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via: http://subdigit.com/blog/outsourcing-comments/

“So this is interesting. +Dave Winer (@davewiner) decided to remove [most] commenting from his blog: http://scripting.com/stories/2012/02/19/noComment.html“

I’m trying to re-think commenting from a few different angles. I’m interested in federated comments… a social layer built on top of RSS itself instead of the blogging software and/or 3rd party SaS like disqus. So I started working on an RSS Namespace called inReplyTo.

On the other hand, maybe thats ultimately as futile as the current commenting solutions. Maybe federating comments is a waste of time. Maybe their needs to be a more deliberate and serious commenting system that just works via email. Accept responses to an article and moderate them as you normally would but instead of approving, rejecting, blacklisting etc…. just choose to publish the few that compliment your article nicely. This can be done maybe by simply forwarding the email to a special address that handles the content without further action on the author’s part.

Maybe alternatively, an author could choose to link to a page that displays the log of referring sites. Possibly with a filter to remove blacklisted domains etc. Passive trackbacks.

If nothing else, its an interesting topic to think about. Dave’s “No Comment” decision, which I have been anticipating for several months, forces the issue even more.

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I posted a quick comment over on rumproarious.com mentioning my RSS related blogging project. Alex asked for more info so i started to elaborate but it went long so i pushed it over here as a blog post instead.

This is just another rehash of the RSS Garden project. I have actually abandoned updates there but i have been using it and developing it further over on apocalyp.to.

it is/was my way of evangelizing an RSS resurgence by writing code. it’s partially an art project but the end result is my own minimalist blogging/bookmarking/podcasting tool.

i had a few rules before i began coding. like…. “Everything is RSS” or “No Database” or “No Sessions/Cookies” or “No Admin Backend” or “Must be Portable/Upload and Run”.

i built out the necessary form handlers that create RSS feeds, feed items, opml news rivers and new users. i use RSS to power the user directory, comments, friend feeds (users you follow/friend merged into one feed), feed feeds (all your own feeds merged into one feed), files feeds (podcasts filtered by audio, video, image or all mixed formats), reading lists (feeds of remote subscribed RSS feeds in RSS and OPML formats) and so on. RSS is in every corner of my little platform. It is both the data store and the frontend. in most web browsers, if you view source on a page, you will see RSS instead of HTML etc. not to say that i dont use HTML, obviously i do. but RSS is whats generated and sent to the browser from the server primarily.

i use XSLT, an old web standard, to transform RSS feeds into HTML/CSS/JS pages/interfaces. The RSS references the XSL stylesheet which causes the web browser to fetch the template(s) once and render the page on the client-side using the browsers own XSLT engine. in other words, my server does not do rendering, your browser does. this is actually a scaleable technique since it off-sets the load from my little server to your fast powerful machine instead. my server sends static content (RSS + Templates once).

my project intended on demonstrating a few things. obviously, it is to show support for RSS and making it do a lot more than what it is normally used for (news reading). i essentially built a private version of Twitter (a microblogging platform) built on old open standards without reinventing the wheel. i also wanted to show how XSLT can be quite useful but most web browsers hijack RSS feeds and try to override a publisher’s own XSL stylesheet references. this is an issue that has bothered me for years so for this project, i injected the necessary hacks to trick the browsers so that they let ME style my feeds instead of forcing the browsers own RSS UI. lastly, it was an exercise in writing minimalistic code, design, experience and functionality.

of course i am the only user, despite a few curious people now and again. and that is fine. not attempting to be one of the pinnacle open source projects like Diaspora. nothing to prove, just having fun with my ideas and existing infrastructure that is too often ignored, dismissed or forgotten. their is a lot of tech out there that works well yet many young developers have the urge to re-create solutions that re-solve problems. sometimes thats cool and i agree with the efforts, sometimes i think its fucking annoying and stupid.

oh yeah, i also injected my appreciation for email into my project. i post a lot using email from my phone. often the posts with media files (RSS enclosures/podcasts) come from my phone via email. email also has something called an “outbox” which doubles as an automated backup of posts. and its a distributed, open standard too

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I talk a little about how I want to use Apocalypto for storytelling and
authoring to html5 based multimedia output engine by leveraging
interpretable hashtags and natural text instructions.

http://apocalyp.to/u/sull/profile/item/1325534232928

http://apocalyp.to/users/sull/feeds/profile/enclosures/1325534232928.mp3

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This will be a good sandbox for the inReplyTo namespace as well. See http://xmlns.inreplyto.me for more info on that component.

Create a new user on apocalyp.to here: http://apocalyp.to/do/newUser

Why the name apocalyp.to? The Greek derivative “apokalypto” means: to uncover; disclose, reveal.
I had planned on using it for an experimental publishing engine that I was going to build and it would output a weekly or monthly digest of global news and art media. A cultural interactive mesh. With a web comic too . I decided that rssgarden could evolve into the aforementioned publishing system. So I installed it there and am hoping to get at least a few users to help me out with it.

