Scripting News

7 years plus 70 days

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:52:28 GMT

7 years ago today: "Tomorrow is Day 70 of No Smoking Dave. Ten weeks. A non-smoking story at the Bowie concert last week. As I'm walking out I see people lighting up everywhere. Smell of smoke all around. It smells good. I really want one. In my mind I outline the steps it would take to be smoking and the amount of time it would take. I would ask someone if they could spare a cigarette. If they said no I'd offer them $1. Oh hell, just offer $1 to begin with. Whoo, where would I get a match. I'd ask for a light. Take a drag. Estimated time, 15 seconds to one minute to first nicotine rush. My heart started beating faster. I felt scared like you feel on a NY subway platform as a train is entering the station and you're standing on the platform and in the instant before it passes you think how you could end your life by leaning forward. I never actually jump, and that night I didn't smoke, and it's good that inside I equate smoking with death so deeply that it invokes my subway nightmare. Do I have it beat? No way. I am still an addict, I expect I will be for life. But I'm an addict in recovery, who is not taking the drug. Even better, I am becoming a constant evangelist for a nicotine-free lifestyle for nicotine addicts, illustrating the old adage that you teach what you most need to learn."

Wish I could send a message back in time to that Dave, seven years ago. I'm sure at some level I'm still a nicotine addict, but I no longer go through this torture when I see someone smoking. Quite the opposite. I smell it and it repels me. Given enough time, you go into remission. Maybe never all the way, but pretty close.

My #blogpostfriday post

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:00:18 GMT

I've had a non-productive week, I've been fighting a cold -- but I made a commitment to the web to write at least one post every Friday, so here I am keeping my promise.

I'm worried about the web.

We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they're public companies, it's very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.

A few weeks ago an entrepreneur said to my face that he was the one who made the money and I was the one who worked for free. My chin dropped. I knew most if not all of them secretly believed this, but I had never heard one say it out loud.

I know others who told me their business model was to patent my work.

Shaking my head. This can't work.

This system is terrible. It's a bubble, like the real estate bubble. It's going to burst, and when it does, it will take a lot of our history with it.

But not this blog post if I have any say about it. It's stored as a static file on a Windows XP server running Apache. It could just as easily be stored on a Linux machine running anything. Or even an iPod or iPhone. Text files are the ultimate in stability. The same text file you could read on a mainframe 40 years ago could be read on a netbook today.

I'll post a link to this piece on Twitter, that probably won't last very long. But -- the backup I'm making of it is being stored as a static text file on Apache. So it may well be around for a while.

I'm really obsessed with creating a historic record. I want to feel that our writing has a future. I also don't want to work for people who are as openly greedy as the typical entrepreneur of 2009.

Anyway -- time to go to lunch. I've taken my vitamins on behalf of the web.

From the 'It Seems To Me' Department

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:02:19 GMT

Sometimes 140 characters is enough to express an idea.

The FCC loves RSS

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:20:20 GMT

It came through in a tweet today, and I gotta say it's great news.

"We discovered RSS! More to come soon."

Coool! Can't wait to see what's coming soon.

RSS is totally an FCC kind of thing. It's a package of net neutrality. A level playing field in a box. It's mom and apple pie, baseball, hot dogs, and (do they still make Chevrolets).

If anyone at the FCC is listening, if you liked RSS, wait till you see rssCloud. It makes RSS updates happen in an instant!

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.