Bootstrapping the blog revolutions
We're in the business of bootstrapping new forms of social behavior.
Scripting News was started in 1997, by me, Dave Winer.
Or 1994 or 1996 or whenever you think it actually started.
I wrote my first blog posts in 1994, that's for sure.
It's the longest continuously running blog on the Internet. It was also the first. Yeah, I'm serious about blogging!
Some people were born to play country music, or baseball. I was born to blog.
At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don't have the impulse to say what they think.
So when you meet one, you'll know it -- if they write letters to the editor, or if they voluteered to go to the blackboard when they were students. In my day, we were the kinds of people who started underground newspapers, or who volunteered for the student radio station at college.
I've had an About page for many years. Here's the one before this.
I always like to say what my mottos are on this page. So you know when I use them in a post it's not something casual. I'll try to list them all eventually. I know -- good luck with that! :-)
My favorite mottos, slogans and ideas
We make shitty software, with bugs!
People return to places that send them away.
It's even worse than it appears.
Still diggin.
Let's have fun!
Only steal from the best.
Narrate your work.
Sources go direct.
Tim Berners-Lee for HTML and HTTP.
Chuck Shotton for teaching me how to write an HTTP server.
Adam Curry for giving me the basic idea of podcasting.
Jean-Louis Gassee for all his wisdom and slogans.
Marc Canter for being the Father of Multimedia.
John Palfrey for giving RSS 2.0 a good home at Berkman Center.
Martin Nisenholtz for letting me have the NY Times feeds.
Jay Rosen for teaching us about the Voice from Nowhere. (And authority.)
Doc Searls for being an outliner extraordinaire.
John Doerr and Gordon Eubanks for buying my first company and freeing me up to make software. (I was never meant to be a company exec.)
Guy Kawasaki for seeing Bullet Charts in my humble outliner.
Steve Jobs for "insanely great" shit like the Apple II, AppleTalk, Mac, iEverything.
Woz for the Apple II programming model, his humor, and love of freedom. It's important for techies to get that we make tools for free expression.
John Lennon for imagining peace and love and Paul McCartney for great music. This duality keeps showing up in the creative world. A person with something to prove and a partner who writes great songs.
NakedJen for being a paradox and bundle of joy in a small package with a huge spirit.
Doug Engelbart for envisioning almost everything I've spent my life creating.
Ted Nelson for writing the anthem for my generation of developers.
Coach Walsh for applying the scientific method to football.
Richard Stallman for telling it like it is.
My father for loving outlines. "Every day is father's day," he would say.
My mother for being a natural-born blogger.
The second OPML Editor community, and all previous instances of Frontier and ThinkTank communities (so many of them). This project has been going for a very long time.
Still diggin!
With the new static sites feature in Amazon S3, it should now be possible to host scripting.com in an S3 bucket.
This is my first project of the new year. We hope. Knock wood. :-)
I have a script that will upload all the files from scripting.com, some dating back to 1994, to the bucket.
I would like to, if possible, preserve the creation and mod dates on the files. Through all the transitions over all the years, I have managed to do that because my scripts have been careful to transfer this metadata along with the actual data.
Now I'm trying to figure out if this is possible with S3. I see how you can associate metadata with a file as you upload it. However I don't see a way to transfer the modification and creation dates. If anyone has a clue, the help would be much appreciated.
PS: I know scripting.com is down for most people now. Unfortunately this transition has not been without glitches. And there are broken images too! Still diggin.
A friend who is a reporter sent an email saying they're looking for New Year resolutions from people in NY and in tech. Arrgh, I groaned out loud. I'll never come up with anything. So I put it out of my mind.
Then trolling Twitter thinking about doing something fun with a couple of hours free time this morning, I came across a tweet from Paul Ford, a New York tech guy who also happens to be an excellent published writer. He also makes a living writing docs about XML and scripting, and other technical topics. He occupies a unique cell in my brain. A techie who is also literate.
Every time his name pops up in my feed I think -- Man I wish there was a project I could do with this guy. Then I thought back to the question my reporter friend asked. And I had my opportunity.