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Reading Lists in the context of RSS feeds is an OPML (or RSS or RSS with OPML embedded or RDF or….) file that contains a list of feeds that someone is subscribed to and is meant to be shared as a suggested feed list for others to subscribe to. Or maybe its a subset of feeds that are of a specific category or a top list of feeds etc. Theoretically, this dynamic Reading List is pulled in by other people’s aggregator software and any changes to it would be reflected (synchronized) to all users who have subscribed to the list. This last part might not be a requirement since a user could just import the Reading List (i.e. static OPML file) into their feed reader. But the idea is more about letting someone else curate a list for you. New and/or removed feeds would be the decision of the trusted Reading List Curator. I don’t know what software currently supports this besides Dave Winer’s stuff.

Today, probably the most similar thing that exists on a major centralized service is Twitter Lists. Though this could be leveraged for what I am proposing, a Whitelist used to filter replies to blog posts, I am instead more focused on decentralized solutions and the more traditional open web blogosphere. So let’s put Twitter aside for now.

First, a brief explanation of the world of RSS that I am envisioning…

Blogging tools would only output RSS feeds which would get rendered by RSS readers, aggregators and other template-based web presentation engines. In other words, RSS is the first class citizen and primary output of blogging tools. The way it is normally done is in reverse. RSS is generated as a secondary dynamic XML source that usually pulls content from a database (i.e. mysql) and outputs the latest x posts. The content is displayed on the web using database queries (and cached copies of HTML in some cases) and templates from themes. I have built things that run in a different order and priority and rely more heavily on static files both locally and archives in the cloud (i.e. Amazon S3). My most recent blogging tool, rssgarden.com, uses XSLT to render RSS feeds in the client-side browser with HTML/Javascript/CSS templates. The web server is only distributing static (and sometimes dynamic) xml files to the users web browser and the web browser’s own engine transforms that raw XML into the familiar styling of an HTML web page. This offsets some of the processing load from the web server and onto the users powerful machine.

With my vision of this stuff and the way I have developed my tools, everything is RSS. So, comments are RSS feeds as well. They are pulled in and included with other feeds that are being presented on a page via the XSLT stylesheets (document() function). Their is no comment plugin from a 3rd party company (i.e. disqus.com) or native commenting module that requires a database connection. Comment threads are just another smart RSS feed. Smart because I have added some experimental enhancements using the inReplyTo RSS namespace. Which leads me back to the topic of whitelists for replies.

Like Trackbacks, inReplyTo will suffer from spam if/when it ever catches on. The concept is similar but adapted more for the modern social web and my own interpretations of how everything works and connects together. Trackbacks have evolved in the form of federated protocols like Salmon. I may very well just support Salmon or the superset Zot!. But I am also on the fence thinking about simpler and maybe even more socially natural ways to accomplish anti-spam. So before I get all geeky and just evangelize and implement these other protocols for distributed messaging and notifications, I want to make sure that I have thought through the simpler side of it all and if something seems interesting enough, it might be worth another blog post or a prototype.

If inReplyTo is something I continue to work on and move forward, alone or with others, then fighting spam is going to be the priority otherwise the whole thing is moot. Being different than Trackback buys time but eventually, the spammers will come. So outside of the world of crypto, what can be done? The obvious thing is Whitelists (and Blacklists). This is what blogging tools natively build into their products to handle spam from comments and trackbacks. The blog author has to moderate and mark comments as spam and rely on some other optional algorithm engines such as WordPress’s Akismat technology. But what if their was a smart reference point unique to the blog author that can automate the creation of a Whitelist? That is where the idea of Reading Lists as Whitelists for blog comments comes into play.

I’m thinking that if people started making a Reading List available online somewhere, ideally within their own hosted website directory but truly it could be any public URL and even a Google Docs URL (more on that later), then that would be the basis for of a trusted network of people, of bloggers, that can be leveraged as the distributed reply system’s Whitelist (optionally). If you want to leverage this trust network, you would enable the feature in your software that supports this system and once enabled, you would ONLY receive @replies and @mentions from those who are within the trusted network formed by Reading Lists. Notice I said ListS (plural). That is because this system would take advantage of a network of linked Reading Lists. As a user of supporting software, you could create or enable a “List of Lists” that consists of many trusted Reading Lists and this could also provide something like “Inherited Trust” where you can pick a list and choose to trust all lists discovered within that list. In other words, you want to trust those who are trusted by who you trust yourself. All of these trusted sources combined would make up the master Whitelist which is used to control where distributed messaging (private, public replies, random mentions) can be received from. All other incoming messages would go into an “Untrusted” queue which you can browse at will and manually trust sources or keep as untrusted by doing nothing.

