Friday, July 04, 2008
There's a new site on the net today:
http://tech.newsjunk.com/
It's the counterpart to the political NewsJunk, which is focused on news of the 2008 presidential campaign. The Tech site is focused on technology product news.
I created the site because I wasn't getting enough news about products. It's that simple. I'm interested in the other stuff too, the finance, trends, parties, puppets -- but that's adequately covered on TechMeme. What wasn't getting through is the stuff I, as a product developer, care the most about -- news about products. And the interesting new products I'd find wouldn't make it onto the bus. If it got bought by Google or Microsoft, that would likely show up on TM, or if a VC invested a lot of money in it. But I like to find out when things are small, before other people invest.
It's important to note that the Tech NewsJunk, like the political one, does not have original content, it just points to the sites that are producing the relevant stories.
I did it so I could learn, and in the spirit of the web of course I wanted to share and hopefully people will forward me links to product news that isn't already on TechJunk (please, no press releases) and even better, pointers to feeds of sites that regularly review products.
A couple of notes. I'm not just interested in new products, I'm also interested in how the products evolve. So if Flickr were to (for example) add a bunch of new features tomorrow, we would defintely link to that.
I also want to hear about products from the people who design and implement them. Their point of view is very important to not only understanding their work, but to understanding the market.
I expect and hope other people will compete with this site, so we can focus more attention on products, so maybe there will be more products that fit user's needs better.
Now, as with the political "junk" site, there are many ways to consume the flow.
1. The old-fashioned way -- you can refresh the site manually.
2. There's a feed, of course, for your reader, or aggregator, or whatever.
3. You can follow it on FriendFeed.
4. Or on Twitter.
5. Or read the mobile version on your iPhone or Blackberry.
And soon you will be able to follow it on identi.ca (as soon as we figure out how to do it). And there will also be an email interface.
PS: One of the great things about this site is that I learn which sites are providing the best product coverage. So far they are (in no special order): ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and Webware. This is just my opinion of course, and it could change. I wish some of the sites would cut down on the cuteness and add more hard info.
PPS: The counts page is getting interesting.
It's the day when we say we're not dependent on Great Britain.
Of course that part of the holiday long ago lost its meaning. But maybe the whole thing, maybe the concept of America has lost its meaning. Matthew Yglesias, a surprisingly young blogger with a lot of influence yesterday wondered if the US really had more integrity in 1974 when our outrage forced Richard Nixon from office. Not just Democratic outrage, but Republican outrage too. I was alive then, Yglesias says he was not, and I remember, as a college student, how remarkable it was. But it's sad if it's true that today's America cares less about its ideals than that one did, because that one didn't care enough to stop the outrage from happening, we only cared when it was too late.
As we learn more about our current President and Vice-President, it's never been more clear that we sold ourselves out -- for nothing -- to a handful of people who are raping not only Iraq for its oil, but our own country's treasury and integrity. They say they're not raising taxes, instead the dollar keeps declining relative to a barrel of oil. In just one week the price of gas at the pump has gone up 10 percent at the local station where I took the picture last Sunday. 10 percent! This is an unbelievable tax that hits everyone equally, which is to say it hits people just barely making it the hardest. And it's going to effect the cost of everything as the increase ripples through the economy, the cost of food, clothing, medicine, keeping our houses warm.
Then comes the amazing story that we may be about to provoke a war with Iran so the oil industry can take Iran's oil, after taking Iraq's. How many more hundreds of thousands of people will die, how many millions will be displaced, and how much more of what's left of our leadership will be foreclosed so the oil and defense barons can make a few more euros (they're surely not taking their loot in dollars).
When we look for someone to blame, we should look in the mirror -- we did this to ourselves, first by electing Bush, and then amazingly, re-electing him. But it would feel much better if I believed we were about to start undoing the mess, but I've been walking around with an undercurrent of depression this week, and I haven't been able to pinpoint the source, yet, but I have an inkling it has something to do with the evaporating hope that we're about to turn the corner. We may have created an unprecedented mess in the 8 years of Bush, we may have wrecked our economy and reputation, but at least we're about to start heading in the right direction. It seems perhaps not.
