past. There's hope for the world.

And to our friends at Twitter, I know you don't put me on your list of favorite Tweeters and you haven't verified my account, but I would still work with you to make all this stuff work right.

One more thing. Even though the loosely-coupled 140-char message network won't need URL shorteners (at least when messages aren't traveling over SMS) our two guests for this evening's Bad Hair Day podcast are Eric Woodward of tr.im and Brian Hendrickson of rp.ly. These guys are very interesting leaders in our little micro-community. If you recall earlier this week tr.im made headlines by first announcing it was shutting down and then in response to the incredible outpouring of support decided to give it another go. In the interim, Brian whipped up rp.ly -- and announced it on BHD 7.5 on Monday. It was a welcome surprise, which I wrote about the next day, in a piece that was reprised by Doc Searls.

And don't forget in the midst of all this michegas, Facebook bought Friendfeed, leaving Scoble with his blog. Of course it still loves him, always will.

TechCrunch doesn't cover us, we block TechMeme, we're committed to a new beginning with all-clean energy. We've done it before we'll do it again.

Join the revolution!

People who RWW readers follow on Twitter

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:37:40 GMT

Yesterday Marshall wrote a story about the Twitter subscription lists app that I put up as part of the rssCloud project. As a result a few hundred people tried it out, and in the process I cached their follow lists.

Then it occurred to me this morning that this is an interesting data set. It represents some slice of the RWW readership and tells us something about who they follow. Unlike the usual argument that Twitter follower lists are garbage, these clearly are not. They represent real people with an interest in some bleeding-edge tech. Who they follow, to me, is intensely interesting.

So here's the list, see what you think.

Custom browser for Facebook

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:09:24 GMT

Marshall Kirkpatrick, my partner in the Bad Hair podcast, has a scoop worthy of comment on Scripting News.

Apparently Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape and a new venture capitalist, is backing a venture to create a custom browser for Facebook.

There are many millions of people who would go for this, it's a no-brainer.

On the other hand, it's a throwback to an earlier era -- AOL also had its own browser. Helps cement Facebook's position as the AOL for this decade.

The silo gets cushier, but it's still a silo.

Marshall goes on to say "it's contrary to the growing storm of support building for a distributed framework for social networking." Amen to that.

http://rsscloud.org/

BTW, we have a great pair of guests for our podcast, live this evening at 7PM Pacific. Details forthcoming.

Seeing superiority

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:56:03 GMT

So many connections are missed because people feel superior to others.

"He doesn't know how to make systems scale," observes an engineer who does. But he fails to observe that the other guy knows how to do things he doesn't. Sometimes people miss what they don't have (wish I was thinner, richer, younger) and other times we're so oblivious we can't even see it exists (he knows how politics work, he knows how to reduce things to their core simplicity).

Better to assume that everyone you meet has something to offer that you can use. Otherwise, why did you meet them?

Sometimes you meet people who are so open, so ready -- and sometimes people are too open and too ready -- you get scared and back off. Gotta strike a good balance. Don't stand behind a huge wall and don't get in the other guy's face.

Do you believe in a purposeful existence -- that everything happens for a reason? Well, you just ran into this guy for a reason. Now are you going to find out what it is or let the opportunity pass?

I guess it's unavoidable but we erect barriers to keep people out. We tell ourselves stories about how much better we have it than they do. Too old, too young, too fat, too needy. But you can always flip it around and imagine it the other way. I've seen ridiculous examples of people who had almost nothing, feeling superior to others, who it could be argued, are vastly better off than them. The mind can play some really huge tricks.

I can't tell the specific stories behind these observations because they involve people who are living who I care about. But I can share the observations and hope to help make more of the connections that want to happen, actually occur.

For whatever reason, this is what my eyes are open to right now.

I try to remember that:

1. We're all bozos on this bus.

2. My shit stinks. (So does yours.)

3. It's not like anyone gets out of this alive.

7/31/09: "Don't waste time on other people's qualities, intelligence, hypocrisy, honor. Distractions. What matters is what you do."

Align the interests of: 1. Users and 2. Investors.

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:28:07 GMT

Last night Marshall and I did a flash call-in version of the Bad Hair Day podcast to discuss the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook. It was the first time I used BlogTalkRadio's call-in feature, and I liked it, and I want to do it again.

Toward the end of the show Brian Hendrickson of Portland called in to say that he was launching a replacement for tr.im called rp.ly. Then somehow the subject turned to how to build a sustainable thing out of his daring act. I gave a lame answer. In my defense, I wasn't prepared. After much more thought I know the answer and I'd like to share it here.