It would help if more users had their own domain names but technically, a trusted source is a trusted URL of any blog or website that is participating in this system. Occasionally, all URLs should be checked for validity and purge out deadlinks or suspected as spam (expired domains registered by spammers)

A spammer will be detected quickly and once removed from one list, it propagates and gets removed from all. This could also be a problem as soon as some trigger-happy people start marking sources as spammers and affecting others who may disagree. In this case, it might need to go through a ripple process where the change needs consensus by x sources before it automatically get labeled as legitimate spam. This ripple would start at the closest related source of the questionable source and move outward to a proper pre-determined level at which point consensus is either made and source is marked as spam or it fails and source is not deleted. Whatever the solutions are, it feels like they can be feasible solutions within the concept of this People-Powered system that circumvents (or maybe coexists with?) algorithmic-centric solutions.

I’ll be doing some research on this to find similar thinking or experiments that exist and the results etc. I doubt this is a unique idea but it does seem interesting enough to think about and warranted a blog post. Please let me know what you think. Oh and regarding Twitter Lists, i’ll write about that another time. But I am reminded of some very cool experiments that I am following and probably, now that I think of it, has inspired some of these thoughts today.
Check out punkmoney.org and GiftPunk.

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1. Google gets a patent on reading lists (Scripting News)
2. Twitter’s New ‘Lists’ Feature Finally Introduces Grouping, Offers An Alternative To The SUL
3. P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Should a free RSS Cloud replace Twitter?

entrepreneurs (especially the tech-focused) who “get lucky” usually need to: have great timing; fill a void (that should be filled); sacrifice a normal healthy lifestyle; be surrounded by more willing and able bodies.

in a sense, doing this when you are young (putting college aside) is smart since the above criteria are more easily met. these young adults can either go through 4-10 years of college, be tight on money and incur large amounts of debt, hope to get a job and still have a passion for whatever it was that they just spent the last several years of academia life focused on and in general… hope for the best.

entrepreneurism should be discouraged by pointing out the severe failure rates and common inevitability of shifting to plan B (see above). at the same time, failure is good, especially rapid failure. but you can only fail so much before the towel gets thrown in the ring and you go home.

entrepreneurism should be encouraged by pointing out the horrid state of the economy and the job market, the variety of opportunities and new industries that are still evolving despite (and because of) these “interesting times” that we live in, and that being an entrepreneur is a very american way of life and we should exercise those freedoms. it is also interesting to see the possibilities around crowdfunding for micro-investing in new companies/technologies/ideas/products.

either way, the harder of the two paths should be noted as being the path of the entrepreneur (imo). so with that said, i agree that this should be reiterated by mentors, career counselors, parents etc.

oh and… nobody gets out alive

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I have also been reviewing the Salmon Protocol again and more interestingly, a superset of it called Zot!. It is designed to handle all of these actions in an open and distributed way.

While I am not sure where I will end up on my own implementations of FSW projects and how to best add a simple social layer on top of RSS feeds, I am also entertaining some ideas around being a 3rd party web service for facilitating certain aspects of Federated Social Web Protocols. I suppose the correct terms here are “Relying Party (RP)” and external “Identity Provider (IdP)” or “Attribute Provider (AtP)” for what I am referring to. inreplyto.me was used for this purpose while I developed rssgarden.com with the inReplyTo Namespace integrated for comments. And I am now interested in doing something similar but for “@mentions” and will deploy at whoMentioned.me.

More info soon.

Related posts:

1. Reading Lists As Whitelists For Blog Comments
2. inReplyTo RSS Namespace Reboot

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1. inReplyTo.me
2. [InReplyTo] Robert Scoble’s Comment InReplyTo TechCrunch
3. [InReplyTo] “Death of the checkin 1.0″ by Adrian Chan

“It sounds like Gourley actually wants a curated experience where new users only see elitist content. That’s cool that he’s explaining that. I think it leaves open a market opportunity for Google+ and Facebook.”

This is probably the key observation that you made in your comment.
It bleeds into the business of the SUL (Suggested User Lists). Twitter can monetize premium content streams more so than regular user content streams so highlighting such channels from news organizations, brands, celebs, politicians and A list bloggers etc. makes sense from a business standpoint.

All the rest of it, the social networky stuff from the 99%… thats the services back channel in a way. The noise, the pulse that matters less. The flow that has gems but those are the exception and gems can be pulled into the 1% as a featured/suggested source to follow. This also means that innovation on enhancing the experience and utility of Twitter’s back channel may be limited. It’s also possible that Twitter is unable to easily add new features to their platform due to the sheer volume of real-time data and the vulnerabilities to destabilizing the network. For example, some of the noise controls you want Twitter to have could be a real technical challenge on such a vast network. Simple modifications to queries can lead to disaster. It requires long periods of testing and QA on an equivalent test environment and then trickle roll-outs on production env. Unfortunately, mass adoption can stifle innovation.

