Friday, November 06, 2009
I thought perhaps the Peek email device might be a good service to get for a family member who's not very technical. I wanted them to have access to text messaging, and thought its advertised simplicity might be the answer. So I bought a device for $49 and bought one month of service for $19.95, with the understanding that it's not a service plan, and if I didn't like it, I could easily opt-out.
I used it for a few days and decided it wasn't what I wanted. It is simple, but the text messaging feature is a hack on top of email, and they put ads for their service in the text messages, and texting is more or less one-way, and it's the wrong way for my application. It's easy for the Peek user to send text messages but virtually impossible for them to receive them. This didn't suit the application I had in mind, because I wanted the ability to send messages to the family member. I didn't think she'd be sending many on her own (she doesn't now).
So I decided to opt out. There's no way to do it from the website. They don't explain how to opt out the FAQ. When I called the sales department, they said I could turn the service off, but I wouldn't be able to use the remaining time on the month worth of service I had already purchased. I said that's unacceptable. I wanted to get off the monthly plan and use the remainder of the time I had already purchased. (Maybe I'd find another use for it?)
After a lot of back and forth, the service person, Jacqueline, said I should get in touch with the operations manager, David Hung. I'm going to email him a pointer to this blog post.
Net-net, Peek is an attractive device, the service works reasonably well for email, but not for texting. It is simple to set up and use. However they don't make it easy to get out. At this point, I'm still going to charged for $19.95 on December 2. They'll probably do what I asked after reading this blog post, but you shouldn't have to write a blog post for what should be a routine matter. It should be easy to turn the automatic renewal off and on as you wish.
I had to do it. Went down to the Verizon store in El Cerrito and put down $350 and bought the $99 per month unlimited texting plan. Took it home, fell in love. It really is beautiful. I'm an iPhone user who loves the esthetics of the iPhone. The DROID is different, but also very nice.
I'm sure there will be annoyances, always are, but the first-time experience is great.
The web browser display is large enough to be usable. The gestures that work on the iPhone don't work on the DROID.
I find both the on-screen keyboard and the physical keyboard hard to use. The keys are too small.
Oddly, when entering text into Facebook or an email, typing is natural and easy. It's only a pain when entering a username or password. I wonder why this is. (Probably has more to do with the operator than anything.)
The setting system makes sense. There are a few puzzlers. It allows you to format an SD card, but I don't see one. I've read the docs, very limited, but they make no mention of it.
They just sent me a text message asking me to sign onto their website, but the password doesn't work. Tried 8 times. Asked them to send a new one, they sent the same one again. I'll come back to this.
Took some pictures with the camera. Example.
Can't figure out how to get some music onto it. Plugged in the USB cable into my Mac but it doesn't mount as a hard drive. Don't tell me I need to use iTunes -- please!
Update: Quick podcast review, recorded on the DROID speaker phone using Cinch. A little baseball philosophy thrown in at no extra cost! 
Update: How do I get music on this thing? Tried something dumb, after mounting it on my Mac desktop, I copied the contents of a Little Feat album into a folder I named Music. Let's see if the Music app on the Droid can find it. I launch the Music app and it says Sorry, your SD card is busy. Interesting! Let me try unmounting it. I had to click in the menubar to unmount it, and then boom (sorry Steve) the music app found my Little Feat songs. This is how it's supposed to work. Goodbye iTunes. Forever.
Update: It plays iPod-size movies, just watched a bit of fargo.m4v. Looks great.
Imagine a terminal program that accepted commands like:
twitter> follow davewiner
twitter> follow ev
twitter> unfollow sexygirl209
twitter> addtolist scoble halfmoonbay -u
The first few commands are obvious, the last would add scoble to a list called halfmoonbay and unfollow him.
I stumbled across this as I was thinking about how to implement follow and unfollow commands in listbrowser.org. Usually this would mean supporting OAuth, which is not a big deal, I already have the code, but it's a pain for users. Another site they have to trust. Even though OAuth is better than giving away my password, it's not much better.
Then I thought how nice it is for a developer to just be able to shoot the text of a tweet over at the status box on Twitter, where the user is already logged-in. But that just works for tweets. What about follow and unfollow, and list operations? And a myriad of other chores that now you can do either interactively or through the API.
Why not have something in the middle, more techy than the point and click interface, but easier than the API. We already have an idea how that works -- it's a command-line interface.
To be clear, there are already command-line interfaces for Twitter, but they run on the desktop. We need a CLI that runs as a web app from a public server. It could come from Twitter, Inc, or could be done by a developer. If there's more than one, it would be nice if they used the same syntax.
If you're already working on this, post a note in the comments or send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com.
Joseph Scott has a post on the main WordPress site that explains that they are now supporting the two enhancements that were announced here on October 16.