Thus, my resolution for the New Year is: I will do what I can to make tech writing more literate.
Silicon Valley is an idea that represents an industry, analogous to Hollywood, Wall Street, MSM, academia.
Sometimes these concepts are geographic, sometimes the geography is totally symbolic. For example, there are people who are definitely part of Silicon Valley who live and work in New York. And there are people in New York also who are part of Hollywood.
Saying Silicon Valley thinks college is a waste is like saying Hollywood is fighting piracy. Or Wall Street supported Romney in 2012. Believe it or not I am part of Silicon Valley, and I sure don't agree with the idea that college is irrelevant, so it's not an absolute or unanimous thing.
We say things like this all the time, often to explain what we don't agree with. It doesn't make sense to spend a few paragraphs stating exactly what all the people in tech think in all its variants. Even if Paul Graham hasn't heard that Silicon Valley thinks college is a waste, the students have. I went to his Startup School and talked with a few of them. I worked at NYU for a couple of years, and saw all the energy drawing students out of school and into startups. That pull totally came from tech. The students hear it even if Peter Thiel is saying something subtly different.
So that's what I wanted to respond to. And I think I wrote a pretty good essay. It's certainly resonated with a few people (except in PG's backyard). I believe there's something there.
Silicon Valley is wrong about college
Lately I've been thinking a lot about startup culture, and am reminded of its nobility -- having started three companies in my career, and learned from each experience, and even occasionally made some money. I'm more positive on startups these days than I have been in a while.
I have experience as an entrepreneur, but I also have an education. For me, it was a rough path. I dropped out, briefly, in high school. Got a chance to reboot my education, which was something I really needed to do. I had a professor in my freshman year of college who showed me that my mind could do math. And from there, I took charge. With mixed results. But at the end of the mess, I was educated. Not just in science and technology, but also in art, music, history, economics and literature. There were a few things I wish they had required I learn: accounting and psychology, foremost, so I wouldn't have been so scared of taxes and sex. But on the whole I think I got a pretty good deal.
Nowadays Silicon Valley says that college education is a waste. This idea has spread to academia too. They're trying to make the experience more relevant to entrepreneurs and their investors. I've heard it said at Harvard that they want to participate in the success of the next Gates and Zuckerberg, both Harvard dropouts. I find this disturbing. I want them to educate better citizens, not richer business people. If they happen to be better citizens and rich, all the better. But first comes the person, not the bank account.
I don't think Gates and Zuckerberg are good role models for young people. And not just because they dropped out. It's more subtle. Most kids who try to be the next billionaire entrepreneur will fail. There probably isn't even one such success in the class of 2013. So most will be disappointed. And if we push the kids toward that, we will lead them to believe, mistakenly, that it's enough to create a massive fortune. It is not enough. And if they fail to create the fortune, according to this standard, they will have failed in life. So, not only will we have set this generation up to fail, but we have just certified the mistake of past generations, that wealth itself has meaning. It has a lot less meaning, imho, than most people think.
When you look at the problems our democracy has, probably the biggest one is the "low information voter." The ignorant electorate that says they want government out of our lives, but keep your hands off Medicare and Social Security, for example. We should strive not to create better billionaires, we should set our sights higher -- to create better voters. I'm not saying they should vote the way I want them to. I don't vote the same way I did 20 years ago. We should however vote with a purpose. Not for style or appearance. For what's good for ourselves and for the country.
The education process could work better, so let's make it work better. But before you throw it out, think clearly and seriously about what we depend on it for.
Update: There's a Hacker News thread on this piece.
What could be bad about a movie starring Matt Damon and Frances McDormand, that was written by Damon and directed by Gus Van Sant? What could be bad? Just about everything. :-(
There were two jokes in the movie. The first one they spoiled in the movie itself, and the second was in the trailer. The one Damon told had Damon's charm. Both appear in the first ten minutes of the movie.
After that it was all downhill.