I think it’s a mistake for Twitter to not continue down the path of becoming the type of “new media company” that FB and G+ are becoming. This is an identity complex for them. They don’t want to follow and copy, they want to pioneer and originate. The concern here is that if they lose focus on the 99% users, then they may devalue their product by losing the audience to other services that are serving users social sharing needs AND content consumption needs. I have gone out on a limb before to say that Twitter needs to continue to become more like FB and G+ and even offer a separate long-form blogging service that seamlessly integrates with the Tweet timelines among other features for media storage/galleries etc.

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1. Just realized that the comment feature h…
2. [inReplyTo] “Outsourcing Comments” by Robi B of subdigit.com
3. A Comment to “Imaginationland” on Andy’s Blog Regarding 140limit on Twitter

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/domain-name-local-ly-sold-for-100000/

It does raise my curiosity a bit being that vocal.ly is different by a single letter character. But i’m also reminded that a lotto ticket off my a single digit is usually worthless But I won’t be selling vocal.ly for a pittance either.

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Knowing this, the Hulu owners tried to sell Hulu as the pretty wrapping paper around its content/licenses with a few years exclusivity added into the deal. Though their was interest, their was no company gullible enough to fall for this and essentially over-pay for Hulu.

The future of Hulu will probably end up with the owners separating the relationship and if anything, one or more of the owners could utilize any useful technology for their own backends running on their other different Internet properties. “Hulu”, as a consumer-facing brand, may go away or may be used in the same vein as a TV Guide or some other Online TV/Entertainment Portal concept. But I don’t see Hulu being a Netflix type of competitor after 2-5 years or sooner. Pushing Hulu forward in its current form will not make sense long-term even if it can sustain itself (on paper). Hulu was born to challenge YouTube on TV content and the piracy issues and it did that well. But beyond that narrow goal in 2007, it has not been able to become much more and exists in a crowded and difficult market to proper in. Their are still too many players and revenue control concerns to provide the kind of a la carte TV experience that people truly want to have.

This post is inReplyTo http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/13/why-hulus-owners-couldnt-find-a-buyer/

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Rumble from the people

Back in October 2008, when Wall Street was crashing on American investors, workers and taxpayers -in that order – our independent presidential campaign held a major rally at Wall Street. Addressing the New York Stock Exchange, with our participators and their signs, I proposed specific recommendations for law enforcement, a financial transaction tax and accountability for those handling “other peoples’ money.” Few listened.

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Supporting the Occupy Movement is supporting a mass expression of frustration and an open platform for discussion which could lead to clear demands and actionable grassroot initiatives. As long as it stays non-violent, I see no reason not to support its temporary legal existence. Surely, the participants do not all support all of each others ideas and opinions surrounding the core issues that are driving them to occupy in protest.

I am not usually a big supporter or protests unless those who are protesting are willing and able to move onward and do the more mundane boring tasks that are required to make change happen within the current system. You know, the hard and slow stuff. But I do recognize the importance of physical presence and vocal outrage in order to give the issues a pulse.

The Occupy Movement is also significant purely based on the context of polls showing barely any support for Congress (essentially our government) and following recent… dare i say successes… of other ongoing revolutions around the world. Our act of revolution was painfully absent these past few years when you would think that if their ever was a time for a revolt of some sort, it would be now. And suddenly, just when you might think that Americans are soft whiners and confortable enough with our gadgets and crap entertainment to actually formulate a true Movement against the abuses of Corporatism… a small group of people manage to create the ripple.

So yeah, I support it, even if I am still learning wtf it is. You should too.

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This sums up my view perfectly. I declared foursquare a failure so long ago based on this line of thought. Sure, they have had success and may have more success but in the grand scheme of it, they (and most other prominent location based services) have failed. Its possible the failure was intentional and the path they took was the public pre-pivot pitch used to gain traction from early adopters and inve$tor$ and eventually formulate some new more sensible and monetizable product developements. In other words, a way to buy time before posts like this start appearing and rightly announcing the death of checkins (for checkins sake).

The question moving forward is how to find a balance of what is best on an academic level and what is best for a typical user wanting to engage simply yet thoroughly with their social circles and/or beyond them. Something normative must come out of all of this. A new wave of innovation. Hopefully their are many, like myself, who chose to observe this space from the sidelines and/or tinker with advanced concepts as a hobbyist and not as an entrepreneur building a startup company to (prematurely?) capitalize on trends and hype and early touches of innovation around social and activity/action streams. Fresh eyes are needed from the unstuck stock of visionary technologists.

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How to Find Funding | Raising Money

http://www.inventorsdigest.com/archives/7037

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Charlie Sheen and Thom Yorke of Radiohead portray dock workers at the end of their night shift waiting for their bananas to be counted so they can go home. Harry Belafonte sings the soundtrack Day-O Banana Boat Song.

