A travel day

Sunday, August 12, 2007 by Dave Winer.

I'm writing this in Seattle, in a few minutes I'll get in the car and head south, back to the Bay Area. 

I had a great time at Gnomedex. Chris and Ponzi, as always, put on a classy show. It had its ups and downs, and emotional moments, and moments of great inspiration. I think Guy Kawasaki and Darren Barefoot gave the best talks. Derek Miller touched our hearts. People are talking about one presentation more than all the others mostly because the speaker is a great promoter, but the sparks also flew at a couple of other talks that aren't getting as much coverage.  

I had some interesting hallway talks, but none more interesting than the one with Kevin McEntee of Netflix about providing a way for users to take their movie ratings from Netflix to other services. This could turn Netflix into the hub for movie ratings (the first place that exports becomes the default UI), and could enable all kinds of interesting combos, such as checking a box on Match.com to be introduced to dates who like the same kinds of movies. At least you'd know you have one thing you can talk about. And what movies you like and don't probably says a lot about people. It may not be obvious, but Netflix is a social network, and the more the networks open and let the user's data be portable, the more power it gives developers to do interesting things with the data. It's so clearly the manifest destiny of the web, we just need one of these companies to go first. Netflix has always had a great attitude about customers. It would make sense for them to be the first to trust us with our own data. "People come back to places that send them away." 

I used some new technology at the show, my pictures flowed from iPhone to Flickr to Twitter, effortlessly, and pointed the way to the way publishing from a mobile device should work. I got pictures and text to flow in one package, and we have sound flowing in a separate stream. I want them to join, and I want the UI on the reader to be more enjoyable, but I'm satisfied that it works pretty damned well for August 2007. 

A heads-up on breakage. I broke the audio Twittergram functionality when I implemented the Flickr functionality, but that's fixed now, and you should be able to do audio posts again. And the Next-Prev links on Scripting News have been broken for a few days. I can't fix this problem from my laptop, but it'll be one of the first things I do when I get home.  

I'll be writing some tonight, and taking pictures through the day. It looks like the weather is good. Time to hit the road. Seeya later! 

Mark Smith: "The social side of movie watching definitely needs more exploration."