From gun control to abortion, to illegal wire-tapping and funneling government money to religious organizations, the man who sold us Change You Can Believe In, it's sad to say, appears not to have believed in it himself. To find out it was just a marketing slogan is too much to bear. It's so hard to accept that Ted and Caroline Kennedy stood up for him and said he represented the same hope as JFK, well, maybe we misunderstood what they meant. Or maybe it's time for them to take him aside and ask "What did you mean again?"
I'd like to get Aaron Brown back on the air. I'd like Keith Olbermann to be tougher. And if this is just a case of Obama getting comfortable in his new skin, with his new stature as presumptive nominee then I look forward to him re-finding himself, because we need leadership now more than we need a new president. A humbled Obama is worse than a proud McCain.
This post on the Twitter status blog, gives hope to developers wanting to hook into the full Twitter flow, the same flow that now only Summize has access to. Here's what they said: "We're hopeful that once we've improved the stability of the service we can bring back IM. It remains the highest priority feature weÕre working to restore." OK. That sounds hopeful.
I note that a number of programmers I respect are trying to launch instances of the software behind identi.ca.
If they're successful, and if there is a decent way to connect them into a federation (meaning we can communicate even if we're using different hosts), then we're getting somewhere.
Is there some place where someone is monitoring the status? A wiki? A discussion thread?
I'm not planning on running one until the trail has been well blazed, maybe not even then, but I don't mind helping track the progress.
Update #1: Les Orchard has two instances running.
Update #2: laconica.kamleitner.com.
I was catching up with On The Media earlier this week, and who comes on but my friend and former Berkman colleague Rebecca MacKinnon. I love those kinds of surprises, it lets me catch up, in a multimedia sort of way (it's better than reading an essay or blog post). A former CNN correspondent in China and Korea and founder of the Global Voices blogging network along with Ethan Zuckerman, now she's a prof at the University of Hong Kong. I got a really funny picture of her at the end of a movie in Nashville, a few years ago.
She has become an expert on freedoms on the Internet because of her connection to China; that's what she was talking about on OTM. Toward the end of the interview she said we even have issues with freedom on the net in the US. I thought she was being a little too kind.
This morning I saw a judge had let Viacom have all of Google's user data from YouTube, a very shocking thing for a judge to do. I thought RMack, with her perspective on Chinese freedom on the net would have something to say, and it turns out she does...
Rebecca MacKinnon: Corporate responsibility and the Internet.
A Twitter clone that's all-the-way open?
Did Christmas come early this year?
http://identi.ca/doc/faq
Marshall has a writeup.
I am dave over there. Follow me!
First thing --> looking for an API.
It supports the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, which I had not heard about until now.
evan appears to be the author of the software, or at least the authority on it.
From the FAQ, it will support the Twitter API, but doesn't yet. There is RSS here, but I haven't found it yet.
Here's the RSS. http://identi.ca/dave/all/rss Just add "/rss" after anything.
I've hooked it up to FriendFeed, but it looks (much) less than optimal (and I'm being kind). They really need to work on the RSS, it's the first really lame thing I've seen in identi.ca.
Bijan got a preview of the iPhone 2.0 software, which adds location to the camera.
It's a piece of the social camera puzzle.
When you come back from vacation where there are lots of other people taking pictures, go to Flickr 4.0 and enter the location and the time, and voila, vacation pictures and you're in all of them. :-)
It's bad news for people cheating on their spouses. Now it'll be easier to follow your trail and who you were with. (I had a preview of this, when I was on a date, walking down the street the other way was Justin with his camera mounted on his hat and his broadcasting laptop in his knapsack. It was a long time ago, if you want to see who I was out with you're going to have to search through a lot of archives. Enjoy!)
A feature like this (which was obviously coming for years) will reshape what it means to take a picture. That's why people are confused, because we all come from the past, and this product exists only in the future (for everyone but Bijan, who I hate).
Just kidding of course. Heh.
PS: This originally appeared as a comment on Bijan's blog. An illustration of "chasing the news" earlier today.
