Decentralized Twitter, day 2
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Interesting comments continue to appear in the thread we started yesterday.
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Matt Terenzio: "Why we wouldn't use XMPP as the basis for a decentralized microblogging platform?" Good question. I'd like to play with some simple systems on XMPP. I tried to get started with some scripts connecting to Google's Jabber server over the weekend but wasn't able to get a conversation going. I'll try again soon.
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Yesterday's piece, lightly edited, on the Huffington Post. http://x98.us/jz  I think it looks pretty good over there!
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I just woke up in Paris, it's 5:34AM here, but back in California, it still never ceases to amaze me, the day hasn't yet flipped. You guys haven't even gone to bed yet! Now that's amazing to me. What perseverence! Keep up the good work everybody.  I just started posting a couple of twits that really should be a blog post, so let's get started. First at some point, after a suitable period of mourning, I'd like to rasie the issue of what's to happen with Marc Orchant's web presence. Which of course is a way of focusing attention on all of our web presences.  None of us like to think of it, but truth is none of us are going to live forever. Yet if you read this, it's likely that you're creating a digital body that can and imho should continue to exist even after your physical body stops existing. People are humble, no one wants to come out and say their work has any value that's worth preserving past their death, but come on, we know that's not true. If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing on the web. As would Hemingway or Faulkner, Vonnegut or Mailer, John Lennon or Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandberg or Robert Frost. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. You think there isn't any great literature out there on the web? I wouldn't be so sure about that. What if there is? And what if a baby born today becomes a great creative force? Or what if there's a social disaster like the Holocaust? Did you know that there are preserved diaries from pre-revolutionary America? Writings of ordinary people can be of enormous help to historians. And if we believe in citizen journalism (I do) why not citizen historians? Shouldn't we be thinking out into the future? We should! With all possible humility, I'd like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn't it ridiculous that that's what it depends on? And when my sites disappear so will my uncle's. He died in 2003. His site is still accessible because I keep it that way. When I die, who will will take over for me? I'm sure the world will survive without his writing, but why? If I love the memory of my uncle, and I do, what can I do to reserve a place for him in the archive of the future. It seems such a small thing, but it's most of what remains of his life.  And what of academics, Nobel Laureates and others? I know for a fact that a great university (Harvard) has no plan to protect their web-based work after they pass. It's so ironic that the web offers an archival solution for non-digital work, yet the web information is more fragile than the physical stuff. Preserving our digital heritage is going to require some foresight, some planning, but it seems possible and we surely can do much better. Marc's fate awaits us all. While we're still alive, there's still time to solve this problem. When we're gone, it will be too late. Part of his legacy can be that he helped focus us on this issue, and his life work could be a great test case. Do we want to see his work preserved? And if so, how will it be done? PS: The RSS 2.0 site will likely persist, because I gave it to Berkman, and then used it as a test case to learn about future-safing. It seems likely to continue to exist, knock wood, praise Murphy, as long as Harvard exists.
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Last summer, when I was exploring the edges of Twitter, and building a voicemail service that hooked into Twitter with BlogTalkRadio, and then hooking my digital camera up to Twitter through Flickr, it seemed inevitable that Twitter would eventually support "payloads" so that objects like pictures and MP3s could hitch a ride on a Twitter message without using up any of he 140 characters, and with a neat url-less display.  The idea just kind of sat there, we've been quietly using the services, accepting their awkwardness, but without direct support from Twitter, they probably won't become mainstream.  Along comes Twitxr, in a post by Mike Arrington on TechCrunch, and I go -- why? This doesn't seem right. Too many steps. I have it much easier, Twitter is hooked right up to my camera, I never have to get my desktop or laptop in the loop when I want to post a picture. To prove the point, I'll now take a picture of this post, and shoot it up to Twitter.  So now Twitxr basically says it's time to give up the wait for Twitter, and maybe they're right, but for this??? I don't really think this is what I want. If I have to use a whole new Twitter for photography, I probably want it to be Flickr, which I already use, whose API we've already mastered, whose scaling we trust, and even though Yahoo's future is in doubt, it's more certain than that of a startup. Choice #1, if the Twitter guys are listening, is to go ahead and help us, your developers, create something seamless out of what you already have. No matter what it's easier for users to stay with what they're already using. It really isn't, it seems to me, in your interest to have users switch?? Twitxr throws down a challenge to both Flickr and Twitter. To Twitter: Scale, scale, scale and add payloads to the API. To Flickr: Go ahead and do an event streamer for pictures.
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When I was in college, professors used to ask questions that are much harder than the question Allen Stern asks in this piece.  The NY Times crossword puzzle is harder. Geez, installing a new hard disk in a MacBook is harder, and as I've found out that's pretty easy.  Okay what is Twitter's business model?  They give away access to the API only to find that add-on devs have a business model selling Twitter clients while Twitter itself is left sucking air.  And this is some kind of problem? We should all be so lucky. Here's what you do if you're Twitter.  Distribution. How much you want to bet that Twitteriffic reaches a very small number of Twitter users.  Twitter, of course, reaches every Twitter user. So what could be easier than to offer to sell everyone a client that makes Twitter work a lot better?  And of course Twitter would be entitled to some of that money. Now, imagine that Twitter was really ambitious and they wanted to design a cell phone around Twitter. One that could make phone calls and play MP3s and do SMS but also had Twitter baked in.  Okay, so you can't imagine Twitter getting into the hardware business or being a cell phone service provider. But what if one of those did a deal with Twitter, or even bought Twitter? Then you'd be paying a monthly service fee to use Twitter, and might have chosen TMobile or Sprint over Verizon or AT&T because they have Twitter and the other guys have Microsoft's ripoff of Twitter. Or Google's. I think there's a premium for being the original guy, if you play it right (I never do, but Evan Williams does this pretty well.) Anyway, there are lots of ways for Twitter to make money once there are enough users. And right now their business is to grow and their first priority is to stabilize their service. This isn't based on inside knowledge, but comes from reading the tea leaves and applying common sense.