What this means: Now any aggregator that wants instant updates of WordPress sites can have it. It was an issue for complex sites like Google Reader, that's why we enhanced our apps, so they could hook into rssCloud and provide instant updates to their users. If you use Google Reader or My Yahoo or Bloglines, tell them you want rssCloud support so you can get instant WordPress updates from sites like CNN, TechCrunch, GigaOm (and of course) Scripting News!
WordPress also fixed a problem that could prevent RSS feeds from reflecting the change immediately. That was a problem because sometimes we'd receive notification that a feed had changed, and then would go read the feed only to find that it hadn't!
Many thanks, once again, to the great people at Automattic.
I have a problem with entrepreneurs who say they want to Change The World.
Isn't that a lot to take on? How do you know your idea for changing the world is what the world needs? What if you Change The World and instead of making it better you make it suck. What then?
I am a former young person who wanted to Change The World himself. I look back at that young person, and think -- he was lovely in many ways but he made a pretty good mess of his life, because he had no clue who he was and how he got that way. Change The World? Good thing that didn't happen!
As someone who just watched his father die, I don't think any of us have the first clue how the world works. My father was a smart man, spent a lot of time thinking, and at the end, he may have understood 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of how the world works. And some of that was based on faulty assumptions. Yet my father would always give a couple of bucks to anyone who asked for it. And if you wanted to take a picture of him, no matter how old or sick he got, he always put on a smile and let you take it, and if you asked why, he shrugged it off, as if there was any reason to care. A week before he died, I tried to teach him to use Twitter, but he said he didn't have time. He was right.
So I've recently seen the end. I don't think too many people get much further than my dad did. He lived to be 80, grew up in Europe, fled from a war, fought in a war, raised a family, was married 55 years, got an education, taught, went to museums and the ballet and opera, traveled everywhere, and I don't think he would have said, at the end, he had any idea how to Change The World. It's only youth that figures it knows, but that's because of strong chemicals and not knowing what you don't know. It's an illusion.
Change is made by all of us, over many generations. The best we can do is make a few other people happy for a while, make ourselves happy, and if you do that, and leave the place a little nicer for having been here, I say -- Job Well Done!
Maybe instead of changing the world, relax, and Let The World Change You. That's closer to what actually happens in life, no matter how rich or famous (or not) you are.
See also: Transcendental Money.
Here's the Suggested User List as a list.
http://twitter.com/davewiner/twitter-s-sul
How I produced it.
I created a fake account, gristmillie, visited the Suggested Users page, checked them all and followed them. Then, from my own account, I went to the page of people she follows, went through each one and checked it, adding it to my list.
A caveat, this will go out of date when they add more people to the list.
Here's the listbrowser.org rendering, and the OPML version.
A new feature of listbrowser.org.
When you're displaying a list, you'll see a white-on-orange XML icon at the bottom of the page, right next to the (also new) Refresh icon. Click the XML icon and you'll get an OPML rendering of the list. You should then be able to import that OPML into Google Reader or some other feed aggregator just like any other OPML file. What that means? Like everything related to Twitter lists, it's too early to tell. But one thing is for sure, you can now use Twitter to author OPML. That in itself is pretty new idea. (It's totally new.)
Here's a screen shot showing where the XML button is on my innovators list. This is the OPML version of that page.
BTW, one of the reasons the OPML Editor is called the OPML Editor is that you can enter that address in the Open URL dialog in the File menu and it'll open in the editor. This is a convenient way to create mashups of Twitter lists. At this point I haven't got a way to get OPML into Twitter, but you gotta figure that's coming.
I've got some more kickass features in the pipe. This is very very fertile ground.
PS: The Refresh button tells listbrowser.org to get the list from Twitter, instead of using the copy it has cached. Normally it'll reload on its own after an hour, but if you just made a change to a list and want listbrowser to reflect that, just hit the Refresh button when viewing the list.
I wanted a quick way to browse around to see what people are doing with the new Twitter lists feature. So I put this simple app together.
http://listbrowser.org/
If you want to jump into your own lists, or someone else's, just enter their username in the box below and click the Go button.
My hard drive has a top level, it's called Macintosh HD.
On PCs it's C:
Yahoo's home page is the root of its directory.
Suppose you were going to design a list browser for Twitter, one that would allow you to hop from list to user to their lists to other users and their lists and on and on.
Where would you begin?
There is clearly no top to this thing. Which imho is good, the same as the web. There is no Home Page, no place everyone starts. It's why the web is open and democratic and without a bottleneck and has no gatekeeper to keep you out. Hat's off to TBL for designing it that way.
That still leaves me with the problem...
Beginning with this morning's show, at 9AM Pacific...
The site is moving to wordpress.com.
The feed should continue to work, but you may find that all the posts are new again now that the guids have changed.