My Internet writing is so distributed these days, there are five main places I write, and a host of others where I write peripherally. Here are the five:
1. Scripting News (and its RSS feed).
2. The comments here (managed by Disqus).
3. Twitter (used to be a lot, now much less).
4. FriendFeed (links, comments).
5. The OPML Editor (for software dev work mostly).
My writing style differs in all the places, it depends on its newness, who's there, what the tools let me do, what I'm doing there.
None of them are what I want them to be, but I'm happy because I feel like things are shifting, and I'm almost ready to understand what I really want.
First, like a lot of people, I have either found or invented systems to connect the five places. When I write something here, I ping Twitter. FriendFeed has been programmed to automatically pick it up. My writing sometimes but rarely flows through the NewsJunk website and out to FriendFeed and Twitter because it's like a radio station, again, pushing links and content where we want it to go. We're all set up for new destinations. The NewsJunk software (which is a major undertaking, like Manila was in 1999) is all about moving ideas around.
But movement isn't really what we want.
For a moment think about TechCrunch. Okay let's say one of the editors writes something longish over on FriendFeed and then realizes that would make a good post on TC. So he switches over to WordPress (the editorial software they use) and pastes it in there, makes some corrections, adds a picture, some links, edits some more, adds a few thoughts, then publishes. A few minutes later an update, he spots a typo and fixes it. Now what happened to the FriendFeed article? It's still there, unchanged by all the improvements. But what should have happened?
It seems there should only be one copy of the story, and when it changes on TC, it should also change on FF. Further, when he adds some pictures, or links to a podcast, or embeds a video, that should happen in both places as well. And of course there shouldn't really be two places, there should be one, with two views. TechCrunch is a flow of articles grouped around a name, with the judgment we assume comes with it. But the idea originated somewhere else (it seems all of them do) and after it migrates it still exists there.
I go through a similar process with pieces that flow to the Huffington Post. First, I get the piece in perfect shape over here, and then copy it over there. Of course it never is perfect, and then I'm stuck making changes in both places.
Now should the comments in both places be the same comments? Ahhh, at that point I'm nto so sure. We'll have to try it out and see what happens. (In the Huffpost case, definitely not. I don't feel like a member of the community there, even though the comments I see are in response to my writing.)
If you want to get more ideas about this, revisit Web 2.0 Gas Prices, a piece that tells the story about how an idea sprouted in one place and then bloomed in another. Lots of data were integrated from pictures to maps to MP3s. Try to ignore the issue of wheher it's fair to McCain. That was the point in the discussion on FF, over here on SN, what's interesting are the editorial techniques and what kind of software will be needed to support them.
A few weeks ago for the first time a reader noticed the double-entendre in the name of this weblog. People always assumed it meant "News About Scripting." Sure to some extent that's what it means, but we all know, not so much these days. But it's main meaning was "The application of technology to news." Scripting is the verb, not the subject. You always have to be looking for that with me, I have a devious mind and sometimes (not often I hope) I lead you in one direction, when the action is in a different one. 
PS: I've been working on a new "junk" site, this one for tech news. I'll have a writeup here soon.
PPS: What I've learned from the political NewsJunk, the MSM guys have figured out blogging, and generally do as good a job as the amateurs, though some of the pros are just running linkblogs and not much more. They typically don't like NJ, for some reason. Go figure.
PPPS: It seems postscripts should have lives of their own too. The next one should live here, and also live in the FriendFeed Feedback room.
PPPPS: The Reshare command in FF, it seems to me, shouldn't create a copy, rather should add the item to my flow, at the top of the list, and any comments that appear in either place would be seen in both. It's understandable that copies must be made when things move among silos, but within a silo why not deal in pointers? (Or give the choice to the user.)
I caught up with Eric Marcoullier and Jud Valeski of Gnip in Eric's car, this afternoon.
http://mp3.newsjunk.com/interviewWithGnip.mp3
Earlier today, on Scripting News, I asked Twitter to use Gnip to communicate with developers so the network can come back on. I wanted to find out if anything had come of it.