The plot was taken out of the Handbook of Hollywood Scripts and then twisted so it made no sense. In other words they couldn't even get the standard plot right.
The plot: Corporate asshole falls in love, finds he has a conscience, struggles, decides to do the right thing, gets the girl.
The plot: Jerry Maguire, which I really loved, however with none of its charm, or coherence. Or Renee or Cuba. :-)
However, this time the reviewers got it right.
I don't understand how a movie can suck as much as this one did.
They had a great idea -- let's expose fracking -- something that's very important. That, and $9 billion corporations suck the life out of people and communities. And if you want to show us how, great -- but they didn't.
There were two people conversing loudly during the coming attractions, and I was thinking Oh this is going to suck. After the first half hour of the movie I thought they were more interesting than the movie.
My eyes were rolling so often I just decided it would be simpler to leave them permanently rolled. They are rolled right now in fact.
In case it isn't completely obvious: Skip this one.
PS: It did have a great poster. Probably why I was suckered into seeing the movie.
According to a post late last night by Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, and an email they sent to all AWS users just now, and a walkthrough on the AWS site, they appear to have finished the implementation of static websites on S3. I'm going to check that out right now and report back.
The problem was in the past you could only map a CNAME to a bucket, not the domain itself. This is because of a limit in the DNS system. They appear to have implemented a non-standard (and appreciated!) alias feature in their Route 53 DNS service, which many of us use.
What's not clear in the docs is if a request from mydomain.com is
1. Redirected to www.mydomain.com or
2. If the user of your site simply sees the content as residing at mydomain.com.
To some this may seem picky, but I won't be using the feature if it's #1, because I think it's just plain wrong to waste four characters at the beginning of a web URL. I'm a member of the No-WWW movement. I would rather pay the extra money for a host than have readers of scripting.com be redirected to www.scripting.com. However if the distinction is tranparent to users, then I'll use it, but hope that next year they get rid of this limit.
Cliff Notes version of the walkthrough
Their walkthrough is very verbose. I'm going to do the Cliff Notes version here.
1. Register a domain and set it up so it's managed by Route 53. For my demo, the domain is bloatware.org. It's a real domain, with a placeholder home page currently being served by other software. If this goes well it will be hosted in an S3 bucket.
2. Create an S3 bucket for the domain. Screen shot.
3. Upload the website. In this case, I just have an index.html file with an image on it. Screen shot.
4. You have to add a "bucket policy." Follow the instructions in step 4 of this howto I did a couple of years ago.
5. Next, configure your bucket for website hosting. Click on its name in the left panel, and then click on Properties at the top of the right panel, and then Static Website Hosting below that in the right panel. You should get a display that looks like this screen shot. Important, copy the endpoint because you'll probably need it in the next step. (We hope.)
bloatware.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
6. Finally, go to Route 53, and set it up so it's hosting your domain. For that you can refer to the Amazon docs. But the key new feature is the ability to make the root name a CNAME that's an alias. I just guessed how to do it (the docs are too complex to follow) and it worked! Hey they did it right. Yehi. ;-)
They did it the right way, #2 above. I can host scripting.com in a bucket and the user will not see www.scripting.com. You can redirect from www.scripting.com to scripting.com any way you wish, you don't have to use Amazon's method. That's why the docs are so confusing, they assume you need to use their software to do the redirect.
Now that they have this wonderful feature, it would be nice if they increased the per-user limit on buckets from 100 to something more reasonable, perhaps 10000. :-)
Or maybe no limit at all. It would be great to set up a hosting service based on this feature, and the arcane process of setting it up. It could be very useful, for example, to Dropbox users. But with a limit on the number of buckets, and buckets being the basic unit of this feature, it's impossible to set such a service up.
Gives Werner something to ask for next year? :-)
This is something I do at the end of every year, at least for the last five years or so.
I try to pick one person who exemplifies the blogging spirit, which is a multi-faceted thing. So each year there's been one face we take a look at. In the past we've looked at Joel Spolsky, NakedJen, Jay Rosen, Julian Assange and Seth Godin.