The feed is located here now.
http://rebootnews.com/feed/
It seems that WordPress does a redirect, automatically from rss.xml (the old location) to the new one.
The editorial system should work a lot better, and I hope more interesting discussions will evolve from each show.
Suppose there's a topic you're interested in and you want to stay current on it. What tool would you use to do that?
That's at least part of the purpose of the whole push to "realtime" stuff. I've been writing about it since 1997, I called it Just-In-Time Search. Similar ideas, but not exactly.
When you search for friends you always get the same old pictures, because the search engine reports them in order of relevance. Perhaps there are newer pictures, but they're nowhere near the top, and it might not even consider them relevant enough to index.
We need a search engine whose primary axis is currency, that values news and images based on their newness, not by how many others are pointing to it. Google has News Alerts, but that's it. Their news system is geared toward big stories. I'm interested in the small stuff their search engine covers. There's news there too.
Update: A commenter says that Google does have time-based search. I'll check it out.
First, thanks to Jeff Pulver for a fantastic conference earlier this week and thanks for letting me keynote it. Putting it in L.A., away from the distortion field of Silicon Valley, made it a lot more interesting and less of a festival of wiener-boys. I fell in love at least five times in 24 hours, that's pretty good. First time I spoke at a tech conference since LeWeb in 2007.
Technorati rolled out a new version and completely lost track of Scripting News, so I took its icon off the home page of the site. I used to check it every couple of days to see if it found anyone talking about something I wrote here. Nowadays it comes up with nothing. So goodbye Technorati.
I added links to my newest projects in the right sidebar. Makes them easier for us to find and of course adds juice to them in the search engines.
That's all!
Happy Halloween! (And Let's go Phillies. Teach the Yankees about philosophy.)
This began as a response to a comment left by Marshall Kirkpatrick to an earlier post of mine.
My belief is that it's content that drives the apps.
You need something or someone to go first. With RSS it was Wired, Red Herring, Motley Fool and Salon then the early blogs then the NY Times and it blasted off.
With podcasting it was IT Conversations, the Gillmor Gang, Morning Coffee Notes, Daily Sourcecode, the community, then NPR and it blasted off.
This confluence has not (yet) happened for directory structures. It's not immediately obvious who the big drivers are going to be, but if they're out there, the Twitter lists feature is getting them to think about this stuff. I don't doubt that OPML will be part of the bootstrap and that people will quickly want to make lists that include resources that are not (just) Twitter users or lists of Twitter users.
In other words, this is the most promising moment for OPML directories that's come so far.
So many things to say about where Twitter's lists point, the thing is, I've said them all already, many times over many years. There's a whole architecture already designed and deployed for lists and lists of lists. And they form directories that are much more open than the original Yahoo directory or DMOZ. I know everyone thinks DMOZ is the most open directory possible, but it's not.
The list structure of the Internet should be a open as the web. That is to say no one gives you permission to create a web page on any topic you like. So if you want to create a list of resources, that might include Twitter users, but might also include many other things, go ahead. Be the best you can be. You don't need anyone to let you do it.
If you're good, I might include your directory within mine, thereby delegating that topic to you. If something better comes along, I might unhook yours and replace it with theirs. Or I might get fancy and join yours with theirs, forming the sum of two lists.
If you want to see this working, here's a directory rendering of the archive of Scripting News. Look at the white-on-orange XML icons in the upper right corner. They, as always, link to the XML version of the rendering. In this case instead of being RSS, they are OPML. Every page has a way to suggest a link.
How do you edit these structures? In the OPML Editor of course. Here's a screenshot.
The OPML Editor allows you to build these attributed hierarchies but it also includes a full web server and CMS. And a lot more. And because it was built to run on the computers of the mid-90s, it's pretty fast on today's machines. The download is the size of an MP3. Takes a minute to install.
I may try one more time to push these ideas out there. It may finally be the time. If anyone wants to get something entrepreneurial going, I'm up for it. I'm not just doing this stuff out of the goodness of my heart.
Techies, read the OPML 2.0 spec to see how the pieces fit together. My software is all replaceable. The formats are open and lightweight. And there's some great connections to search engines possible. I pitched Google on this in 2002.
Once again the Bay Bridge is in the news, and this time it seems obvious it's going to be in the news for years to come. So, what to do?
http://baybridgeblog.com/
Start a blog, of course !
Okay things are getting interesting now that 50 percent of the Twitter users have the lists feature. And now it's getting pretty obvious that there are some serious omissions.
First the fun part.
I started a Twitter Babes list, but got really nervous about it, fearing backlash, so I deleted it and gave it some more thought. It came back to life as my Entourage list, very much gender-neutral, there are men and women on the list.
http://twitter.com/davewiner/entourage
These are people who I admire for their intellect, big heart, creativity, willingness to take a chance. Some I would trust my life with and others I'd trust my heart. They're good people to hang with. I don't agree with them all the time, I even compete with some of them. Some I don't know well but find interesting.