Nothing had...
Meanwhile, the guys believe there's no technical reason that Twitter can't turn back on all the services that were hooked into the XMPP gateway -- the protocol is designed for that kind of syndication.
It seems, therefore that the reason must be economic -- which leads to the conclusion that Twitter, which was founded as an open platform, with a Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom philosophy, is now headed in the opposite direction.
We know where that leads, to the place where Instant Messaging foundered, which motivated the development of XMPP to route around the problem. (Oh the humanity!)
Gnip raises the question in about as clear a way possible, will Twitter come back to developers, or are we looking for a new platform to do the wonderful things we were hoping to do with Twitter.
Eric, like me, is friends with Bijan and Fred, on Twitter's board, so we're posing this question, which is potentially controversial, in a friendly way.
Here's the smiley to prove it:
Yesterday I wrote a teaser piece masquerading as a vision piece. The vision is not mine, it's Eric Marcoullier's, a very affable and brilliant entrepreneur from San Francisco, who founded MyBlogLog and sold it to Yahoo for big bucks a few years back.
As we know Twitter is having scaling problems, and in fact, some of the problems are related to people pounding their API when they should just be getting the data through Gnip, Marcoullier's new startup.
But Gnip didn't officially exist until 9AM today, but as of now (9:20AM) there is no excuse. Twitter, what are you waiting for? Call Eric now, and do a deal and let's get on with building a fantastic network of wired-up Internet apps that scale.
And if you want to get details, get the full scoop from my amigo Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb.
Here we go!!
Update: Mike Arrington seems to agree. "Notably absent from the list of partners is Twitter, which may be the one service that needs something like Gnip the most."
I'm not sure how much of the stress in Twitter is caused by the services that poll its API on behalf of thousands of users, but it's got to be a lot of work to service all those requests that are constantly coming in.
Here's why it has so much work to do. When I post something to Twitter, within a couple of minutes it shows up on FriendFeed. I don't know for sure, but I bet that it's calling the Twitter API every few minutes to ask if Dave has posted something over there. Most of the time the answer is no. And it's asking for each of the thousands of FriendFeed users that have connected their Twitter accounts to their FriendFeed accounts. Wouldn't it be simpler for FriendFeed to say to Twitter: "Here's a list of all the FriendFeed users who want to have their twits reflected over here." Then Twitter could call FriendFeed saying "Yo, Dave just updated and here's what he said." Don't call us we'll call you. It's often more efficient.
Back in the old days when I used to work on much larger systems known as mainframes, they had special-purpose computers whose only job was to offload work for the main computer, much the way a booster rocket or a tugboat help a space ship or an ocean liner. In computers they were called TIPs which is an acronym for Terminal Interface Processor. Each user sat at a terminal, a sort of dumb computer that behaved like a printer, and typed away, and then the TIP would talk to all the terminals, and then talk to the mainframe in a language only the two computers understood. It was much more efficient for the mainframe. Seems Twitter could use that kind of efficiency.
There's lots of this kind of connecting going on these days, and it is costly. It slows systems down. Probably the way the problem is going to be solved is through something like the TIPs, adapted to the 21st Century.
Just a thought for a possible way to make Twitter a little more perky.
PS: In 1997 I knew Apple was going to fire its CEO, I had been brought in, in confidence. The morning of the announcement, I wrote a Wired column (published on the web) calling for his resignation. It ran two hours before the announcement. Some people mistook it for cause and effect.
I'm revamping my feed reading.
FriendFeed has made me (and apparently others) much more aware of how I get my news.
I've also learned a ton from the NewsJunk project. I get much better political news now than I ever have, and it's getting better all the time.
Something I've learned...
The thing that makes the difference: GOOD FEEDS.
Behind those feeds of course are honest, smart people with a passion for information.
I started NewsJunk because I was getting terribly spotty news about politics. I asked how other people get their politics, and everyone said the same thing, they hunt and peck. Now I get a steady stream of great stuff. It's like the briefing books political candidates get from their staff, but open to everyone. When a story breaks I get a bunch of perspectives. If I'm not interested, I don't click, but in an instant I have a sense of what's going on.