Before giving the answer let's be clear on what the question is.

Brian is a young ambitious hard-working creative persistent developer. I can vouch for all that. He lives in Portland, but when we have events here in the Bay Area, he comes. He never gives up, never flames, and his stuff works. He's got all the attributes you look for in an entrepreneur.

The question is this -- how to build a sustainable user-oriented business around Brian's talents so that it doesn't let the users down as the investors' interest diverges from the users' interest. That's what's going with FriendFeed and Twitter, when you really drill in. Some of it is incompetence and fear. Twitter's SUL is just plain dumb, it's not in anyone's interest. But FriendFeed getting acquired and not protecting the users, that is simple divergence. Their stockholders and the users had different interests.

Anyway, when you frame the question this way the answer is very clear. You have to align the interests of the users and the investors.

Think about that for a minute.

Align the interests of: 1. Users and 2. Investors.

How to do that?

Well, they need to be the same people.

Get ready for some non-linear thinking folks, because this is not the 20th Century. It's not Kansas and Twitter isn't Toto and the VCs aren't the Wicked Witch -- they're just business people following their training and instinct the best they can.

To understand how this can work, back up a few years and then a few years more.

Why did Google get such an outrageous market cap when they IPO'd? I maintain it's because they had a huge number of users who understood their product and were very excited about it.

Okay back up another generation. Before Netscape went public the assumption was they needed revenue at a 20 percent pre-tax margin. They squeaked by if you looked at the numbers the right way in the right light, and squinted. But in the end none of that mattered. The stock didn't end up pricing based on the old metrics. Why? Same thing -- they had a huge number of users who undestood their product and were excited about it. They bought the stock and bid up the price. And up and up and up.

We're now in the same place again. The question is this -- okay Brian isn't a Google or a Netscape. Neither is tr.im. Neither are the handful of developers who are excited by rssCloud and the idea of a loosely-coupled distributed 140-character message network. But who says public offering have to be mega-size. They don't. Sometimes they're very small affairs.

And that imho is the answer -- we, the users, need to own a technology company -- and have it work to serve our interests. It has to help us achieve our goals to do what we are excited about. I believe the users are worth betting on, much more than I believe that Marc Andreessen or Larry and Sergey really had any idea how to tap into the potential of their inventions (with no disrespect to any of these brilliant people). The visionaries were the people who believed their stock was worth a lot more than anyone in Silicon Valley did.

So that's what I'd like you all to think about -- founding a People's Software Company whose first act is to IPO and pool the financial resources of users who believe there is a gap in what Silicon Valley is providing using their old models for corporate structure. We're living in the proof that the gap exists, with all the failures of the centralized system in just the last week. See if your imagination takes you to the same place it takes me.

PS: I've turned off comments on this post. I may explain why in a subsequent post.

Scoble, your blog still loves you

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:34:28 GMT

Just got off the phone with Robert Scoble.

I've known him for a long time. He's not so much a Natural Born Blogger as he is a Natural Born Evangelist.

For the last couple of years he's committed himself to the success of FriendFeed. It's really been awful to see how much he promotes it. All the time, as I watch, I'm thinking -- "Those guys are going to screw him."

Today it happened.

All the effort he poured into FriendFeed is for naught. They sold to Facebook. In the announcements, no mention of the users, and certainly no mention of Scoble. Now would have been the time for them to tip him, throw him a few thousand. Or if not money, how about at least a hat-tip -- an acknowledgement of the help they received from users, esp Robert Scoble. Nothing. They didn't even give him the first interview.

Scoble it's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet. That's what it was designed for.

And I told him I'd write a blog post about him, and that he'd like the title.

Our blogs are still there, as is the web and the Internet. They never went away just because we foolishly flirted with something fast and easy and seductive. Our blogs never went away, they're still ready to share our ideas and connect us with others.

We'll go back to basics now, take what we learned from this round of innovation, and build it for real this time.

Enough with shortened URLs

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:36:34 GMT

Enough!

With every shortened URL the foundation of the 140-character-sphere gets shakier. Now we know that when Twitter switched from tinyurl as the default shortener to bit.ly, they cut off the path to growth for the other entrepreneurs exploring this space.

Now, according to Mashable, bit.ly wants to absorb tr.im. They would make tr.im URLs work for the forseeable future. That is, until bit.ly runs out of cash and has to shut down because it doesn't have a way to support their service.

Uncle!

