Scripting News

http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml (07.07.2008 06:20:38)

Why FriendFeed is growing faster than Twitter

The tech blogosphere loves to study itself in a herd-like fashion.

Back in the old days we used to call this "Watching us watch them watch us watch me watch you watch them watch us watch ourselves watch everything."

It's a big house of mirrors.

A chorus of fooles and puppets.

Today a lot of the alpha bloggers woke up and realized a lot of people are following them on FriendFeed. From that some of them conclude that FF is better than Twitter. There's another possible explanation.

First, let me tell you a story.

I was a laggard when I started using Twitter. A lot of people started using it before I did. I figured I'd forever be lagging behind them, but it didn't work out that way because as soon as I started blogging about it here, my subscriber numbers over there zoomed past others whose blogs have fewer readers.

Also, the same thing happened when Mike Arrington discovered Twitter, even though he didn't use it much, he had more followers than I did because his blog has more readers. Today he has twice as many followers as I do on Twitter.

And FriendFeed is tacking in the draft behind Twitter, it's growing faster than Twitter did in its early days because people are talking about it not only on their blogs (as they did with Twitter) but also on Twitter itself. It's bootstrapping off Twitter. Same with identi.ca.

It's the coral reef thing I was talking about last year.

We noticed this with the growth of podcasting in 2004 into 2005. Once we had the right combination of features and content, it grew like a weed, growing in four months what it had taken the blogosphere four years to do (probably more, depending on what you want to call the start of blogging). It's all part of the same bootstrap. Blogging, podcasting, twittering, friendfeeding, and whatever "ing" comes next.

It's all part of one cosmos (not a mere sphere), and there will come a day (I hope) when it all is unified, otherwise we're forever going to be chasing our news from place to place as it gets replicated in ever more awkward ways.

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07.07.2008 03:35:33 - Scripting News

Hard link

Announcing Tech.NewsJunk.Com

There's a new site on the net today:

http://tech.newsjunk.com/

It's the counterpart to the political NewsJunk, which is focused on news of the 2008 presidential campaign. The Tech site is focused on technology product news.

I created the site because I wasn't getting enough news about products. It's that simple. I'm interested in the other stuff too, the finance, trends, parties, puppets -- but that's adequately covered on TechMeme. What wasn't getting through is the stuff I, as a product developer, care the most about -- news about products. And the interesting new products I'd find wouldn't make it onto the bus. If it got bought by Google or Microsoft, that would likely show up on TM, or if a VC invested a lot of money in it. But I like to find out when things are small, before other people invest.

It's important to note that the Tech NewsJunk, like the political one, does not have original content, it just points to the sites that are producing the relevant stories.

I did it so I could learn, and in the spirit of the web of course I wanted to share and hopefully people will forward me links to product news that isn't already on TechJunk (please, no press releases) and even better, pointers to feeds of sites that regularly review products.

A couple of notes. I'm not just interested in new products, I'm also interested in how the products evolve. So if Flickr were to (for example) add a bunch of new features tomorrow, we would defintely link to that.

I also want to hear about products from the people who design and implement them. Their point of view is very important to not only understanding their work, but to understanding the market.

I expect and hope other people will compete with this site, so we can focus more attention on products, so maybe there will be more products that fit user's needs better.

Now, as with the political "junk" site, there are many ways to consume the flow.

1. The old-fashioned way -- you can refresh the site manually.

2. There's a feed, of course, for your reader, or aggregator, or whatever.

3. You can follow it on FriendFeed.

4. Or on Twitter.

5. Or read the mobile version on your iPhone or Blackberry.

And soon you will be able to follow it on identi.ca (as soon as we figure out how to do it). And there will also be an email interface.

PS: One of the great things about this site is that I learn which sites are providing the best product coverage. So far they are (in no special order): ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat and Webware. This is just my opinion of course, and it could change. I wish some of the sites would cut down on the cuteness and add more hard info.

PPS: The counts page is getting interesting.