I'd love to say all this on the list, but there's no way to. That's feature #1. You must be able to explain what a list means. Even if it's only a link to a web page where you explain it.
A list is like a Twitter user. In fact some of my placeholder Twitter accounts will now go away. I no longer need the page of NY Times twitterers, or the Top 100, or even the Berkeley folk. So it makes sense that all the annotations, all the metadata that goes with a user, should also go with a list.
People are going to want a way to suggest a new addition to a list, and people with lists are going to want a way to have new additions suggested.
It should also be possible to include a list within another list. My friend Cori has a list of Bay Area people. She should be able to include my list of Berkeleyites, since Berkeley is in the Bay Area (of course). That way when I discover someone in Berkeley she automatically gets updated with that person.
All the ideas that we had for OPML directories apply to Twitter lists.
In fact there should be a way to export a list as OPML, and I think Twitter ought to do this, as a way to create systems that bridge in and out of Twitter hierarchies dynamically. Very powerful stuff. If they won't do it, I'm going to suggest that Matt get on top of this asap.
I'm doing so much stuff with WordPress these days, I'm starting to see it a bit as a platform the same way I view Twitter. I wonder if that's why Matt embraced rssCloud so quickly? Heh.
Anyway I have projects I'd like to try, but I'm really busy and probably won't get to them soon enough. If I were viewing lists as an entrepreneurial opportunity, the first place I'd explore is doing a list browser and editor, with a Suggest-A-User feature. If you want to start one of these, I'd be interested in participating, for equity.
BTW, lists are obvious gold for search engines.
It's been a long time since an operating system had a feature compelling enough for me to justify an upgrade. But last night I thought of one.
The web is totally getting reverse-chronologic and imho that's a good thing. It's becoming easy to find the new stuff everywhere. Everywhere but on my local area network, that is.
When something new arrives, a podcast or an enclosure, or I download a new app or a song or TV show, on any of my machines, I'd like it to roll up into a list that I can scroll through, and have a blog-like calendar structure that I can search.
That's all -- nothing more.
Also a follow-up to the post about the battery needs of my MacBook vs the Asus Eee PC. Jim Roepcke thinks it's somehow my fault that the MacBook either has a weaker battery or uses more juice. And that they decided it would be better if I couldn't buy a spare battery to travel with. I have no idea which it is and I don't care. I'm a user. He thinks it's the OPML Editor that's responsible for the disparity. But that's just plain wrong. I run exactly the same software on both the Mac and the Asus. Further, if you look at the performance monitor, Firefox is the hog, not the OPML Editor. It's generally using five or ten times the CPU that OPML is.
Another clue is that at the conference, the last row of the auditorium, the one with the power strips, was filled with Mac users. I didn't see a single netbook user back there. That's unscientific of course, but it was pretty shocking nonetheless. Traveling Mac users are drawn to power outlets much more than netbook users are. It's just a fact.
I think I'm going to do an A-B test. Put an Asus next to a MacBook, kill all the apps, unplug both, and see how long it is before each of them dies. That ought to put it to rest. (And don't forget that while the Mac is a nicer computer with a bigger screen and keyboard, it's also heavier and costs five times as much as the Asus. And it runs hotter too, your lap gets scorched using the Mac.)
Update: I see in his follow-up comment he thinks I'm sniping at Apple. That's nuts. I spent $1700 on the MacBook so I could snipe at Apple? I actually bought it because I hoped to take it on trips like the one I took to LA this week. It didn't work very well. You want I should say it did?
Interesting thread on FriendFeed about the next evolutionary step for C. I wrote a comment that I felt deserved to be elevated to a blog post.
Start by creating a really lightweight and easy to use development environment. I should be able to teach Jay Rosen to program in it. Back in the 80s there was serious competition in this area -- from Borland with Turbo Pascal and on the Mac, from Think Technologies with their C and Pascal systems.
The languages aren't the issue, at least not for me. I want to program in C again, but the curve is too steep in all the environments. Give me a Turbo tool and some nice libraries, and lets go!
Eric Schmidt says he can search real-time stuff, but how to do ranking?
Good question. Would have been easier had Twitter not polluted the follower-count measure of authority. But you can still do it by making it relevant on a personal level. Someone I follow is a lot more relevant than someone I don't. After that people who are followed by people I follow. That immediately cuts down the power of the super-elites with millions of followers (they tend not to follow many).
Google is onto it with their social search. I've been asking for that, but in a different form. I want to tell them that I'm the author of this blog. Now they know a lot more about what my interests are.
7/26/09: Two-way search.
So it would be nice if ranking were a personal thing. Keep going the way you're going Eric.
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.
