Scripting News

I was a sixth grade communist

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 05:56:06 GMT

A cute story about my 6th grade class.

My girlfriend in sixth grade, Gail Schneider, who I still see from time to time, will tell you that I haven't changed in the 42 years since I was a 12-year-old boy growing up in Queens. I always thought it's funny how women, even when they are little girls, think they can peer into your soul and see the real you, but in this case I think Gail is right. (BTW, that might be a picture of Gail, a few years later, at Woodstock.)

My mother accumulates things, it's her curse. She wishes she traveled lighter, in the George Carlin sense, with less baggage. She keeps shedding stuff, but then a relative dies and she ends up with another closet full of stuff that's too precious to throw out. Anyway, she had been holding on to my sixth grade autograph book, and gave it to me on my last trip to NY, and I've been reading it. This one was worth keeping!

Some observations. Well, men never know what women are thinking. There were a couple of girls who had a crush on me, all the girls knew it, but I was clueless at the time. The trail is right there in the book.

And (finally I get to the point) along with a couple of friends, Clifford Hable and John Monterisi, I was part of a club of sixth grade communists. Of course we weren't really communists, we were just kids, but we read the news and knew the adults were freaked out by the commies, and we thought they were silly (don't all 12-year-olds think adults are silly). So we had a club, and in that club we were communists. That's all over the autograph book too. Hammers and sickles, comrade this and comrade that. It still makes me laugh how we adopted the symbolism and language of our most feared enemy.

I wrote to the Chinese mission to the UN asking for literature about their country, and boy did they send stuff. Color magazines and posters mostly in English, a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, a huge wall-size poster of Chairman Mao. I loved reading the stuff the way I loved District 9. It was science fiction, but it also bore some semblance to reality. It was forbidden and terrorized the adults. I liked it!

So today when a Republican Twitterer from the Deep South called me a commisar and said I should communicate with the Kremlin and said dasvidaniya, I smiled, and almost thanked him. As if it were Clifford or John, complimenting me on some daring or noble revolutionary act in defiance of Mrs. Dori, our sixth grade teacher.

On reflection, I realized this is the new Republican macho. Call anyone who criticizes a Republican a Nazi or a Commie. Can't call me a Nazi (I have relatives who died in Hitler's camps) so go for commie. Except the Cold War has been over for almost 20 years. It's really sad that it has come to this.

BTW, another woman who could peer into my soul was Mrs. Dori, who was one of my two favorite teachers. She wrote in my autograph book: "To David, a boy who really cares." I don't know if she wrote that for everyone, maybe she did. But in my case, it was true.

How to fix URL-shorteners

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:10:38 GMT

First a few notes as a preamble.

1. URL-shorteners are bad for the Internet. They centralize linking, and make it more fragile, and more controllable. Wait till the Chinese govt finds out about them.

2. When bit.ly breaks, it will be an outage that may be bigger than Twitter going down. Not only do we lose the present, but we lose the past too. One big URL shortener that dominates the others is itself a dangerous thing.

3. Twitter could and should obviate the need for URL-shorteners. Yes I know SMS messages are limited to 160 chars. So shorten the URLs at the SMS gateway and leave them long for communication over pathways that are not so limited. Any engineer could see this obvious solution.

4. For now URL-shorteners are a fact of life.

End of preamble. Now to what is needed in URL-shorteners to work around the various issues they present.

It's not so different from the problem with Feedburner, and the solution they used, and implemented quickly once it was known.

1. CNAMEs. It must be possible for the user to own and control the domain his or her URLs live at. Technically, this means I register the domain name, and map a sub-domain to the URL-shortener site with a CNAME record. Anyone who knows how to use Godaddy can do it. I would be happy to write a howto that explains.