URL-shorteners are at best a temporary workaround for a limit Twitter shouldn't have.

It's time for Twitter to add a simple feature to their platform that allows users to attach a URL of arbitrary length to a message, without using up any of the 140 characters. That would be the rational way to get out in front of this mess -- to remove the reason it exists.

Even if they can't implement it immediately, just announcing that they will would restructure the "market" and allow us a way forward that has a teeny bit of safety. We will still have the mess of the last three years to clean up. No way to avoid that.

If Twitter won't do that, then it's time that users insist that URL-shorteners at least provide the safety that Feedburner provided, by allowing users to point a subdomain at their server, and use that as the address for their shortened URLs. If tr.im had that feature, I would now be able to take over hosting of my own tr.im URLs and walk away from the mess. However because they didn't have that feature, I, and every other tr.im user, is stuck. Locked in, with no way out.

Twitter created this mess, now it's time for Twitter to become a leader in its own community and get involved in cleaning it up.

Two choices: 1. Obviate shortened URLs, or 2. Require portability.

tr.im announces shutdown

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 23:15:32 GMT

I've done a lot of building on the tr.im url-shortener, as have quite a few other developers. They just announced that they're shutting down. It's not clear what the timeframe is and how long we have to transition. Nor is it clear what will happen with all the tr.im urls that are already out there, will they break, and if so, when?

The mess this creates makes me feel pretty queasy. I wish this were someone else's problem so I could watch from afar and think "There but for the grace of Murphy go I." But this time the problem is mine. I've done a fair amount of building on tr.im, and I have at least a few users, Nieman and Jay Rosen among them, who are using my tr.im-based tool. Really glad I didn't open up the 40twits app for broader use.

If there are any url-shorteners out there that support the same functionality as tr.im, please post a comment here.

And Twitter, when your DDoS problems are cleared up, please take a look at obviating the need for url-shorteners. This is a harbinger of much more serious problems down the road, should bit.ly prove not to be a profitable business, as tr.im has proven.

Narrate Your Work

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 18:17:42 GMT

Over the years I've seen ideas that show up over and over in various different forms, and when we discover one, we give it a name. Examples. Jay Rosen came up with Atomization. Doc Searls said Markets Are Conversations. David Weinberger has so many -- including Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Transparency is the New Objectivity. Clay Shirky says Here Comes Everybody. Jay and I together came up with Rebooting The News. Some of mine are Sources Go Direct, River of News, We Make Shitty Software, Checkbox News, People Come Back to Places that Send Them Away, Ask Not What the Internet Can Do For You, The Platform with No Platform Vendor, It's Even Worse Than It Appears.

Now I'm going to add one, and provide a fantastic example. It's the title of this piece -- Narrate Your Work.

Narrate Your Work is something I used to tell my team at UserLand Software, because we were a virtual team, with people in Seattle, Boston, Vancouver, Germany and California. But it would have applied even if we were all working in the same office. As a manager, I wanted to know where my people were, because if they were completing a project I needed to be thinking about their next steps and how their deliverables fit in with other stuff that was coming online. And if they were late I needed to understand why. We even developed technology for this, and Hutch Carpenter discovered the docs for it, and was excited about the discovery, and I was excited for his excitement.

Brent Simmons, who was on our team at UserLand, went on to write NetNewsWire and other gems after leaving the company. Brent uses Twitter, to this day, to narrate his work. You'd have to ask Brent why he does it, but I'm glad he does. I like how his mind works, I learn from him. He's also a friend and a guy I respect, so I like to stay in touch, and this is one way to do it.

Twitter is very much a Narrate Your Work environment, in addition to the many other things it is. In a way its question What Are You Doing? is what Narrate Your Work asks of you too.

So that's what Narrate Your Work means. I wouldn't waste your time with all this theory unless I could show you how all this fits in with Rebooted News and the News System of the Future. Here's a recital of what happened.

1. As you may know, at roughly noon Eastern time yesterday a plane crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River in NY, killing all nine people aboard both.

2. I was away from my computer when it happened, didn't check in until about an hour later, and on Twitter there was a mess of conflicting stories, and lots of individuals "breaking" the news even though it happened over an hour ago.

3. I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different, and this is the point of this story. I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don't know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others' posts, I don't know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn't work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times.