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These 3rd party services monitor their users feeds for updates and then pushes those posts into Twitter on your behalf using the Twitter API. Technically, this is perfectly reasonable. If API limits are reached, such companies work through details of their partnerships and whitelisting terms etc. But what if these terms become undesirable or unsustainable for these 3rd party companies? Twitter could easily kill this segment of the ecosystem too and push publishers to form direct partnerships with them instead. Twitter could offer support and provide software/plugins or refer to existing solutions that help publisher’s CMS to connect directly to the Twitter API instead of through a 3rd party service.

Why would Twitter do this? The obvious reason would be a reiteration about “System Health” and reducing spam.
Essentially, this would be Twitter Pipe Cleaning. And i’m not saying it would necessarily be a bad thing either. Personally, I have used the Twitter API directly many times with my own custom software or other apps such as WordPress plugins. It’s not difficult. But some of these 3rd party services are very good and enticing. I choose the service at dlvr.it for cross-posting some of my content into Twitter. Other people praise twitterfeed.com who enjoys a very large user base right now. These services work well and are easy to use and setup. But this is also why these services can be abused and become a source for spam into Twitter.

Ideally, Twitter will allow these services to continue to run and monitor them for the type of content that comes through them. If the content is too spammy, they will get warnings and blocked when necessary. This is how it is setup now (regardless of whether or not Twitter staff/software is on top of this or not). Yet, it is entirely within the realm of possibility that twitter may prefer to make it easier on themselves and close down open automated content importing and place emphasis on partner relations with publishers instead.

Total speculation here but I would not be surprised at this point. And the truth is, the more Twitter reveals itself as a utility with certain terms and conditions and restrictions… it allows for the more open flow of content within federated networks to remain viable and relavant to the future of the Interwebs. The Open Web becomes harder to dismiss when corporate interests start to seep out into the culture of developers and publishers who are the ones that help to create these rare bottom-up network entities that become a global cultural phenomena. It’s great to have Twitter but this greatness needs to be balanced with decentralized networks that are void of any corporate financial interests.

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I plan to write another post or two about inReplyTo and inReplyTo.me soon. This is just a prelude.

Here is a reference to work done by Brian Hendrickson – http://brianhendrickson.com/2010/09/swat0-and-a-salmon-like-flow-for-rss/

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In 2009, I was experimenting with ideas around simple publishing/blogging tools and “recipes”. Stuff that avoided bloat and over-complexity. Minimilist solutions. I enjoyed it and to be honest whenever I open up this WordPress blog, I get frustrated knowing how much bloat is under the hood of this thing. Sure, it looks ok up here where the 2 or 3 people who may visit this blog every month can see it. But I am a minimilist at heart and WordPress is quite the opposite is a lot of ways. But I continue to use it for this particular blog until I muster up the motivation and time to get rid of it. I can live with it. But lately I am writing some code to continue my experimentations in minimilist blogging.

This new project is called RSS Garden. I started with the rule that I had to base everything from RSS feeds. From the data store to profiles to social features. Everything had to be an RSS Feed first. I also set a rule that the server would deliver these RSS feeds (often static files) directly to the browser without any server-side rendering and instead let the client-side web browser use it’s own built-in capabilities and resources to do page rendering. To achieve this, I once again added the old technology known as XSLT to the minimilist stack. Together, they would be two pillars of this….. let’s just call it a framework for sake of ease.

Other tech involved includes very basic PHP (mostly just CRUD and XML construction and a small set of API related functions) and of course HTML, CSS and Javascript. RSS Garden supports multiple Themes via XSLT Stylesheets and the aforementioned presentation layer components for styling and UX. The default theme is nothing fancy and that’s the point. But I think it’s heading in a good minimilist direction for demonstration purposes.

The default theme emphasizes a Twitter-like experience with short-form posts and some social functionality like “Friend Following” and Replies/Comments. but a theme could skip out on the social networking type of stuff and just focus on blogging/writing or file sharing or link sharing. A theme could also be made to work like a media gallery and not like a blog at all. Obviously, their are no constraints to creativity when you understand some basic knowledge about web development. And at this point, that is required to build a theme. However, it is no more complex than a WordPress or Drupal theme. In many ways, it is actually simpler.

RSS Garden has some awareness initiatives too. I want to raise the issue about how web browsers hijack RSS feeds and dismiss a content publisher’s machine-readable instructions to use standards-based technology to render the output of the feed. I am talking about the XSLT stylesheet declaration in a feed that is meant to tell the web browser how to present the document. This applies to any XML document but when the format of the XML is discovered to be RSS, the web browsers think they know whats best for users and ignore the stylesheets in favor of their own built-in feed handling. I think this has gone on way too long and i’m hoping that in the future, web browser makers do the right thing. RSS Garden uses trickery in order to avoid this RSS feed hijacking.

Another issue that I want to raise awareness of is the lack of XSLT support in the stock Android web browser. This is very disappointing especially when the stock web browser on iOS devices handles XSLT.
This needs to change sooner than later.