These days I start thinking about BOTY in the summer. I know no one is waiting to hear who won, but it's an important process for me, because it helps me understand what blogging is and isn't. And this year's decision came down to two people, and in the decision is some truth about what blogging is, I hope.
First, I thought it should be Nate Silver, who is most certainly a blogger, even though his writing now appears on nytimes.com. I thought it would be a good idea to say that blogging can take place even at a famous newspaper, even by someone who is paid to blog. Blogging isn't always an amateur thing, even though I strongly associate the word with the deed. Amateur means it's done for love, not money. Good blogging is amateur. But then so is good everything, pretty much. I don't really care how much money you made writing that book or movie script. I care about what it evoked for me, what you said, what it proved. On those grounds Nate Silver certainly belongs in the BOTY seat for this year. He proved that an individual with his brain and beliefs can conquer all the paid pundits the pros can muster. Politically and spiritually Nate is a carrier of The Cause. Believe your eyes and ears, and your mind, not conventional wisdom. But in the end, I believe his accomplishments in 2012 were not about his blogging. The blogging was a means to a different end. If there's an award for statistical modeler of the year, that award should go to Nate, without contest.
My choice for BOTY is someone you might not have heard of, unless you were a techie in the early days of the web. If so, then you defintely know Philip Greenspun. He was a blogger before there were blogs, writing his own web CMS so he could tell the stories of his photography, flying, his beautiful dog, teaching at MIT, and his startup. It was when he wrote about the startup that he caught my attention. I remember reading the story of the people, his mistakes with investors, what he learned. Oh man, this guy is a blogger, for sure! But he wasn't writing on an official blog. Yet.
At the time I said: "I think we're really onto something here. The people are doing their own press, and doing it damned well. Thanks to Philip Greenspun for showing us how it's done, and thanks for the courage to state your case so clearly. Amateur journalism at its best."
That came later when we started a blogging server at Berkman Center in 2003. It was probably at one of his Sunday afternoon parties in his Cambridge apartment when I said he should get a blog on our server. He did, and it's still there, and he's still writing. And it's great stuff. When a Greenspun post appears in my river, I post it to my linkblog to be sure I read it. His politics and mine are almost 180 degrees opposed, but he's still a read, because you can see how a brilliant mind can take the same facts, and get to a totally different destination. And when it comes to aviation, or any of the practical subjects he writes about, there's always a lot of wisdom, and entertainment, in a Greenspun post.
This is what I meant by the unedited voice of a person. That's what a blog is. That's all you have to do to be a blogger. But to be a great blogger, you must have something to say. That's Greenspun, for sure.
Someone should report weather news the way other news is reported.
I said this in a variety of ways on Twitter yesterday, as a blizzard was working its way through the midwestern US, and got back pointers to regional feeds. I could follow the weather in the midwest. Yes, I knew that. I already follow the weather for NYC, and for a few other parts of the country, but I'm looking for something different.
An example. The NYT has a feed for International News. One for Sports News. One for baseball and one for basketball. But they don't seem to have one for weather. The basketball feed has news about basketball where ever it happens. Not just for the NY-area teams. I would like to follow weather the same way. Yes, I have a particular interest in some areas. But I have a general interest in weather.
There are probably other areas that we're not covering very well from a news standpoint, but right now weather seems to be the most glaring. Yes I know about wunderground.com. It's not what I'm talking about. It's reallly simple. News. About. Weather. No matter where it happens.
It should be written like news, not like a meteorologist's report. I am not a meteorologist.
You'd think weather.com would do this, but they don't.
As someone who enjoys walking in New York, as many NYers do, I thought to take a walk relatively early yesterday. It was crisp, in the low 30s. Not windy. And it's Christmas Eve so I figured the sidewalks would be pretty empty. They were. However, that didn't mean that people talking on phones or reading/sending texts were paying any more attention than usual. If anything, they took license to occupy even more of the sidewalk.
