In October 2009, after 2.5 years of using Twitter every day, I wrote a piece that explained the limits of Twitter that we'll have to look past Twitter to see solved, because Twitter doesn't seem to be trying to solve them.

Tomorrow, we hear, Google will announce a product that aims to take on Twitter. If so, here's a list of features to look for. Any of these features would give Google a serious edge over Twitter. Maybe they thought of some things I don't have on my list. It's always nice to put your stake in the ground. I did it with the iPad with some hilarious results.

So here's the list of must-have features:

1. Reliability. Twitter still has trouble dealing with high-flow events like last night's SuperBowl. Lots of Fail Whales. So if Google is able to offer reliability, no matter how much of an advantage Twitter's installed base is, it won't matter. When Twitter goes down everyone will reassemble on Glitter.

2. Enclosures. Can you imagine if you couldn't enclose a picture or an MP3 with an email message? Why do we jump through so many hoops just to tweet a picture?

3. Open architecture metadata. Let developers throw any data onto a status message, giving it a name and a type, and let everyone else sort it out. It would result in an explosion of creativity.

4. Relationships with hardware vendors. I still want a one-click Twitter camera. If I can't have it from Twitter, I'll take it from Google.

5. No 140-character limit. I debated this one with myself. At first I compromised and said okay let's have a 250-character limit, or a 500-character limit. But I really don't want a limit. If I want to write short status messages, no problemmo. We've already made the cultural transition. We know how to do it. But sometimes a thought just can't be expressed in 140 characters. No one is wise enough to know what the limit is, so let's just not have one.

6. No URL-shorteners. I've explained this so many times. They're stupid and ugly and they hurt the web. I like it when developers take the time to craft their URLs so they make sense to users. That's all the shortening we really need and all we should have.

Those are some of my wish-list items. It seems likely Google will offer #1 and #2. Very unlikely they'll do #3 (they don't trust developers any more than Apple does). Probably not #4, though it would be easy to get some people from Kodak and Sony to come on stage with them. #5 would take a teeny bit of guts. It's a perfect way to throw some serious confusion at Twitter. I'd recommend going all the way, but if they can't, go to 500-characters. Get some editors and authors on stage to say how nice it would be. Because they're making a commitment to their own URL-shortener it seems unlikely they would outlaw them on their status network, but one can hope.

I usually don't subscribe to the idea that new products aimed at the user base of an established product are "killers" -- but it's been a long time since we've seen a product as ripe for killing as Twitter. (Lotus 1-2-3 was probably the last great example.)

The hubris of Twitter is the assumption that the product is unassailable because of the features they leave out. Sooner or later one of their competitors is going to test that theory, and I'm pretty sure it'll prove incorrect. And where they include horrendous features that a competitor might leave out (I'm thinking of URL-shortening) they don't seem to feel any pressure to take it out. Yet almost every user would enjoy a Twitter with real full URLs that didn't take up any of the 140-character space. Hard to imagine anyone objecting.

OTOH, Google is a big clunky Microsoft-like company with strategy taxes, and they don't trust the web or developers, or each other, and their internal politics drive most of the decisions they make. To compete with Twitter is an easy sell inside Google, but to actually have the will to be cut-throat about it, that's another thing. It'll probably have to pay homage to Google Wave (remember that?) and therefore will have some elements that are completely incomprehensible. Twitter likely won't get killed, because Google's product will likely fall far-short of what's needed to get us all to think they can be trusted.

The usual disclaimers apply. This is all tea-leave-reading, I have no actual information, and I'm usually way wrong with these prognostications, but it's still good to share the thought process.

Update #1: A commenter named Scott says: "If people were posting dissertations, I'd be much less likely to read." Tom Caswell says: "How about a 'more' button you could set in the preferences? I would set mine at 140 characters for old times sake." Even better, it could default to 140 for old times sake.

Update #2: Cesar Razuri: "also, make hashtags some sort of meta data in our tweets that doesn't add to character length" Good idea.

Update #3: Scoble weighs in. Even though Google's past efforts at social media have failed, he thinks this time they have a good chance of succeeding.

 2/8/2010; 5:03:06 PM  

A brief note of congratulations to the City that Care Forgot.

It's so wonderful that the Saints won the Super Bowl!

This will go down as one of the big moments of sports history, imho.

As the 1969 Mets undid the betrayal of NY fans by the Dodgers, the Saints give hope to a city that was betrayed in so many ways.

From what I know of New Orleans, this victory will be the stuff of legend for a long time to come. It's a city with a great sense of history, and destiny. And humor.

Until 2005 its destiny was to be devastated by a monster hurricane and the failure of the rest of the country to come to its aid.

But tonight begins a new beginning for the Crescent City. From now on this is the city of champions!

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

 2/7/2010; 11:39:33 PM  

I spent my first full day living in NYC since 1977.

Lots of observations, but I only have time to share one.

In other cities, the places you drive to are places you walk to in Manhattan. There's every kind of restaurant within a block of my apartment. In Palo Alto, you can get it all (but the pizza isn't as good) but you have to drive everywhere unless you live off University Avenue. Same in Berkeley.