And in general, RSS Garden attempts to show support for RSS, a powerful and meaningful data format that has changed the Interwebs for the better over the last 5-10 years. However, it is common for RSS to get dismissed these days as old, slow and increasingly irrelevant technology in light of centralized corporate owned services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and eventually Apple among many other smaller companies. RSS represents a wild uncontrollable technology (in the eyes of corporate interests) that is best suited for the Open Web and is hard to wrangle and monetize. It also gets a bad rap because the consumer-facing side of RSS has had limited success in comparison to things like social networks or even email. Yet, RSS is incredibly pervasive and continues to be important enough for many of the worlds most respected publications to incorporate into their flow. Their are also more recent efforts to reboot RSS as it continues to be deeply applicable to todays Social and News Info Ecosystem. Pardon my lack of references but i’m not trying to be thorough here….. just say’n

So RSS Garden, for me, is a way to continue to have fun with code while demonstrating how a basic technology stack can be used by DiYers in the blogging and publishing world to remove dependence on corporate silos, challenge over-complex solutions (both open and closed) and contribute to federated and decentralized social pub/sub alternatives.

For more info and to check out the current state of the software, go to http://rssgarden.com.

Related posts:

1. inReplyTo.me
2. Yet Another Rant on RSS and Related Topics of Federating the Social and News Pipelines
3. RSS isn’t Dead… My comment

“The Twitters” in my title refers to any service who has relied on Twitter (API, FireHose, Partnerships etc) and has evolved to the point where their own user base is significant enough to lift them out from a reliance on Twitter. They get into a position where they become their own competing realtime Info Network. The Twitters are typically companies that have revolved around their Twitter Client Software which is where many users interact with Twitter. It is this business that Twitter has been trying to kill slacken in order to control the user experience with consistent UI and of course to “control the flow”. Twitter continues to modify developer terms and tighten access to the pipes.

Twitter purchased the most popular iOS Twitter Client (Twitter for iPhone) and released their own official Android app and they are working to improve upon the consistent user experience in the coming months. Meanwhile, It’s been interesting to watch how companies have been pivoting and strategizing in response to Twitter’s clamp-down. Some shift focus to the Enterprise market while others who have the resources gear up in a different way.

UberMedia has been a significant player and most recently acquired TweetDeck, arguably the most popular Twitter Client independent of Twitter, Inc’s own apps. Now in order to evolve in this space and move forward, 3rd party companies will need to balance between partnerships and competition with Twitter. Their will likely be a tilt where we will see more emphasis on the competition side with more increased pricing by Twitter for access to their FireHose and smaller data stream options in addition to other entries into the Twitter product lines. But partnerships will of course still be in the mix. It may take a while before these companies play nice with each other though. It seems that we’re entering a fierce phase where small developers are certainly left in the dust and larger companies are shaken up… and those who remain afloat will be the fittest and best candidates for new partnership terms. Their are a few other companies that are probably worth mentioning but UberMedia seems to be the most relavant and agressive player right now. Just look at their site and see how many Twitter related products are a part of their line-up. Not to mention that it was born out of Bill Gross‘s IdeaLab.

Obvious stuff, right? Monetization via ads is still the business at hand here. Sure, their is some experimentation and innovation and money-making outside of ads (most just different/new forms of ad units) but these companies are gearing up for the next revolution in the ad market… beyond what Google has done in Search….. Now it is the monetization of Social and News. When twitter charges for the FireHose, it’s not really to make money. They are weeding out solo developers, unfundables and dying startups. Likewise, their product offerings are all targeted to big pockets (for now). Business is Business. Way it is. Way it should be. Even when it doesn’t start out that way. Truth is, developers who latched on to twitter’s open API in any serious manner (starting a real business) had to do so while knowing the inevitable evolution of a successful mass-adopted service. If you expected an everlasting Utopia, then that’s your own fault.

So what are we going to see happen next? Will we see a shift similar to the Myspace Fall and Facebook Rise in the next 3-5 years where Twitter loses its traction as one or two viable competing networks rises to the top? Will it inevitably be in the control of Mass Media Channels and which Darling Company they pick next and plaster all over their TV shows, newspapers, magazines, radio, apps, web etc? Would Twitter have risen as they have without the FREE promotion they received from the Celebrity Circle (not to mention the early adopters in the tech Industry)?. Either way, Twitter has enough money and traction to last more than five years at or near the top…. probably closer to ten years. Still, UberMedia and NewCos are out there and coming. And it will be very interesting to see the co-evolution of Social & News Info Networks.

I can’t end without talking up the little guy. Yeah a little something called the Open Web. Quite vast and powerful as it is, it has been getting pushed aside in favor of focused centralized corporate efforts that can iterate and (re)invent and (re)innovate quickly and ruthlessly (dismissing most prior art, standards, and working groups etc in favor of proprietary (re)inventions with a sprinkling of patents on top). So what of the Open Web in context to all of this?