4. I took a snapshot of the page at that time so we could all look at this.

Now why do I think this is so important? Because it's a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho. Today's reporters don't think the public wants to see inside their process, but they are wrong about that. Many of us totally want to look inside and watch them at work for a variety of reasons:

1. We thirst for instantaneous real-time news. The cable networks have been simulating it for decades, but not delivering very often. Go back to the Gulf War, and how we were all glued to CNN watching for any hint of new information. It became an obsession that was repeated in the 2000 election and in the aftermath of 9-11. Now we try to grab for that sense of immediacy whenever possible, and they market to us on that basis even naming their show The Situation Room, when it is nothing of the sort.

2. But cable news isn't where it started, it started with the idea of news. It's not history or analysis, it's what's happening now. Think about how the Iran Hostage Crisis spawned Nightline and how the networks covered the Nixon resignation, or the moon landing or the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. (In the recent spate of bios of Walter Cronkite I learned that he broadcast from the room he worked in at CBS News, not from a set on a stage. It's as if he was prepared to go on the air at any time and it wasn't appearances that mattered. At that time, to CBS, news was a functional thing.)

3. We also want to feel to be a part of the news process. Again this is something the networks are playing lip service to. But the Times people on Twitter aren't just pretending to use sources outside their own newsroom, they are actually doing it. And you can see it.

4. Weinberger says we should seek transparency, and of course I agree -- it's my theme song too. You can see real reporters dealing with a true breaking story not just a simulation of a breaking story, let their hair down and share everything they know with the world. This is the impulse of news, it's not about hiding things until they're ready, but when you know something for a fact, you want it out there as quickly as possible. And as long as something is clearly labeled as speculation it's every bit as true as a fully vetted fact.

5. Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future. A key component of this system is that it is used both as the back room for narrating news work and for the finished delivered news product. It's this duality that makes electronic news vital. I first saw this in the LBBS and MORE software I did in the 80s, then in Manila in the 90s, and I believe we will see it in the news system that comes out of Twitter. You have two modes of viewing the content, the editorial view and the finished product view -- but it's important that the are just views on the same data, so when a change is made to one, it automatically appears in the other. This was the key concept in Manila's Edit This Page function.

6. Lenn Pryor at Microsoft figured this out a few years back when he started the Channel 9 website. Channel 9 is the audio channel on airplanes that allows you to listen to the cockpit conversation. Pryor set out to create that kind of experience for users of Microsoft products. Lenn is a creative guy who went on to work at Skype. He also coined the term unconference for the format we were using at BloggerCon.

Update: The Times stays with the story.

Trading one centralized net for another?

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:58:21 GMT

Interesting question came up in response to yesterday's piece about naming. Since name resolution is inherently centralized, aren't we trading one vulnerable system for another? Couldn't a hacker take down the name server just as easily as they swamp twitter.com with zombie requests?

First, I'm not an expert on this subject, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

Second, let's summarize the problem we're solving.

We're trying to turn a mnemonic like judy into a URL like looselycoupled.net/judy.xml.

If the name server were to go down, one thing we lose is the ability to find new people. But our clients still know how to find all the people we were subscribed to before the attack. We also lose the ability to relocate feeds that move. But that's only temporary, and we still have HTTP-level redirects, and we don't have that ability in the RSS network today and we seem to get along okay.

Another observation. Somehow the domain name system survives these kinds of attacks (knock wood). That's all we're talking about here, a service that's no more complex than DNS. And like DNS, the net could operate indefinitely even if it went down, though we'd lose the ability to find new people or ones that moved.

One more comment, unrelated to the centralization question. A question that keeps coming up. Why not have the name be like an email address, like judy@looselycoupled.net instead of judy. There are several reasons why. 1. Twitter has nice short names, and if you want to be as easy as Twitter, you have to have short names too. 2. The goal is to map a name to a URL. If the name has all the info the URL does, why bother mapping at all? No point, just skip the whole thing and have users enter URLs.

I posted a video excerpt from Oliver Stone's movie Any Given Sunday where Al Pacino tells the team they have to fight for every inch if they want to win. I've learned that simplicity in protocols is the same. You don't get many breakthroughs, most of the simplicity comes from fighting for every inch. Stone, speaking through Pacino, tells the story infinitely better than I can.

How many RSS updates per second?

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:39:48 GMT

Jim Posner asked an interesting question via email.

"I was wondering about your estimate re: the number of rss updates per second there are on the web. Crazy question I know but just trying to understand orders of magnitude.

"If I were to subscribe to every available feed on the net do you think that would be 1000/updates a sec or closer to 1M/sec. Any guidance appreciated."

I responded that I don't have any idea. But I bet it's 1000 times what Twitter does. And it never goes down and isn't subject to a DOS attack.