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Forward to the (distributed) revolution Comment As the Web 2.0 bandwagon continues its rapidly accelerating path downhill towards the inevitable crash we find ourselves at another turning point in the development of the networked world.â¦
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With the recent acquisition Sun has made (you heard about that, right?), there's tons of resources in the open source community that are talking about it, lots of them are more PHP-specific. Cal Evans has put together a list of some of the PHP bloggers/community memembers that have posted some of their thoughts on the purchase.   With all of the buzz floating around yesterday on this topic, I decided to let some of the dust settle before posting. From everything I've seen, the PHP community is largely positive about the news. [...] As I said, the community at large seems to be pleased with this news. Here are the links I've collected so far.   Names in the list include Andi Gutmans, Lukas Smith and Jaremy Zawodny. There's also a list of some comments from the "pundits" as to what this purchase could mean for the web as a whole.
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MySpace has an impressive lead today, but things can change quickly in the fluid world of mass-market social networking sites. Just ask Friendster.
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On Joshua Eichorn's weblog, there's a new post talking about some of the events covered at their latest PHP London meeting.
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Blog: Interested developers and entrepreneurs get together to talk about what they want to do with the Facebook Platform.
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TechMeme really likes Friday evening's Monkey piece, it's been #1 for almost 24 hours. Even if people still use the Social Graph term, it may have done some good by asking the question -- what's the difference between a network and a graph? In math there is no difference, a network is a graph and vice versa.  I got one thing wrong, apparently the term came from Facebook, presumably as a way of separating what they do from their predecessors.  Dan Farber reported in May. "Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a 'social graph,' the network of connections and relationships between people on the service." Google Trends comparison of "social network" vs "social graph." Fred Wilson posted a comment pointing to a post where he wondered what the graph thing was all about. His post was one that inspired me to write my piece. Buzzwords and phrases are useful if they describe something new. For example, I remember when platform was new, but I didn&#185;t object to it, because it explained a concept that we needed a word for. Today it's still much in use, and there's little or no confusion about what it means. I was doing audio blog posts before we had the term podcast, and I totally got behind it because we needed a word for what we were doing. But social graph is not needed, it makes something simple sound complicated, and we totally need it to sound simple if the problems are going to get solved. They&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes. Another problem with new names for old things is that it tends to push aside the pioneers and makes it sound like newcomers are not also-rans. Fred had a reasonable gripe as a backer of Wasabe when Mint started getting credit for being a first mover. At least they didn&#185;t have the chutzpah to try to make it a trend and give it a buzzword.  Someone is being pushed aside with the term &#179;social graph&#178; likely some competitors of Facebook like MySpace and LinkedIn, and some pioneers are going to lose credit for their innovation if it takes root. It may still take root, but I felt I had to say something. BTW, the title of the post contains a grammatic error because I changed the title to monkey from something else and didn't look carefully at the resulting title.
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New site doses social networking with literate lists. Plus: Is
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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DevShed has posted the second part of their (three part) series looking at the construction of a blogging application in PHP5. In this part, they look at how to handle the user's desire to input entries into the application via a HTML form.   In this second installment of the series, I'll show you how to expand the initial functionality of the already familiar "BlogProcessor" class so that it is capable of addressing all these (displaying all the entries, show the insert/update forms) issues.   They start with the simplest of the group - the displayBlogs method, outputting the full contents of the entries for the blog. Things get a bit tougher with the next step - creating the insert and update forms for pushing content into the database. Finally, they defined the header and footer functionality to make setting up the structure of the page simpler.
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Doc: "A year from now every newspaper will have a newsriver." I think so too because: 1. The idea is so compelling and 2. It's so easy to implement. Thanks so much to Doc Searls for writing a great evangelical piece about the power of rivers. The stream is turning into a current, and soon really will be a river.  It&#185;s so weird to see rivers show up in Facebook, and Twitter is just a big river of all the people you&#185;re following. The idea is actually a descendent of the teletype terminals that used to be in the movies (and for all I know in actual newsrooms). The news would be printed on scrolls of paper, and when a new story would come in it would push all the older stories onto the floor. You could catch up on the news by scrolling back through the news. Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn did it. We&#185;ll all be doing it soon enough. And it really helps to get other people singing the song, esp from within the hallowed halls of Harvard. The more attention we get focused on it, the more other developers will tune in. And what may not be so clear from the narrative is that this project got its start from a meeting I had with some technical people at the Times last week in NY. Like most organizations, it's not of one mind, there are people who are scared of what comes next but there are others who know that the Times has to change. By opening up their internal data to me, all kinds of interesting stuff can happen. We've been here before. The Times are the unsung heroes of RSS, without them it never would have solidified, with the publishing industry falling in behind the Times. It was this consensus that created critical mass for RSS 2.0 in 2002 and 2003. I really hope some of this stuff feeds back into the Times support of RSS. And as you have seen, there are now lots of new opportunities in user interface for news. This is what I do, when I'm in my "flow" -- we're there now again, with a new toy to build and then play with, every day.  Betsy Devine: "Dave Winer has been improving the New York Times for as long as I&#185;ve known him." Phil Windley: "With more sources, who are themselves continuously updating, the keyword river could be as dynamic as you&#185;d want it to be."
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Micro-bogged news feeds While struggling to get its chip machismo back, AMD has decided to distract itself as much as possible by rolling out a new Twitter-based news service.â¦