And the walking in Manhattan is amazing. It's huge and has so much variety. And everywhere you go the buildings reach the sky. In every other city I've lived in, they might have had a few buildings as tall as the average tall apartment building in NY. And that's even in neighborhoods which aren't known for big buildings.

I live two blocks from the West 4th St subway station. From there you can get to every part of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn. One change gets you to everywhere in Queens.

But I spent five hours walking today. I'm wiped, but in a good way.

Now on to the SuperBowl. Of course as a Tulane alum I'm rooting for the Saints!

 2/7/2010; 5:37:46 PM  

David Weinberger asks: "After press conferences, what?"

Imho: A hybrid of newsroom and press conference. And it must be open, unlike newsrooms and press conferences of the past.

A few years ago I wrote about an idea called Hypercamp, a way of distributing ideas and news that I felt would come into existence in what we now call the "rebooted news system."

The idea became real for me at a Microsoft press event at the Palace Hotel in 2005. Ray Ozzie introducing himself as the new CTO. After the event we all went upstairs to a small ballroom where there was all kinds of food and refreshment and a mix of bloggers, developers, reporters and Microsoft execs. The party went on for a couple of hours with people reporting live from the event out through their blogs.

The coolest thing was the collaborative writing that happened, that usually doesn't happen in the blogosphere because we all write holed up in isolated cubbies.

It dawned on me that this was a hybrid press conference and newsroom.

So imho what happens in the rebooted news system are open newsrooms. I'm not talking about virtual (online) newsrooms. A couple in SF, one for tech and another for biotech (different people, different issues). In NYC, you'd have an open newsroom for tech, and one for finance, fashion, perhaps sports. In every geographic center, you'd have one or more such facilities.

The idea developed -- let's put two podiums at either ends of the room with vendors paying to make presentations. There's an EIC for each open newsroom who can also give time to open source projects in all these fields (open source sports and fashion -- interesting).

Big high bandwidth pipes emanate from the room, all kinds of video flow in and out. It's a work place and an event space.

I called these open newsrooms Hypercamp and drew a diagram to illustrate.



I'd love to start one in NYC and/or SF. It has to be operated by someone other than me, I'm strictly editorial. Not good at the logistics involved in putting these things together.

In the age of realtime networked news this is the new CNN, video would flow out of these facilities 24 hours a day. If you have an event to host, you'd pay to put it in the appropriate Hypercamp.

 2/7/2010; 9:44:33 AM  

wilshipley: "Is there an iPhone app for adding your own subtitles to that famous Hitler scene on YouTube™, yet?"

Why it's the perfect tweet:

1. It's about a product from Apple.

2. It suggests an Apple slogan that's almost become a meme.

3. You know damned well there's no app for that.

4. But there totally should be.

5. We love Apple even though they turn us into couch potatoes and minions of Steve.

6. Consider it a feature request for Android.

7. It's about at the appropriate level of importance for the average tweet.

8. It's an application of Godwin's Law.

9. The Hitler videos are funny even thought Hitler himself was a monster.

10. You never know what Hitler is going to say next!

11. Think of all the new applications for Hitler.

 2/6/2010; 5:08:19 AM  

Saw a link this evening in Danny Sullivan's feed to Bit.ly Pro. Not sure when this was announced, there are no references to the product in Google News.

Read over the FAQ. This is basically the service I wanted to create with Bit.ly when we started it up in the summer of 2008. But it's apparently missing one key component, the freedom to switch to a different service. Once you've chosen to map a domain to bit.ly, if you map it to another service, all the links you created with bit.ly break.

There is a way for them to provide the ability to switch, Joe Moreno at Adjix did it. Bit.ly could echo all your shortened URLs to an Amazon S3 bucket that you control (and pay for, btw). If you decide to switch, just change your CNAME to point to Amazon. Or give it to a competitive service that you like better. This protects your choice, and protects all of us if Bit.ly should fail.

8/19:09: How to Fix URL Shorteners.

Now I could be missing something, I hope I am. But I'd get the answer to the question before I bet my future on any URL-shortening service.

 2/5/2010; 9:11:26 PM  

I'm in California, where it rains a lot but snow is pretty rare.

That's why a honkin winter storm is so interesting!

If you're getting dumped on in Washington or Baltimore or where ever, how's it going? Any accumulation? Pictures!

 2/5/2010; 6:04:12 PM  

This is a networking experiment to see if I can connect with people in NYU's Computer Science department through the readers of this weblog.

Me: I'm a visiting scholar in the Journalism Institute for the next year; working with my friend Jay Rosen and his students on several interesting projects. While I'm there it would be interesting for me to catch up on how Computer Science is taught these days, and perhaps talk with some students about how I got where I am and see if there's any interest in working on some projects while I'm in NY in 2010 and 2011.

Here's my CV. To get in touch, please send an email to dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Haven't got my NYU email address yet (next week, I hope).

Update: NYU Computer Science Students Make Awesome iPhone Apps.

 2/5/2010; 12:00:00 AM  

WIthout any fanfare as far as I can tell, Google has unveiled one of the most signficant, far-reaching and basically good features in its core search product.