The corporate machines involved are not necessarily evil. It can be argued that they in fact are needed in these times of unfathomable realtime data flow. Afterall, they are making huge infrastructure investments and taking on the risks needed in order to bring the masses useful and stable tools of and for the Global Infonet that we are all so jacked into. Still, serious efforts must go into more Open alternatives because Data Portability/Ownership are important issues not only to solo blogging journalist geeks but also to *some* Brands and Companies and Organizations. They want little or nothing to do with the Terms of Use of Corporate Silos that want to control the pipes or be influenced and controlled by governments, investors and shareholder interest. These DIYers may never make up the masses but that is never going to be the real point of this. Powerful voices are out there. Some of them realize that the tools and methodologies involved in self-publishing, socializing and hyper-distributing their content are well within their reach and comprehension. And I think even BigCo does (publicly) admit that a healthy Open Web is a good thing.

And as always, Content Remains King. Wherever it lives.

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“It’s less important how the leaks make their way to their desks. News is now an environment, not a publication. It lives and breathes. That’s what the news orgs still haven’t been willing to embrace.” – Dave Winer

I commented. I did not focus on the latter frustration but rather on the decisions of News Publications to leverage Twitter etc and on the issue of handling and accepting leaked info.

I’ve been thinking about News Publication’s usage of “social” services like Twitter as opposed to and/or in tandem with having their own similar platform for update bursts. They look at this situation as leveraging and taking advantage of the currently available and most relevant services in the social sphere in order to lure mass attention to the real value objects which are the full articles. So they don’t see the river of news as land they need to own…. as long as it flows to the sources.

But the short real-time notification headlines are often the beginning and the end of the transaction. And as we have seen, despite the brevity of the messages being posted, they often say a lot, especially when combined with consecutive related posts. Real value does exist in the river itself.

Either way, these Publications will be pushing their content out to Twitter one way or another. It’s possible that they are using tools that allow them to archive all their activity on social and info networks. So putting aside the issue of data portability, access and ownership…. We are then left with a debate of empowerment. Why should Twitter or NewCo be empowered by info sources and be given the opportunities to monetize and analyze the vast flow? Thats a business topic that might get too off-topic for this comment.

At the end of the day, it takes money (and data) to make money and not many “new” companies are competing to be the next Twitter as the scale that Twitter now enjoys. The Open Web is probably the closest alternative to coexist.

Regarding Leaks…. I believe that Publications should have their own means to accept anonymous leaks. Their should be standards in place for this type of transaction. Likewise, I think that their should be independent leak dropboxes that allow for the info to be distributed to multiple Publications. In the latter, it takes a mix of technology and trusted human relations to be successful. One approach does not replace nor defeat the other.

If News “lives and breathes” then there can be many intelligent logical utilities and processes that are adopted to allow for the most optimized I/O possible.

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http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/duel-of-denial/

Their is truth to their being a certain misguided evangelism of social media services surrounding some recent global uprisings. More than anything else, social media channels ease the amplification of awareness and attention to these matters more so than being an igniter itself. The nature of social networking is that news seeps into your stream rather than you having to actively seek it or subscribe to mailing lists and feeds that are tuned to global news. So for people who don’t normally want “breaking news alerts”, they end up learning about these events through friends and as awareness escalates, so does interest and energy.

Technology as a whole is a big impact here. Phone cameras in particular have repeatedly brought audio/visual footage that have been catalysts to proper action and social discourse. Likewise, it adds to “news entertainment”.

Essentially, people are so deeply connected with their networked devices these days that it is virtually impossible to not be passively involved in current affairs. And people will spread the news to some extent and collectively, add to the virality of the information. But their is nothing particularly special about Twitter etc in terms of making an uprising and/or revolution more feasible or more efficient and organized that other traditional communication tools can’t provide. In fact, with the corporate owned centralized brands that everyone relies on…. they can be deemed less useful to those who truly are involved in the strategies and organization of these movements. Less useful and more risky in terms of privacy/secrecy, reliability and legal interferences. Wikileaks being a great recent case study.

So again…. our Twitters and Facebooks and whatever else is hyped today are best as massive loud-horns and info/propaganda proliferation and extensions of traditional televised news media. Their may be truth is what is spread but their are also lies and distortions and spins and all of this brings dangerous effects.

Though both Paul and Sarah were trying to make valid points on various angles, it is a tough topic to rush in and out of and that showed. I felt like Paul was attempting to make a more valid and interesting point, however.

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Received this book from Amazon today.  Should be a good read and refresher.

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I’m no stranger to the DiY DiSo Federated Web Yadda Etcetera. And though I am not a true fan of WordPress, I’ve been too lazy to migrate this blog off of it since it works well enough. Just not crazy about what’s under the hood. Still, anything of relative importance gets published here first and cross-posted to Twitter. This simple fact is why I don’t see a reason to officially quit Twitter like some have done as statements. I can stop “using” Twitter but still cross-post to it. I own my content, have proper backup and control my digital presence. Twitter is just a way to scatter the bits no matter what, if any, value comes from it. Its automated and takes mere seconds. No bother.