And it's a level playing field. If a story breaks via pro or amateur, we get it. Fast. No waiting. (When we're doing our job.)
Now, I want to straighten out my access to news about technology.
In a word, it sucks!
I want it not to suck.
As much.
Tech news is different from politics though, most people in the tech world, the insiders, hit TechMeme at least a few times every day, I do, at least 20 or 30 times. I don't want it to change, it serves a very useful purpose. But it isn't enough.
What I want is what I've always wanted: News about products. New products. What people think about products, but features added to popular products. And not just the really huge products, like GMail and Amazon. I use lots of stuff. You should see my bookmarks and my system tray. And some of the products I'm interested in aren't even in my Bookmarks. Earlier today Steve Rubel wrote about Summize and a neat new feature they just added. It's a really small thing, but I care about really small things. I make and products for a living. Ideas are important. And someday I might meet the guy who did that, and I'd like to know about it so I can congratulate him. The personal touches matter. People care that you notice. I certainly do!
You know what else I like -- hearing about products from the person who implemented it. What were they thinking? What were their goals? What were they surprised by when people used the product? What questions do they have? You can learn a lot by listening to the person who wrote it.
Anyway, I want to know about products. Today I found two blogs that are devoted to reviewing tech products. I added their feeds to my mix.
I want to know what you rely on for product news, and I want to start reading what you read, voraciously. And I don't just want to read it, I want to consume it.
So please, if you feel so inclined, either post a URL of a favorite product-related feed in the comments here or send it to me at scriptingnews1 at gmail dot com.
Thanks!!
PS: If we can improve the flow of news about tech products we can create more opportunities for tech products. I'm sure there are niches we're missing, big ones, but they're hard to see because the picture has been muddied up by all kinds of peripheral stuff.
PPS: One of my inspirations for this work was a post by Fred Wilson where he said he wanted a TechMeme for inspiration. I don't think it'll end up looking like TM, and your source of inspiration might look very different from mine. We've gotten too centralized, imho -- we'll now get more decentralized. Pretty sure I see how it could work.
Earlier today we were having a hot debate about how John McCain doesn't know how much a gallon of gas costs. A Republican thinks we're being too hard on old John. I thought not, what single fact could you expect someone running for President to know? It's like asking the manager of a baseball team their percentage (the number of games won divided by the total number played). Or asking a batter how many RBIs he has. A president should know what gas costs, as would the CEO of an airline or car company. It's a very basic indicator of what's going on. You can't even go to war (something McCain is proud to say he knows something about) without gas. Lots of gas.
You could forgive him for not knowing what a gallon of milk goes for, you'd have to actually go inside a store to find out, but the price of gas is displayed prominently on street signs. All he has to do is look out the window of the famous Straight Talk Express.
Anyway, we did a little checking, found an MP3 of the interview where the question came up, verified that the transcript was accurate. (Yeah, if you want to split hairs, he wasn't asked if he knows the price of gas today, literally, just if he knew the price of gas at any time in the past. Lawyers everywhere.)
Then I went looking on Google Maps for a Street View of a gas price sign on a station at San Pablo and Marin Ave in Albany, an intersection I go through frequently on my way to San Francisco or the South Bay or the movies. Later I was waiting at a red light at that exact spot and thought to take out the camera and take a picture of the sign today. Uploaded it to Flickr. The prices had changed quite a bit!
What a world we live in. Gas is ridiculously expensive. But the Internet keeps getting more interesting.
This morning, the story I've been tiptoeing around here appeared for the first time in the business press.
Guardian: Shel Israel puppet show bites the dust.
There's an undercurrent to the story that insiders will understand that I don't want to explain here at this time.
People need to do some soul-searching, now, and then do some damage control before this gets much worse.
June was a terrible month in TwitterLand. The service was down a lot. It's basically down right now, has been for days -- since the Replies tab doesn't work.
I've never seen anything like it. A service so many people use that can't stay up.