They can be pretty difficult to avoid. I think this is because we have an inner mechanism that draws us to other people. Or maybe it's my personal energy. I'm walking toward someone whose eyes are looking into their device. I move a little to the left, they move to their right. Okay, let's try it the other way. No luck, they match my move. I end up stopping a foot in front of them as they walk into me. I don't want anyone to say that I walked into them. They're usually not pissed. I guess they're accustomed to finding themselves in this position?
I'm old fashioned. When I want to check for messages on one of my many devices (doesn't matter which, they're all synched), I generally pull off to the side and stop. In winter, I have to take off my gloves. And I'm just not fast or agile enough (fat fingers, fuzzy vision) to do this while walking. I'm also afraid that I'll end up walking into a city bus, which might have a rude effect on my future existence. :-)
A story I've told many times. I lived in Florida for a few months in 2005. I wanted to try living on the beach, and I had family in the area, so this made sense as a place to try out. In this part of Florida, you can drive on the beach, which goes for miles, between inlets on the intercoastal waterway. This stretch of beach was about 10 miles long, and except for a town in the middle of it, mostly empty. One morning I decided to take my swim via car. I drove a couple of miles south, on a stretch of beach that was totally empty. I laid out the towel, read for a while, then went for my swim. When I came back, there was another car parked next to mine. The people were gone, so I couldn't ask them why they chose that spot, when there were so many other places to stop that were totally secluded.
Yes I am old fashioned. I still think it's hilarious to see a person walking down the street talking to no one. Hands waving wildly. I try to imagine my grandfather, who died long before this became a common sight, trying to figure it out. "David, vat ist dis?" he might have asked.
When you get the idea that things will always be the way they are now, remember that not long ago people thought there was something special about printed magazines. Then go look at a magazine rack, if you can find one. Someday, not too many years from now, you'll mention the idea of a printed magazine, and a young person will have no idea what you're talking about.
I was chatting with a friend the other day about using my outliner to write email, and later it struck me, why not?
So I wrote a script that took an outline and rendered it as if it were on a web page and then emailed it to myself.
When I opened it in GMail, not surprisingly, all the text was there, but the Javascript and most of the CSS had apparently been stripped.
This led me to wonder if there's anything like a standard or best-practices document that says what email clients typically do with emails that have script and style?
BTW, here's the text I actually sent, and a screen shot of the email. The wedges don't do anything when you click on them in the email.
People don't listen when you say something bad will happen
I went to college in New Orleans, so over the years I've paid attention when scientists said that it was certain at some point that a storm would cause the levees to fail. I also heard about what happened historically when the levees failed in other parts of Louisiana.
All this information was available to anyone who lived in New Orleans. Yet, after Katrina, amazingly, people were angry that no one told them this was going to happen.
Again, with global warming, on a much larger scale, the information about what's coming is available to anyone. But many people push it away. It's too heavy to really contemplate. We all have problems in our own lives, things to worry about on a much smaller scale, to really be able to incorporate the kinds of changes such disasters will bring about into our thinking.
With that as background, I highly recommend reading this article in the NY Times about what's happening in the Antarctic.
Pick#1: Omer Asik - Houston Rockets
Pick#2: Kevin Durant - Oklahoma City Thunder
Pick#3: Chandler Parsons - Houston Rockets
Pick#4: James Harden - Houston Rockets
Pick#5: Jeremy Lin - Houston Rockets
Pick#6: Carmelo Anthony - New York Knicks
Pick#7: LeBron James - Miami Heat
Pick#8: Tyson Chandler - New York Knicks
Pick#9: Deron Williams - Brooklyn Nets
Pick#10: Raymond Felton - New York Knicks
You can vote too. :-)
Anyone who's trying to create a platform should keep this in their mind when making decisions about which way to go. The point of making a platform is to encapsulate something that you've finally figured out how to simplify. Then you put the complex stuff behind an interface, and it becomes easy.
I like to visualize a very huge ball at the end of a very long chain. I have it between my index finger and thumb, and with the least effort possible I should be able to make the ball swing as fast as I want in exactly the direction I want it to go. That's my idea of power.
