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Twitter feeds stray puppies

Wednesday, October 28, 2009 by Dave Winer.

A bunch of random notes on returing from the #140conf in Los Angeles. 

Next time I go to a conference I'm taking the Asus, not the MacBook. You're always looking for a power outlet with the Mac and that sucks. I'm also going to actively look for a replacement for the Sprint MiFi and my AT&T iPhone, both of which have terribly spotty coverage. I couldn't get online in LAX last night, even though my iPhone can tether and I had the Sprint. If you can't get online in one of the largest airports in the world, what is the point of carrying this thing with you. SFO wasn't much better. And I couldn't use either of them in my hotel room in the biggest hotel in Hollywood in the middle of a shopping mall and convention center. These are places that by now these cell providers should have the best coverage in. The question is -- is Verizon any better?  

Great Rebooting The News with Jeff Jarvis as the guest. Lovely rapport betw Jay and Jeff.  

At the conference yesterday they explained the vague announcement made by YCombinator and Twitter over the weekend -- YCombinator startups will have access to Twitter's firehose. The audience heard "startups get help from Twitter" which they reacted to as if they said "Twitter feeds stray puppies." I hate to spoil the party, but not all speculative investigations are done by "entrepreneurs" -- and not all entrepreneurs are part of YCombinator. This is just more of the lunacy that comes from building an industry around a company instead of an open format or protocol. Paul Graham hypes it as Twitter having discovered a protocol like SMTP or HTTP. That's pure bunk. When there's a protocol, no one will own the firehose, and no one will be granted access (and no one will not be granted access). 

I'm continuing to love my linkblog. I've gotten nothing but complaints from readers. Eventually you all will love it too. I'm sure of it. In the meantime, my work is 100 percent more valuable to me, and my incentive to remember a link by pushing it through Twitter (and my linkblog) is greater than ever. So I'll do more work for you, you'll be better informed, and happier and more productive. I can't promise you'll live longer. We'll feed some stray puppies too.  

Reminder to subscribe to this feed not the one that WordPress provides. (Note to Matt and the WP community and company, as I use WP more and more I'm hitting limits we never had in Radio or Manila. You guys should seriously look at stealing some ideas from those products. I'll help you find them, because I'm starting to depend on this software.) 

I started to watch the video of my presentation at 140conf, which everyone says went well (it was widely quoted on Twitter, of course). That's good, cause I couldn't stand to watch it because I'm frowning too much because there's a light shining in my eyes. We have to come up with a better way to do this, so it doesn't feel so much like "I'm up here and you're out there." I have to be able to at least abstract the audience when I'm speaking. That's why I much prefer the interview format, because I can talk to another person. It's part of the theme of my talk, we're just people, I'm not Mike Wallace and you're not really an audience. It's a brave new world and we should have the courage to accept it for what it is. And please believe me that I'm smiling as I write this. I wish I had been smiling more while I gave the talk.  

And don't forget to feed the stray puppies.