2. Shared data. The URL-shortener and the user share a space where the data is stored. Joe Moreno at Adjix, who I have been working with, has figured out how to do it on Amazon S3. I have mapped a domain to an S3 bucket, and given his software permission to write to that bucket. Here's the key point. At any time I can revoke the permission and my URLs still work. Or Adjix could disappear, and the shortened URLs would still work. With this method the only way there is linkrot is if S3 goes down.

Here's a URL that links to a Flickr picture:

http://tmp.loose.ly/jmxe

Obviously the sub-domain, tmp.loose.ly, is temporary. But if you're a techie, I encourage you to do a DNS lookup on tmp.loose.ly. You'll see it's a CNAME to s3.amazonaws.com. And get the contents of the file to see how it works. It's static. Yet it still gathers statistics. Yes, it's unusual. That's why Joe was the only one to crack this nut. He's a creative guy.

It's such a clean implementation that if I decide later to move the files to an Apache server on Linux, no problem.

I think basically Adjix has solved all the problems with URL-shorteners. I hope other engineers poke at this and verify my conclusion or disprove them.

Wednesday links

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:22:38 GMT

Not uncommon that an intensely productive week is followed by an unproductive one. Fighting a cold. Probably just my spirit saying Slow Down Davey. I've learned to accept these things, not fight them.

Great new domain, ou.rs, suggested by Mike Wheeler -- no doubt we'll find a use for it. One thing Twitter has taught us is how to be creative in fewer characters! BTW, don't assume that ou.rs will be a URL-shortener. It might be like Andrew Baron's mag.ma, a site that was born after Twitter, and has the short URLs designed-in.

l've wanted to have Google index all the script code in the OPML Editor's root file and tools. That's where most of its personality is defined. So I wrote a simple script that visits all the scripts and does a web page listing each. I think this will possibly interest one or two people other than myself. But I'm linking to it here so Google thinks it's important enough to index.

I found an review the NY Times ran about ThinkTank in 1983. It predates any coverage from the tech industry. At the time it ran I was totally out of money and was going to shut the company and find a job. Instead, we were able to quickly raise money and a company started, leading to a Mac product and a PC product, and lots more. Now here's the scary part -- that was 26 years ago. A long friggin time already! Yow.

Went to see District 9 yesterday. No spoilers. But it's fun, thoughtful, interesting, well-acted movie with lots of B-movie scifi cliches, all done masterfully. Lots of twists, and one or two places where you go Oh Yeah! because you know what's coming is really coooool. Good movie to take your inner-adolescent to.

Chuck Grassley

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:40:40 GMT

I used to think Chuck Grassley, Republican Senator from Iowa, was an honorable man. An exception to the spineless liars of his party. Now he's spouting the "death panels" lie, like all the rest. This pitch hypocritically confuses and hurts the very people they claim to care about, the people and families of people who are dealing with serious illness or imminent death.

Grassley: "We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

It seems unlikely that Grassley, who is 75, has not dealt with death in his family. If they're like other Americans, they got help from the medical system preparing for it, or dealing with its aftermath. At least they were offered the help. Being educated about this subject not only saves hurt and grief, it also saves lives.

There is no more sensitive subject. No more private place you don't want the government to mess around in. And btw, the Republicans are sneaky -- they are government. Grassley is a US Senator. Doesn't get more government than that.

Saying the Democrats want to euthanize your grandmother is beyond despicable, I can't think of a word that describes how low it is.

It's time for the Republican Party to die.

I'd sign up for that death panel.

tr.im goes open source, community supported

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:13:44 GMT

Marshall has the announcement.

I think it's great. I know that Eric Woodward wanted to move on from tr.im and this gives him the opportunity to do that, but allows the community that's gathered around tr.im to continue.

I am part of that community -- having build an application that gets a lot of use, and one that a lot of people want. To match Eric's generosity, I will release the app behind the 40twits site as open source.

It's the app behind these sites:

http://dave.40twits.com/

http://jay.40twits.com/

http://nieman.40twits.com/

It builds on the tr.im API.

Let a thousand flowers bloom!

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.