There's a huge opportunity to simplify now that the web browser is being used as an application environment. We're pushing the envelope now further than we did in the age of desktop applications. But we've already simplified that once before, as the desktop platform matured. So I don't have any doubt that the simplification of the browser programming environment is coming. It will happen because it is happening. ;-)
Things we need all the time are getting simplified, factored -- and standards are emerging. jQuery, for sure that's a standard. And more and more so is Bootstrap Toolkit. But it can get simplified further. What we're doing now is exactly what we did in the early-mid 80s as we went from character-based apps to graphic apps. We know how to simplify here. And Bootstrap is very much on the path.
When I build in Bootstrap I have to worry much less about whether it will run in all browsers. And browser-makers should be sure they don't break Bootstrap apps or jQuery apps. The platform is being elevated. And the stuff that should be easy is becoming easy.
I got my new iMac on Monday, and immediately switched out the old one after doing the hot-copy upgrade, which is fantastic. Probably the nicest thing that Apple does. Of course it makes it easier for you to give them money too, but wtf.
It is really fast. This is important because I like to run a lot of bloatware, concurrently. More speed is goodness. It means I can keep more balls in the air.
It's more beautiful. The screen is brighter, clearer, just qualitatively superior to the previous iMac.
They keep moving parts that shouldn't move.
They keep changing the plugs in the back. So old devices stop working because there's no more Firewire on the thing, for example.
The keyboard has the Control key in a different place. This meant that for the first few days I can't type quickly, everything has to slow. down. so. I. can. be. sure. my. fingers. are properly. positioned. over. the. right. keys. Try typing with a period after every word and you'll get a good idea what the re-learning experience is like. And what will it be like when I go back to the MacBook Air, which I still use when traveling? I'll let you know.
A few pieces of software I depend on required upgrades to run on the new OS. One of them wasn't free, VMWare, which charged $45 for the upgrade. Not sure if I get any features I need for this, but it does work on the new OS.
They fucking changed the way fucking scrollbars work. That would be a glitch. But the travesty is that there are things you can't do on the new scrollbars that you can do on the old ones.
I am a serious professional computer user. This would be like Fender moving around the frets on a Telecaster. Or the knob that adjusts the pitch of one of the strings. Maybe I can adjust by composing my song in a different key, but tell me, what the fuck were you thinking when you did this, Apple??
I'll forget eventually what bullshit this was. That's why I have to write this review now, to vent the sputum they added to what otherwise would have been a mostly-lovely experience, for which, btw, I paid $2500.
Share your large Twitter archive?
Here are the archives, uploaded to static.scripting.com, a bucket on Amazon S3.
@adactio -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@ahynes1 -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@alecperkins -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@dino8352 -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@gartenberg -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@ijohnpederson -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@knunez -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@mathewi -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
@sarahbourne -- the HTML view, and the zip archive.
1. Has Twitter enabled your ability to download your archive?
2. Have you actually downloaded your archive?
3. Have you been using Twitter for two or more years?
4. Have you been steadily posting to Twitter?
5. Do you have more than a few thousand tweets in your archive?
6. Are you willing to make your archive publicly available?
If we had one of these archives to play with we could start developing software tools right away.
So, if the answer to all these questions is yes, especially #6, could you email your zip file to dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Important: I will upload your archive and link to it from Scripting News so any developer can experiment with it. It will become public. On the other hand, you might become famous. :-)
Please help the developers get started now creating interesting stuff with this new flow.
Sometime early in the boot-up of the blogosphere, April Fools became an odd tradition. People would put up stories that were intended to fool readers into believe something that wasn't true. I did it once or twice myself, but came to believe it was a bad idea. Instead I celebrated the birth of my blog on that day. It gave me an excuse to not participate.
Here's how I see it. One of two things happens:
1. Your prank is obvious, no one is fooled. Or
2. You pull it off. People are fooled into believing you.
You lose in either case. In #1 obviously you look bad. And in #2, you convince people you most want to trust you, to not trust you. It's like deliberate failure, on your mission. Analogously, it would be like a bus driver deliberately taking you somewhere that isn't on his route. Or a street cleaner dumping garbage on the street. Or a teacher telling you something he or she knows is false. It's not just bad, it's very bad. It undermines what you do.