Now, in addition to presenting the pages ranked in order of algorithmic importance, it also shows you what people you know have to say about the subject.

How does it know who you know? Based on some very simple information you may have entered into your Google profile. (I called this two-way search in July 2009.)

For example, in my profile, I told it that I have a blog, am on Twitter, FriendFeed, run opml.org, have Flickr, Identi.ca, Picasa and YouTube accounts and OpenID. From there, it presumably either crawls or makes API calls to find out who I'm connected to and what I care about. There's a wealth of information about me just in the links on scripting.com.

So, when I search for "Michael Clayton" it includes results from my social circle. In this case it has a hit from Cody Brown who it knows (so they tell me) I know because I follow him on Twitter.

It's good for the web because it puts all the social services on the same open playing field. If I want to add another service, I can put it in the list, and I can tell them how important it is to me by moving it up or down the list. It also makes sense for Google to throw its lot in with the web because they aren't Twitter or Facebook, and they got their start by indexing the open web. No matter what their motivations, that's for God to judge. Good is good. And good is not evil.

If you have an account on Google, you can edit your profile here.

At first the results aren't blowing me away, but I expect over time they will get better.

 2/3/2010; 10:46:05 AM  

I can list all the conferences I'm not going to this year because I didn't get an invite. A friend who's going to TED this year for the first time (I've never been) says he's pissed at himself, ironically.

I've never personally faced a life-and-death struggle as intense as Dana Jennings describes in a piece at the NY Times. When I read it I think how small my problems are, I more or less have my health. I have to work at being unhappy or scared. This man has to work to find something to be happy about. And he does.

Dana Jennings: "I was hospitalized for six weeks in 1984 with an acute case of ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the large intestine. Before my entire ravaged colon was removed, my doctors let me peer through the scope and take a look at it as it died."

I also like the piece because it's beautifully written and uncomplicated. It represents a point of view that no one can say is objective. Its subjectiveness, written from the point of view of someone whose body is conflicted about living or dying, is what makes it so powerful.

It's been pointed out elsewhere that President Obama's meeting with Republicans was one of the best press events ever. But the press just covered it, it played no role. And that's as it should be.

We do learn from conflict, but real conflict, not the made-up kind that we read in the news and hear on radio, and see on TV.

I want the collective press to be like a microphone, a very accurate one, that simply tells us what was said or done, without spin or savvy. If a cat got caught up a tree and the fire department came to get it down, I'd like to know that, and what the rescue people thought, and the spectators, and the cat.

I've enjoyed my first experiences with the NYU students. It's a great thing for me to get back to those particular roots. To enjoy, vicariously, the point of view of someone who doesn't know all that decades of life teach you, and is smart enough to know that. But also people who will live to know things I never will know. Hey, we're all here now, people who are at TED and people who are not. People who were alive in 1955, and people who will be alive in 2055. People whose bodies don't need radiation and chemotherapy to have a chance at survival, and those who will be dead next week. We're all here now, so let's dig the moment and do it together, with respect.

Your first dividend from my NYU experience. Please check out nyulocal.com. It's a student-run news site, completely unaffiliated with the university. The kids don't get credit for it, they do it for love. One student, reviewing the study-abroad program in Paris (she had just completed it) said she couldn't wait to get back to NY to keep writing for the site. That's the kind of writing I love to read, and if you like scripting.com, I bet you'll like nyulocal.com too.

 2/2/2010; 10:51:07 AM  

My mother, who has a WordPress blog, keeps telling me about posts that I haven't seen. This was starting to irk me, so I looked into River2 to see what's going on. Yes, it is finding her posts, but it thinks they're pictures. Why? Because the feed says they're pictures. Oy.

Digging in a little deeper. WordPress has a neat feature that I don't fully understand, called "gravatars." If you have one, as my mother does, it attaches it to every post, as an image. I'm sure she has absolutely no idea what a gravatar is, and I'm equally sure that WordPress created one for her automatically.

So, I want to fix this, so her posts (and those of other WordPress authors) show up where they belong in River2. Other than looking at the URL of the image, I have no idea how to do it. I'm hoping one of the readers of this blog does.

Here's an example from the feed.

<media:content url="http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/ed80e40fc7fa8d76b88e3e5d1079f429?s=96&d=identicon&r=G" medium="image">

They use the media:content element to represent the gravatar. I have a strong feeling this is very wrong. It seems to me that a gravatar is a bit of metadata. Why should it be represented as an image, why not as a <gravatar> in a new namespace defined for the purpose of representing gravatars?

The media:content element came into being to help Flickr attach pictures to items in feeds. It probably was a mistake, in hindsight, to try to make a general namespace for this, because it gets us into jams like this. Probably would have worked better if they had come up with a <flickr:picture> element. That way we might not have had this conflict in semantics.

<media:content url="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2785/4317723874_9ac5cf85e5_o.jpg" type="image/jpeg" height="1880" width="2816"/>

I'm pretty stuck here. I really need to separate pictures from non-picture items (I subscribe to some awesome picture feeds, and they would completely swamp my news-oriented feeds). It looks like I'm going to have to check if the image comes from gravatar.com. That's a terrible way to parse metadata.