It’s also about the reliance of corporate entities that involve multiple investors looking for a payday. The Internet needs… no it requires an Open Infrastructure and Messaging Pipeline. It is obvious that modern society puts high value on Light-weight Messages distributed to the masses. Twitter is not the solution. It was the Wake-Up Call. The world needs an uncensored system for our inherent freedoms of speech. We are seeing the People’s Digital Landscape disappearing. Whether it is because of a corporation and its policies or government interference…. The People…. us ants… are going to be reduced to compliant narcissistic noise makers unless some serious attention and movement begins now. Otherwise, a schism will have to occur. The Darknets will grow.

Bringing it back down… here is what got me on this train of thought this morning. A clip from this video by Robert Scoble interviewing the founder of LazyScope, an RSS + Twitter Air App. At 22:52 he mentions the Twitter limitation for Embedding 3rd party media on Twitter’s right-sidebar that isused for additional content. Twitter reserves this functionality for a set of ~16 Partners and have chosen to not communicate details on how to become a Content Partner. Twitter only provided an email address (contentpartnerships@twitter.com) which seems to be a black hole since multiple communication attempts over ~3 months have failed to return even an automated/canned response. Thanks Twitter! I’ve embedded the segment below where Instagram is mentioned as an example of how LazyScope is better since Twitter does not embed Instagram Photo links but LazyScope does. I suspect that Instagram will soon have the privilege but it remains a question as to how other projects/companies can get whitelisted by Twitter.

UPDATE: Instagram now supported by Twitter – http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/07/twitter-instagram-rdio/

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wine, fire.  here’s to looking back.  cheers.

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http://gonze.com/blog/2010/11/15/is-hulu-a-solid-company/

Hulu is a fascinating case. Not only because of how and why it sprouted and how they have evolved…. but now even more so as they forge ahead into the challenging space that is the future of TV. Hulu success is not black and white. It’s not a typical startup company. Hulu is a vehicle to traverse through various obstacles that have existed and will exist in the “Internet” TV space. A means to an end. Many ends in fact.

One possible future for Hulu exists more as a backend company to power the existing Brands and Properties that are already valuable, built up over decades, and that have penetrated into our modern culture’s news & entertainment sector. Hulu, the brand and destination site, may become less of a priority, in effect. The audience would be directed to the proper Channels/Shows. On the web, obviously these would be domains/sites. On new interfaces built specifically for TV (i.e. GoogleTV, AppleTV, Roku etc) the concept of domains/sites does not exist and instead you just have a GUI to navigate and search for the channel and show you want to watch. Why would we need a “Hulu” to encapsulate the content and direct brands?

The future of TV does not require TV Guides or mulit-library destination sites like Hulu. The future needs backend infrastructure and, as always, brand penetration. Hulu, in its current form and in this context, gets in the way.

Think about why Comedy Central, CBS and in my opinion the most noteworthy of all…. HBO are not part of Hulu. They don’t need to be. How does Hulu become needed by all? Like I said in my comment on Lucas’s blog, it’s an all or nothing proposition. Way I see it. How about you?

@sull

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Library owned autographed copy.  I actually went to see Ralph Nader on this book tour but did not buy a copy.  I love listening to this “unreasonable man”.

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Tyler Crowley chimes in with great thoughts in a very calm manner. Together with Jason’s vigor, they make a balanced duo that I find enjoyable to watch/listen to.

In this recent episode, a few topics are relevant to my current thinkering. Dave McClure is on. I’ve been playing with Twilio and he is involved with them and started the Twilio Fund (http://500startups.com/twiliofund/index.html) . Also, the Shark Tank session at the end of the show with Chas Wagner of Fanattix.com was interesting to me because of Tyler’s thoughts on how to tap the emotional aspect of the sporting events as a core component to hinge the product on. I completely grok that and spend a good amount of time thinking on social actions and gestures online. Good feedback.

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I thought it might be a fun exercise to build something in this space at some point in time. And as I always do, I like to give it a name and try to grab a domain name to nudge me to work on it. I noticed that many of these services have odd names. I went right for the obvious name this time. And I was somewhat surprised that it was unregistered. So I grabbed NearbyChat.com. It redirects to this blog post for now.

Anyone want to help develop it? I sure don’t have the time right now.

@sull me on Twitter

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Mark Nason Griffin Boot

Mark Nason Griffin Boot

My new boots.

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Murder By Death on NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130976680

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well… more like working *in*.

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At Soul Dog.  A common hangout for us potowners.

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Decent pinot noir.  Mirassou.

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About 5 minutes on each side. Then let sit for 5 to let juices settle down.  Then enjoy the savory moments to follow.

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Here is the video:

http://vocal.ly/file_uploads/VID_20101017_173734.3gp

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