This came up today when a blogger who I've followed on Twitter for a long time posted an item saying that Twitter had added the ability to edit a tweet. It looked like he was reporting a news event that's very significant. And since he covers Twitter itself, he's exactly the kind of guy I'd hope would break this big story.
All kinds of thoughts ran through my head after I RTd it. Would the press credit him with the discovery? So often they don't recognize news until a big publication reports it. This guy is an individual blogger, but one who I respect. I hoped that he would get credit.
A couple of hours later, when I had a moment I looked around to see if anyone else was reporting it. I looked for the command to edit a tweet. Didn't find it. I guessed that they hadn't turned the feature on for me yet. This makes new Twitter features particularly confusing to report. You often have to try to interpret other people's view of the feature, if you weren't randomly chosen as one of the first to get the feature.
I then responded to his tweet, asking where the feature was. I saw that others had responded the same. We all took his tweet at face value. Wanted to know more about it. One person commented that Tweetbot would have to add the feature.
I then checked my DMs. There was a message there from him saying it was a joke, and he was sorry for the misunderstanding.
BTW, apparently he deleted the original message, so I can't point to it.
Something I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.
The way Twitter packaged up the archives that people are starting to download enables new kinds of apps to be developed. That's because the data files are distributed in a very software-readable format called JSON.
It will be possible to make all kinds of interesting tweet-browsers without hitting any rate limits, because you won't have to access twitter.com to get at all your tweets.
One thing they haven't said is how frequently they will allow people to download their archives. Once a week? Once a month? Or is it a one-time thing?
But this is important. It will make a pretty substantial difference in the tech market, imho.
If I had access to my own archive I would start playing with this right away.
And some people like to cook for themselves.
And sometimes people who cook for themselves like to eat out, and vice versa.
So I use Flickr even though I could program my own photos site, and have. I find it convenient to use their front-end. But I don't have to. If I needed to cook my own meal, I would. I did.
Everyone always thinks the last turn of the cycle in tech was the first and the last time around the loop. It might be the last but it sure isn't the first.
For Marc Andreessen, who Felix Salmon quotes in this piece, the first wave of the web was his first tech experience. And it made him a billionaire and launched a fantastic career as an investor and tech iconoclast.
For me, it was my third time around the loop (I'm a generation older than Andreessen), but I didn't make nearly as much money as he did, nor was I trying to. For me, the web was creative liberation. Seriously. I had given up on making software because everything was so jammed up and ugly in the tech world. The web freed up everything. We could create again, because I could set up my own net that no one owned but me. I didn't have to get anyone's approval to play with servers. I needed that to be creative.
Imagine if Jackson Pollock had to convince a big company that his art was worth making. That's why when everything is controlled by companies, we get stagnation.
Being creative with tech is not for everyone, but so what. It mattered to me that I could be free. Obviously freedom doesn't matter to everyone. And it was and is available to anyone who wants it and had the patience to keep it going.
And freedom matters to me in some activities and not in others. I feel no need to be free in creating new kinds of car engines. Or creating new paintings or works of music. There, I prefer the AOL/Facebook type of experience. I like going to art museums and Broadway plays, and to drive a fine car made by a big company I trust. But for me, I will always, till the day I die, want to run my own servers. Because that's where I choose to be creative. And if I let other people do it, there would be unacceptable limits on my creativity.
And I depend on the fact that people who create in other artisitic areas are free to do so. Who would want to see an endless stream of idiotic movies programmed for LCD intellect and emotional maturity. You see the problem, it is possible for us to die as a culture. It's happened before. But the human spirit is pretty strong. And there will be someone forcing the question of how to create, as long as there are new ideas to explore. It's never been an easy sell that this kind of creativity applies to tech, but it does.
If you've only seen one turn of the wheel, it must be hard to extrapolate that because there were turns before yours that it's likely there will be more to come. I don't have any trouble imagining it because I've seen it, I've lived it.