Yesterday I got an email from Jay Rosen asking if this was the day Twitter died. It had completely gone off the air. No whale, no features taking a rest, the server wasn't responding at all. I posted a message on FriendFeed linking to the Don McLean song American Pie that's about "The Day The Music Died." Yeah, yesterday might have been the day that Twitter died.
Fact is, Twitter as it was conceived was never meant to live.
It's very possible with better engineering its architecture might have gone on for a few more years, but eventually it would have hit this wall, where there were too many people posting too many twits to too many followers. The scale of the system as conceived rises exponentially. Just look at the spewage report for a sense of the scale.
So I started arguing for a decentralized system, and the engineers at Twitter sniffed that you would never be able to recreate Twitter in a decentralized fashion. I still doubt that's true, but now we have a counter-argument -- you couldn't keep it running in a centralized fashion either. It may just be too rich an application for today's computers. To a user this seems ridiculous -- it doesn't look rich. I guess sometimes appearances can be deceptive.
So the conversation moves to FriendFeed. True, I am ignoring the flow I have on Twitter. Easy come easy go. The flow there is pointless. It's like trying to make a baby by having sex with a rock. First, it's hard to get excited. And second, no baby.
And FriendFeed is a much better place for conversation than Twitter. No 140-character limit (they do have a limit, but it's much higher, so high I haven't had a reason yet to figure out what it is). And most important, with 10K-plus followers on Twitter, when I respond to one person's question, all 10K see the response and some get annoyed (a certain percentage say so) or ask what we're talking about. If I answer their question, I'm annoying and confusing a bunch more people. Conversation was awkwardly grafted onto Twitter as an afterthought. It seems to fit in better with FriendFeed.
However, before we all move to FriendFeed and think we've solved anything, this underscores the problem with putting all our eggs in one basket. We just move the problem into the future. FriendFeed may be able to scale where Twitter can't, but there are other problems with centralization, putting all your trust in a corporation, esp one so young and unformed. Instead, we should start bootstrapping a decentralized Twitter-like thing immediately, building off the base of clients that connect to Twitter. It can connect to any service we want to connect to, and if one should go away, we do the thing the Internet does so well, route around the outage. I wrote about this, extensively, in early May.
PS: I implemented my own suggestion. Here's my RSS feed of today's Twitter posts.
PPS: At 7:40PM, replies in Twitter are back. Now we get to find out if our fling with FF is the real thing, or just a summer love.
Much-discussed today on FriendFeed, with art.
From today's Fresh Air, a selection of 10 great movies in 10 genres from the American Film Institute: Animation, Romantic Comedy, Western, Sports, Mystery, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Gangster, Courtroom Drama, and Epic. I love resources like this, cause there are bound to be some movies among the hundred that I haven't seen. Maybe you'll find some too.
I just got an email from David Plouffe, the campaign manager for Obama. Click on the image below to read the email.
This site showed up in my referrer logs.
http://whoisi.com/p/216
http://whoisi.com/p/755
Not sure what to make of it. Looks quite interesting.
I hadn't heard of it till today, but I see it's being discussed on Twitter.
Here are some other people...
http://whoisi.com/p/459
http://whoisi.com/p/1
I think I get it -- it's a wiki-like FriendFeed?
http://whoisi.com/p/683
http://whoisi.com/p/141
The opportunities for abuse abound (but there are obvious ways to fix things, if you claim your own person, and correct the links). It's very clever. Why didn't I think of it??
One of the things I love about it is that it does the right thing with RSS descriptions. Bravo!!
It's been suggested that McCain made a good choice in hiring a comedian to write about Barack Obama for their campaign webiste. I humbly disagree.
There are some things that you shouldn't joke about. For example, tech support. How would you feel if your server had crashed and it turns out your ISP was playing a joke on you. Come on lighten up! Read the Cluetrain.
Or suppose your doctor was playing a joke on you when you went in for your prostate exam and hid a little treasure for you to find. Relax! It's a joke!
Presidents have buttons that launch missles that destroy the world. Their power is even greater than doctors and tech support people. It's better if they stick to telling us what they think without misdirection. Imho.