 2/1/2010; 8:02:26 AM  

Interesting collaborative post betw Gruber and Scoble. I'd like to get into the mix with a 90-degree turn -- in the form of a question.

1. Okay, Apple seems to be forcing a question. Can they force web site producers to kill Flash?

2. It's kind of hard to defend Flash because it's a company-owned thing, not an open standard.

3. Now the question. What if Apple were trying to erase something that's not company-owned? Either a formal or defacto standard?

4. Further, what if their alternative were something that was locked-down and owned by a company? Further, what if the company was Apple?

This may be kind of a toe-dip. Apple tries this. If it works, they try sticking their whole foot in. The end result may well be a networking environment owned by one company. Or two or more incompatible networking environments.

Users and website developers are practical people. We don't care about Adobe, says Gruber, and that's probably right (I don't have a single Flash document on scripting.com). But I very much care about an open Internet.

Yes, that opens me to ridicule from users with little experience with the other kind of networking, one that has huge Do Not Enter signs everywhere. Their naivete is no excuse for throwing out the engine that's been driving innovation. The question of where and how we draw the line should be part of the public discussion.

BTW, how lovely are open standards? I'm writing this post from an American Airlines flight from NY to SF. Do you have any idea how many open standards were necessary to make this work? Makes the mind spin. And it all works exactly the same if I fly Virgin America or Air Egypt. In an Apple-designed world how much of this would work? Imho, not very much.

PS: Adobe might want to consider, right now, very quickly, giving Flash to the public domain. Disclaim all patents, open source all code, etc etc. That would throw the ball squarely back into Apple's court and would frame the question right now in its most stark terms.

 1/31/2010; 9:50:19 AM  

One recurring theme in defense of the closedness of the iPad is that it gives you access to the web and that's the most open thing around. Maybe, but if I want the web there are much better and less expensive ways to get it that don't compromise on flexibility and the ability to run other software. In other words, if you want the web and only the web, iPad would be a poor choice.

Yet I am concerned that it will get a flow of great apps from people who are willing to compromise on their freedom and users' freedom. They may say they're not doing it, but I don't see it that way. I wouldn't want to do anything to discourage them from developing cool apps for iPad, as long as they're not pumping their creativity into a platform that can't be competed with because of patents. If that's the case, it's a very unhealthy situation. Not one a developer should support unless they know for sure that other platforms can challenge Apple. I suspect there's a problem because Google is not releasing their multi-touch technology very widely.It could be that it's not ready, I hope that's the reason. But it may also be that Apple has a patent.

Another question that comes up frequently is why worry about limitations in a platform from Apple when we haven't expressed similar concerns re those from Nintendo, Sony, etc. The answer is obvious -- we depend on the Macintosh being one of two or three serious and open development platforms. At some point Steve is going to get up on stage and tell us it's the end of the road for the Mac, because the iPad/iPhone OS has sucked all the energy from the Mac. That's something he and Apple could seriously influence. Sony and Nintendo don't make the Mac, therefore there's nothing to worry about. One way Apple could alleviate these concerns and, at the same time, blast a big hole in the side of Microsoft would be to fully open source Mac OS. At that point, I'd be very happy to keep working on it, and wouldn't give a whit about the iPad, knowing as long as there's demand we'd be supplied with new versions running on the latest hardware, by someone, if not Apple.

Re the need for simplification, I've watched a close relative struggle with the multiple layers of user interface on today's computers, I recognize the need for a fresh start. Current GUI technology is 40-plus years old. Mac and Windows are equally confusing messes. User interfaces can be vastly simplified. I thought Apple would have done much more in this area by now. It's already been three years since the iPhone's introduction. And I don't think Android has the same commitment to a fresh start, it's more of a hodgepodge. And while Google is a patent offender just like Apple, so has no moral advantage, at least there's no barrier to what developers can put on the Android platform, so Google doesn't have the ability to control what goes on Android as Apple does with the iPad. In the worst case, you can route around Google totally because Android is open source.

Another thought occurred to me -- iPad looks rushed. It seems possible that Apple pushed it out sooner because it got wind of a competitive product. Could it be that Google has a DroidPad in the pipe? One thing's for sure, Apple's competitors are not scared of iPad. Let's hope they make some decent offers to developers. If any of them want my help, I'm here and ready to roll up my sleeves. I want to be sure there are lots of choices, the sooner the better. I can help get developers to pay attention to what you're doing.

The stakes are much higher than with the iPhone. No one should underestimate the potential of iPad. That's why I said, ironically, there's no doubt I will buy one as soon as I can. For the same reason I bought an iPhone. You have to understand this product if you want to stay current. But we, as an industry, must have choice. Now is a crucial moment for that.

 1/30/2010; 11:15:56 AM  

Brent Simmons, Joe Hewitt and Miguel de Icaza all write that they look forward to developing on the iPad. I found their essays surprising, especially Joe's -- given his decision to stop developing for the iPhone because of the review process that Apple imposes on developers. I totally supported him in that, and since his decision (though not because of it) I have switched from the iPhone to Google's Android platform, as a user.