I don't say Andreessen is wrong, from his point of view the web never really was that wonderful. I accept his version of the truth, as his. But it's not mine. For me, the web was, and continues to be, liberating.
We're all like the blind men and the elephant. Salmon sees the web as broken, as do the others he quotes. But I see it as liberating. We're all just reporting on the color of the lenses in our glasses. (And btw, all this discourse is happening on the web.)
That's what the change in terms says.
If you're using Instagram and in any way care about your creative work, or what your word means, you're an idiot to keep using it.
Now, there are a lot of idiots out there.
Me, I always prefer to make tools for the smartest people.
Schnooks are welcome to use my competitors' products. :-)
Just a quick comment about all the discourse going on in the press about torture in the new movie Zero Dark Thirty. It's very angering because I haven't seen the movie. Yet the pundits are discussing it, with lots of spoilers, in places where I can't miss it.
Okay, I live in NYC and it's opening here tomorrow. For three days, and then it goes away. When will it come back? They don't say. I have a funny feeling it's only opening so it can be up for the awards for 2012. And the pundits go on talking about it as if the movie is available to everyone.
This system is going to end, hopefully soon. Let the movies open when they open, and everyone gets to see them at the same time. I don't think there's any special wisdom with the reviewers. They all liked a really shit movie, the latest Bond -- Skyfall. Why? It's so much better than the previous Bond film. Wow. That must have been one seriously awful movie. (I didn't see it.)
It's even more aggravating given the totally aggressive way Bigelow, the director of the movie, went after piracy for her last Oscar winner, Hurt Locker. On the other hand this movie is supposed to be seriously great. I'm going to see it tomorrow, even if I have to stand in a long line at the theater.
Could we make Flickr into Twitter?
A thought just popped into my head when Peter Rojas friended me on Flickr.
I wondered what if we used Flickr's API to implement a message system that worked like Twitter, with a timeline, and of course great picture support. Does the API have enough juice to do it?
I think a lot of it would depend on how much of a moving target the API is. If it's not moving, at least for a couple of years, it might just work.
I've said it many times in the last few days, but it bears repeating. The thing that makes Flickr so interesting is its broad and stable API.
Why is Twitter letting us export?
With all the crazyness about Instagram and how they own your pictures (not mine, I never used the service) it raises the question as to why Twitter is letting us export our tweets now? You don't see how they're connected? Read on...
Instagram's answer for those people who don't like it is this -- opt-out. You can download all your content, close your account, and we won't own anything. They're banking on the assumption that most people aren't paying attention, don't understand, or don't care if they use their picture of their beloved Aunt Amy to advertise a brand of cookies that caused her demise. There are some truly bizarre possibilities.
So maybe Twitter wants to use our pictures that way too -- esp since they now have access to all the pictures we post from other services, the ones who support the Twitter Cards API. Which of course until last week included (tah dahh) Instagram.
The order in which things come public isn't necessarily the order they became known to the companies pulling the strings. It's quite possible Instagram gave Twitter a heads-up about the licensing change, and that Twitter told them to cut the cord, before dragging them into the mess. Or whatever. You just can't know what they're telling each other behind the scenes.
So back to the question raised in the title.
Maybe Twitter is letting us export because something bad is coming that they want to be able to offer an export-to-opt-out feature like the one Instagram is offering. A change in TOS that will be so unpalatable that if there was no way out, the FTC would stop the change (and rightly so).
Maybe it's just Twitter being good guys. Wanting us to feel good about them, and maybe even wanting to enable new applications, which the JSON-based archive certainly does. Unless of course there are onerous licensing terms lurking in here somewhere. ;-)
One more thing. To publishers who act as if Twitter, Facebook, etc are part of the open Internet, maybe now you're getting the idea that this is not true. These are corporations who think and act just like you do. They are very likely future competitors of yours. And if you don't think of them that way, at least as a possibility, you stand to lose, big.
Ask not what the Internet can do for you...…