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Supporting the Occupy Movement…
InReplyTo Dave Winer’s piece entitiled “The message of Occupy“.
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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[InReplyTo] “Death of the checkin 1.0″ by Adrian Chan
InReplyTo: http://www.gravity7.com/blog/media/2011/08/death-of-the-checkin-1-0.html
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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Crowdfunding Related Interview for Inventors Digest Magazine
A while ago, I did an interview for Inventors Digest Magazine.
The online version of the article written can be found here:How to Find Funding | Raising Money
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Charlie Banana Head
I made this multimeme remix video for fun. It’s been a long time since i’ve created a video (that required editing). Enjoy.
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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Will Twitter Raise the RSS Shields?
I have not read the Twitter TOS nor researched this much. But we all know about Twitter’s seemingly sudden enforcement of their game rules (new and old). I’m waiting for the next bombshell which I have a feeling might involve how content is imported into Twitter, usually via RSS/Atom feeds, by services such as Twitterfeed, dlvr.it and others.
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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Another possibility is that Twitter itself provides a feature for importing RSS just like many other services do such as Tumblr. This would if effect largely make Twitterfeed etc unnecessary or even violators if Twitter were to add new terms that prevent 3rd party services from importing content on behalf of other users. Twitter may include a curation/filtering layer and of course a volume control to its own RSS import functionality.
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inReplyTo.me
In relation to RSS Garden, I have also started an experimental service provider to handle replies to posts in a distributed manner. This component is about Socializing RSS Feeds. The best way to do this directly is to provide simple mechanisms to let users have conversations on top of RSS Feeds and across the Internet similar to p2p systems. inReplyTo is an RSS Namespace/Extension that i’ve been kicking around with @brianjesse for a while now. Their is prior art and their are other protocols that have similar goals but this hasn’t stopped me from experimenting with my own ideas nor should it. I’m not pushing anything on anyone….. just thinkering going on here.
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/
Will Lee is discussing. 
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RSS Garden
I started yet another side project a week or so ago and I thought i’d write a little something about it here.
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.
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Clash Of The Twitters
Some recent topics that are on my mind having to do with the Twitter Ecosystem might be worth getting out and on to my blog. So here it goes.
“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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Well, the fierce competition I mention in this post are indeed here.
Why did Twitter suspend UberTwitter?
http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Twitter-suspend-UberTwitterhttp://scripting.com/stories/2011/02/18/itsAboutTheUsersDummy.html
http://gigaom.com/2011/02/18/interview-bill-gross-talks-about-twitters-clampdown/
etcetera.
Twitter’s true light shining bright today. #fail
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A forgotten Roboto Account
The other day I stumbled onto the site http://robo.to.
I remember when it was launched and how it was yet another one of my ideas incarnated by others (which i’ve learned to love! . This one was called “MotionAvatar.com” and I pitched it to @natdefreitas as a way to leverage one of his projects at the time, a video transcoding service (mux.am). Anyway, here is the sole robo.to update that I added. I look exhausted and defeated. heh.
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News Lives And Breathes
Dave Winer makes some brief points today about News Publications relationships with information I/O (i.e. Twitter, Wikileaks, Open Web) in a post that also expresses frustration with the unnecessary character assaults on Julian Assange or anyone who dares to lead and be a public face for controversial News Organizations.
“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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Regarding Misguided Social Media Evangelism In Response To Uprisings
I added a comment to this rather difficult to watch video over on TechCrunch:
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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Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design – Received
Received this book from Amazon today. Should be a good read and refresher.
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Bitter on Twitter
Twitter has frustrated me over the past several months. It’s not really a company I can root for anymore. I’ve been turned off by business decisions and their poor communication and transparency (in my opinion). It’s also very annoying when Twitter announces projects and several months later…. nothing is launched and barely a tweet update about them (i.e. Annotations, t.co url rewriting). But yeah I still use the damn service for the simple reality that its where everyone is at. But I am gradually losing interest in Twitter for certain usages such as social interaction and starting to just look at it as the pipeline of worldly noise that it is. Useful for dumpcasting links and headlines out into the digital ether to be crunched and consumed and lost in the stream.
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/
Will Lee 11:09 AM on September 2, 2011 Permalink |
With social networks becoming more localized, for my Masters Thesis at NYU, I am focusing on location-based services (LBS). The study aims to understand how the three key factors—practical functions, fun & games, privacy risk—affect the adoption of location-based services applications. Please do a good deed, fill out this short and completely anonymous survey (https://www.113.vovici.net/se.ashx?s=13B2588B58E0782D). Please email me if you like a copy of this study. Thanks. Will Lee (wkl209@nyu.edu)