I don't develop for any of the new platforms because they don't run my software, though Google could. Apple would never approve anything remotely like the OPML Editor, and that makes it very unlikely that I'd develop for them, but also for some really important reasons, makes it equally unlikely that I'd use it. I found Joe's piece thought provoking (it provoked this piece). I hope he gives mine similar consideration.

First, after reading Joe's piece, I understood why developers find the iPad interesting. It's because while they liked creating apps for the iPhone, the tiny screen made some very difficult design choices necessary. While they could see the potential of the multi-touch interface and a fresh start (they don't have to live with a UI design that's 40 years old), the iPhone screen is so small, that they couldn't nearly deliver on the promise. All the while they're thinking "If only Apple would make one of these things that isn't so small." And that of course is exactly what the iPad is. I'm sure they can understand that we, as users, weren't having the same thoughts. Until I read Joe's piece I had not heard this idea in any of the flood of discourse on the iPad, pro or con. Since I don't develop for the platform I never had the thought myself.

So, if Brent, Joe and Miguel like it, it stands to reason that they will create software that users will like. So the success of the iPad is assured, in ways perhaps that the Asus isn't. Or perhaps even Android, because it doesn't have multi-touch enabled, just guessing that might have something to do with a patent. Which is a shame, because while Joe has the option to put some or most of the functionality that Apple won't allow on a Facebook-owned server, the user doesn't have any say in this choice. So the user's data will live where Facebook, or some other funded company, wants it to live.

While Joe et al have been thinking about great new user interface, I was too when I was their age, now I'm thinking about something else, that I believe is even more important -- keeping big tech companies from controlling what has become our primary means of expression and communication, computer networks.

When I was young, some of us envisioned the world we live in today, only we tended to think only of the upside of networked thinking, never the dangers. I guess that's human nature and the nature of youth. Won't it be great if everyone can access everyone else's ideas anywhere, we thought -- on any kind of device, all inter-connected and fast. Some believed, me included, that computers without networking interfaces were totally uninteresting. Everything I created was designed to communicate. I ached because early Macintoshes had such awful networking APIs. Eventually all that got sorted out when we got HTTP -- it was so simple, the big companies couldn't control what we did with it.

But ever since that watershed moment the big tech companies have been trying to get the genie back in the bottle. It's the nature of bigness and corporateness to do that. Facebook didn't exist when I started my work, but now they're here and they're huge, and they view the world the way a big company does.

The problem is this -- if Facebook goes away -- and it could, so does everything everyone created with it. Facebook investors and developers like Joe (who I respect enormously) probably aren't worrying about this, because necessarily everything they do is tied up in the success of Facebook. Now if Joe can show me, in his architecture based on the iPad, where all my work is mirrored in a service I pay for, like Amazon S3, in a simple format I and others can write software against, then I can relax and look forward to the future he, Brent and Miguel want to create. But if my work is tied up in their success, then the price is too high. I'll take the lower fidelity but open playing field of the netbook, and keep my own data on my own hard drives, and back it up as I see fit. And continue to exercise my First Amendment rights.

I know that "most users" aren't thinking like this, it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of confidence. But I don't trust these companies, and I especially don't trust Apple or Google with my writing work. I can see a day when what I write has to be approved by someone who works for Steve Jobs before it can be read publicly. That's a day when freedom is completely crushed.

All three of these men know that freedom is important. So what's the answer. You're all willing to give up some of your freedom to play in Apple's new ballpark. How much of our freedom should we be willing to give up, and is this the only way to get it? Is it possible to create an iPad-like platform that has none of the drawbacks of Apple's offerings? If not, why not?

Update: A must-read piece by Alex Payne. "If I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I'd never be a programmer today." Well put, even if it's not a sure thing. (I didn't have any kind of computer growing up and I'm a programmer.)

 1/29/2010; 5:49:03 AM  

It may just be a temporary thing, hardware development pipelines are long, and Steve was out of commission getting a liver transplant while the iPad was being birthed at Apple. Presumably. Hopefully. If that's not true, and this is the result of a careful gestation, then Steve is no longer the master, he has lost his touch. This thing, the iPad, is a dog.

People who think it isn't comparable to a netbook are just plain wrong. It is, in every way because there are only so many points between an iPhone/Droid/Pre et al and laptops. As Adam Frucci in Gizmodo says so eloquently, where's the camera, where are the USB ports, where is the fracking keyboard? SD drive, removable battery, hard disk, etc etc.

When netbooks first came out they flirted with all-solid-state storage. This meant a $600 unit only had 20GB of persistent storage. Made it almost totally unusable. Then they put a 160GB hard drive in the things and the price came down to $350, and they hit the sweet spot and started flying off the shelves.

Okay the fanbois say this product is for marketing people, old people, one guy even said my parents would want it. My father isn't going to use it, no matter what, and we just bought my mom an Asus, which she thinks is cute and is having just a bit of trouble with even though she's a bit of a technophobe. What they're really saying is that it's the computer for idiots. I agree. Idiots with $500 burning a hole in their pocket. Like me. I'll almost certainly buy one. But unless I'm missing something, I'll still travel with the Asus that I'm typing this review on.

Now I was wrong about the iPhone, I bought one and used it for two years, saying goodbye to my Blackberry. But I ended up saying goodbye to the iPhone for the reasons I thought I would at its roll out. It should have been a Mac. Same with the iPad. They should have come out with a netbook-style product, price and feature-comparable to the Asus products but running the Mac OS and Mac apps. Because huff and puff all you want, this baby is going to have to look good compared to the netbooks, and now it looks like testimony to hubris. Finally, Apple went too far, and the emperor is totally naked for all of us to see. Ridiculous product. Absolutely completely ridiculous.

Apple hasn't added anything new to my repetoire of computer toys in a very long time. I bought a 13 inch MacBook Pro, but it's a battery hog running the same apps as my Asus, and unreliable. It stays home when I travel. I will probably move it to NY to be my main computer here. The iPhone also stayed home. My workhorse is the Droid, and I carry the Nexus One as the admiration platform. It has the SIM that used to be in the iPhone. Fred Wilson and I agreed (we had breakfast yesterday) that it's like carrying a girlfriend in your pocket. What could be better. This is an important point. Finally Google is presenting them with a serious competitor in the lust category. No, they aren't all the way there yet, but they don't have the prison mentality for users and developers. Continuing the girlfriend analogy, who wants an uptight control freak GF when you can have a.. okay I think you probably get the idea.

Also I don't care about the name. We get used to bad names. No one snickers anymore when you say Microsoft, but I remember when they did. I don't care that the name is a big gaffe. But I think the product itself is a gaffe, and that matters.

Finally, my prognostication piece missed wildly. I was way too ambitious on Apple's behalf. I figured it's been so long since they shipped something wonderful that they must really have something incredible and far-reaching in the lab, and here it comes. About the only thing I got right was #9. Steve still loves to delete ports. It would have been sort of cute if he had delivered on some of the potential in this category. But given the lack of imagination and execution in this product, it's a cruel joke that illustrates that all that remains of Apple's brilliance is Apple's arrogance. The art has to be there, following Doc Searls' famous 1997 analysis. This is just a jumbo Oreo cookie. The original classic model made sense. This bloated mess is just a bloated mess.



 1/28/2010; 12:09:20 AM  

Well, I'm very close to getting my apartment in NYC -- in the West Village.

I've also noted that a bunch of people don't know that I'm becoming bi-coastal, splitting my time between Berkeley and NY for the next year.

I also have recently been appointed a Visiting Scholar at the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at NYU. I've updated my bio on the home page of scripting.com to indicate this.

I'm also walking a ton and loving it. This city is built for walking, even in cold weather, there's tons of eye candy, and places to stop and gawk.

And I keep thinking of people to connect with here.

It's the Big City, and I already feel right at home.

 1/27/2010; 12:00:00 AM  

Tomorrow's Apple announcements:

0. This is 100 percent speculation, not in any way based on actual information.

1. Of course like everyone else I assume Apple is unveiling their tablet.

2. AT&T will either lose exclusivity or will be dropped altogether by Apple.

3. The biggest innovation will be the touch interface. They will have a virtual keyboard that works amazingly well, and it will have other amazingly intuitive gestures that it understands. The touch interface will work on both sides of the device so you can wrap your hands around it and make stuff happen that way.

4. Apple will unveil a new cloud that connects all its devices together. The tablet will only cache your information locally, all data and content is stored permanently on Apple's servers. (Apple must learn to be Google and Google must learn to be Apple, though neither ever will.)

5. There will be a radically new iPhone and iPod using the same software as the tablet.

6. The new iTouch software will not only run on all the newer devices, but will also run on the Mac. They will demonstrate their app store running on Mac hardware inside the same environment that runs on all the other devices. There will be subtle hints that the old Mac programming model is "legacy" -- where they began -- will always be loved by Steve, but eventually will be deprecated.

7. Google will be on stage for the announcement proclaiming their support for the new device. Steve will say Google is a valued partner of Apple's. The body language will indicate otherwise.

8. Ditto for leading publishers.

9. Some ports will be missing on the new Macs. Maybe USB? Steve loves to delete ports.

That's about it for now in the tea leaves department. I might think of some other things. It's always good to get your stake in the ground to see how you do.

 1/26/2010; 12:49:51 PM  

I made a stop at the main NY Public Library on 5th Ave and 42nd St.



Three notable things.

1. Free wireless Internet. 3.13Mb/s down, 9.24Mb/s up. (Not a typo, it's asymetric, not the usual way. Probably because there are hundreds of people using the free Internet and most of them are downloading, not uploading.)

2. Everyone in the main reading room has a laptop. There's power at every desk.

3. They have free blogging classes every Tuesday night.

 1/26/2010; 12:15:46 PM  

I'm in NYC looking for an apartment again.

Did a Rebooting The News with Jay last night. It was done in a studio at NYU, which has advantages (you can hear us well) but also disadvantatges. I hear the podcast ends at exactly 45 minutes, cutting me off in the middle of a sentence. That really sucks because the last few sentences were the best. (Just kidding, but we seriously have to get this under control, we run a loose ship and intend to keep it that way.) It's been worse, once I lost an entire podcast due to a technical mistake. So shit happens. It'll be interesting to do it next week when I'm back in Calif.

There's a certain amount of giddy in the media about the expected tablet announcement from Apple tomorrow. There's this idea that Steve will save the free and professional press, because he values a free and professional press. Uncle Rex Hammock spills cold water on the idea. Remember what Doc Searls said about software developers when Steve returned to Apple in 1997. Can you imagine how the free and professional press feels when Uncle Steve and his minions fail to approve their writing because it isn't sufficiently flattering to Apple? Somehow this is a loop back to the lesson of this week's RBTN. Perhaps it's better to accept low fidelity in return for the ability to finish a sentence -- the way you want to finish it. Or at least let the mistakes you make be your own.

Meantime, Uncle Barack Obama is making those of us who supported him really sorry for having done so. Freeze budgets? Robert Reich says that could be bad for the economy. Paul Krugman isn't so reserved. Brad DeLong says his middle name should be "Herbert Hoover." My guess is that it's a lie, he doesn't plan to freeze the budget, any more than Uncle George W Bush meant to get us out of Iraq. He just wants to take the high ground from the Repooobs next election cycle, to deprive them of what he feels might be a very potent soundbite. Either way, pity us. I can't imagine we'd ever elect a president that we'd have higher hopes for than Obama. If he betrays us, well, who won't?

People ask what I think of Google's new synthetic feeds. Great idea, I'll subscribe in my own aggregator. Oh you say I have to use Google Reader? Not my cup of tea.

 1/26/2010; 7:20:25 AM  

In a comment the other day...

What Microsoft used to do in situations like that was bundle a developer's product while they got the feature ready for their product.

We did a deal like that with them in 1985 with our Ready product, they ended up paying us a lot of money (several million) while they got the outliner feature ready for Word. We were able to use the money to develop our next product which put us over the top. A total win-win.

You guys should be tapping into the power of the community. While you're struggling to keep up, they're struggling to make businesses out of their projects.

 1/24/2010; 4:46:34 AM  

I read a post over on the Workbench blog asking about the writing of Leslie Harpold, an early blogger who died in 2006. Her family has let her domains expire.

I'm not glad, of course, that her web presence has gone away, but I am glad that the topic is starting to get wider attention. It's a huge gap in our attention, as blogging has grown.

I've been getting emails from people wanting my help in getting their sites converted from Manila to some other format. It's totally predictable this would happen, but this is the wrong time to ask that question. There's nothing that I, one person, can do to help. The time to ask is when you're creating your web archive. That's when you should be concerned about what could happen to it if.. And there are lots of ifs.

Fact is, most of the writing we're doing now, no matter what tools we use, will disappear, probably a lot sooner than you think.

I'm a very technical person, and I've been aware of this issue starting from the first day I wrote an essay that was published on the web. I've been doing things to protect my writing. Yet, if I were to for whatever reason, stop tending my web presence, the whole thing would disappear within 30 to 60 days. One or two billing cycles before the hosting services cut off service. And then no more than a year before the domains expire and become porn sites or whatever.

This is a terrible situation.

And a business opportunity.

Harpold's writing may be gone. Whether it comes back is entirely up to her family and volunteers. But there are millions of others whose work will not get this kind of attention, and if they want to do something to future-safe their work, right now, there is nothing they can do.

What's needed is an endowment, a foundation with a long-term charter, that can take over the administration of a web presence as a trust -- before the author dies. This is something you can and should be able to ake care of yourself.

My father, who died in October, did a fantastic job of preparing his estate so that it would require the minimum work of his successors. But there was nothing he could do for his web site, and as far as I know he didn't. I don't control his domain, even though I host his site. Luckily I'm technical enough to know how to do a permanent redirect, and I'm fairly confident that even if I can't gain control of the domain, we can preserve his writing. I'm also going to statically render it, so it doesn't require any special software. But even then, even if I host it as a sub-domain of scripting.com, what happens when I die?

We need to focus as much attention on preserving the record as we did in creating easy to use web content tools. We've created a problem of monumental proportions, the hole gets deeper every day, and people are just beginning to come to grips with its scope.

 1/23/2010; 6:30:39 AM  

The World Economic Forum, the organization that puts on the annual conference at Davos, has published a 40-year history of the event.

On page 200, under Social Media at the Forum, my longtime friend Lance Knobel is credited with establishing the first WEF blog, in 1999, Davos Newbies.

Just after that it says, in "2000, Dave Winer, founder and CEO, UserLand Software Inc, became the first blogger invited to attend the Annual Meeting."

Of course that's not quite accurate -- Lance was also there that year, so it's a distinction we share.

Here's a Google query that returns my reports before, during and after Davos.

My favorite picture, and there were many good ones, was of the lunch on the last day, halfway up one of the mountains that surround the town of Davos. And yes, I am wearing a jacket and tie! No kidding.

Bottom-line: It's nice to be remembered! Thanks!

 1/22/2010; 8:10:15 PM  

I just sent this via email to a Twitter board member.

Thanks for including me on the new Suggested Users List, but I have to ask to be taken off it, for the reasons outlined in this piece.

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/01/22/twitterRevampsTheSulAddsAT.html

People might think that I held back criticism for Twitter if I got this boost from the company providing the communication platform.

I know this because I've already felt inclined to withhold criticism because getting the approval feels nice.

I imagine it feels good from the other side, to be able to control who gets approval and not. This is why I feel very strongly that you should immediately, as an urgent priority, get a new system in place that returns your company to being a service provider with absolutely zero interest in how your system is used by individuals.

Dave

 1/22/2010; 12:48:31 PM  

First a few necessary recitals.

1. I've written about the Suggested Users List many times.

2. It was a terrible idea and poorly implemented, because...

3. It created two levels of users, insiders and outsiders, illustrating and propogating the bad attitude of Silicon Valley tech companies relative to their users.

4. It screwed with the integrity of every person and organization that was on the list, or who hoped to be on it. Would they be more likely to praise Twitter, and less likely to criticize them, if they're on it or want to be on it? I think it was pretty obvious at times that they used it as a tool to control the press.

5. It destroyed the value of the one potential metric for authority, follower count. For people on the list, the number became meaningless. The argument that no one pays attention to follower counts is easily disproved by countless press reports where number of followers is cited as evidence of popularity and authority.

6. It also screwed with the integrity of people who aren't on the list. Tim O'Reilly accused both Scoble and myself of criticizing the list because we weren't on it. So cynical! (And wrong.) He had lots of company in making that accusation, btw.

7. Further, recommendation engines are not and never have been rocket science. There are a number of developers, without access to all the information that twitter.com has, who've done a much better job than the SUL or its new incarnation (more on that in a bit).

8. Facebook has a recommendation engine which is eerily good at predicting who I'll be interested in hooking up with. It tends to spot people who I've decided deliberately not to befriend. Annoying, but proves the point that this is one thing that algorithms do better than humans.

9. Probably the worst thing about the SUL is that it rubs our nose in the fact that we're slaves to corporate media, that our presence here is owned and controlled by a company that hasn't established any boundaries of what it will and won't do, no matter what effect that might have on editorial content. People who assume that Twitter won't do something because it's unfair, unwise, or hurts the integrity of the users or the platform, are making a baseless assumption. They've proven otherwise, through the horrific example of the Suggested User List.

Okay, so yesterday they released a new version of the SUL, and it's missing one of the most disturbing things about the SUL -- that it created a random list of 20 elite Twitterers for each new user to follow. How new users find followers now is again a mystery -- but none of my business. I totally don't care about that. That really is between Twitter and the new users. But the damage is done. Follower-count is a meaningless metric. There are two levels of users. Maybe the integrity issue is gone, but who knows what the next iteration of the SUL will look like. They haven't said.

Now, the twist. They put me on the new list. Since I found out I was there, I haven't posted anything on my Twitter account, because that's a terrible place to discuss something like this, and until I decide what to do I want to be very clear about whether I've gained from being on the new list. I can't benefit from it if I don't post. Also there are still too many unknowns about the new setup. There's been no communication from an officer of the company about what this means and what the future holds.

I'm going to stop right there for now. If you have any thoughts please post them here. As usual, personal comments will be moderated. You can use your own blog for that. Stick to the topics in this post, and no name-calling. Thanks.

Update: Twittercism calls it the "Same old SUL with a different coat of paint."

Update: I asked to be removed from the list.

 1/22/2010; 7:34:38 AM  

The Times has something very valuable that it isn't selling, that it's in the business of selling. There is a very simple idea that, if done right, could solve all their money needs and get with the flow of the web, instead of walling themselves off from it.

Rebooting The News: A breakthrough for the Times?

Clear your desk and your mind. Sit down and spend five minutes reading and thinking before commenting. Thanks!

 1/21/2010; 9:01:30 AM  

I wrote a too-short and too-cryptic piece last week that begs a more to-the-point treatment.

There was the web and then there was Web 2.0. The difference is dimension. The first version of the web, though it was never the intention of the designer, was one-way. Publishing was hard, very few people did it. Lots of reading, not much writing. Blogging changed all that, writing got very easy, then richer, to the point where lots of professional publications now use blogging software. Mission accomplished.

Texting was always a read-write medium, and very simple, but like 1.0 of the web, was one-dimensional. Texts were limited in how they could be combined and routed. Enter Twitter, a puzzle -- what the frack is it? We spent three-plus years puzzling it out, in the end it has a rather simple explanation -- it's the next version of SMS. You can do everything in Twitter you can do in SMS, and so much more. But essentially it feels very much like SMS, the same way blogging is very much like the web (so much so that that statement seems ludicrous).

If this is true, what can be done with this observation? I think a lot.

All of today's great handheld computers, the iPhones and Droids and Pres etc can do SMS as a very basic function. But what about a phone that's designed to do SMS 2.0 out of the box? How would that be different from the phones we're using today? A thought exercise, perhaps an opportunity for brain explosions.

 1/20/2010; 5:45:44 PM