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04.07.2008 17:25:56 - Scripting News

Hard link

Independence Day

It's the day when we say we're not dependent on Great Britain.

Of course that part of the holiday long ago lost its meaning. But maybe the whole thing, maybe the concept of America has lost its meaning. Matthew Yglesias, a surprisingly young blogger with a lot of influence yesterday wondered if the US really had more integrity in 1974 when our outrage forced Richard Nixon from office. Not just Democratic outrage, but Republican outrage too. I was alive then, Yglesias says he was not, and I remember, as a college student, how remarkable it was. But it's sad if it's true that today's America cares less about its ideals than that one did, because that one didn't care enough to stop the outrage from happening, we only cared when it was too late.

As we learn more about our current President and Vice-President, it's never been more clear that we sold ourselves out -- for nothing -- to a handful of people who are raping not only Iraq for its oil, but our own country's treasury and integrity. They say they're not raising taxes, instead the dollar keeps declining relative to a barrel of oil. In just one week the price of gas at the pump has gone up 10 percent at the local station where I took the picture last Sunday. 10 percent! This is an unbelievable tax that hits everyone equally, which is to say it hits people just barely making it the hardest. And it's going to effect the cost of everything as the increase ripples through the economy, the cost of food, clothing, medicine, keeping our houses warm.

Then comes the amazing story that we may be about to provoke a war with Iran so the oil industry can take Iran's oil, after taking Iraq's. How many more hundreds of thousands of people will die, how many millions will be displaced, and how much more of what's left of our leadership will be foreclosed so the oil and defense barons can make a few more euros (they're surely not taking their loot in dollars).

When we look for someone to blame, we should look in the mirror -- we did this to ourselves, first by electing Bush, and then amazingly, re-electing him. But it would feel much better if I believed we were about to start undoing the mess, but I've been walking around with an undercurrent of depression this week, and I haven't been able to pinpoint the source, yet, but I have an inkling it has something to do with the evaporating hope that we're about to turn the corner. We may have created an unprecedented mess in the 8 years of Bush, we may have wrecked our economy and reputation, but at least we're about to start heading in the right direction. It seems perhaps not.

From gun control to abortion, to illegal wire-tapping and funneling government money to religious organizations, the man who sold us Change You Can Believe In, it's sad to say, appears not to have believed in it himself. To find out it was just a marketing slogan is too much to bear. It's so hard to accept that Ted and Caroline Kennedy stood up for him and said he represented the same hope as JFK, well, maybe we misunderstood what they meant. Or maybe it's time for them to take him aside and ask "What did you mean again?"

I'd like to get Aaron Brown back on the air. I'd like Keith Olbermann to be tougher. And if this is just a case of Obama getting comfortable in his new skin, with his new stature as presumptive nominee then I look forward to him re-finding himself, because we need leadership now more than we need a new president. A humbled Obama is worse than a proud McCain.

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04.07.2008 11:01:32 - Scripting News

Hard link

XMPP and Twitter, coming back on?

This post on the Twitter status blog, gives hope to developers wanting to hook into the full Twitter flow, the same flow that now only Summize has access to. Here's what they said: "We're hopeful that once we've improved the stability of the service we can bring back IM. It remains the highest priority feature weÕre working to restore." OK. That sounds hopeful.

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04.07.2008 05:53:51 - Scripting News

Hard link

Federating identi.ca?

I note that a number of programmers I respect are trying to launch instances of the software behind identi.ca.

If they're successful, and if there is a decent way to connect them into a federation (meaning we can communicate even if we're using different hosts), then we're getting somewhere.

Is there some place where someone is monitoring the status? A wiki? A discussion thread?

I'm not planning on running one until the trail has been well blazed, maybe not even then, but I don't mind helping track the progress.

Update #1: Les Orchard has two instances running.

Update #2: laconica.kamleitner.com.

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03.07.2008 23:06:55 - Scripting News

Hard link

RMack on Internet freedoms

I was catching up with On The Media earlier this week, and who comes on but my friend and former Berkman colleague Rebecca MacKinnon. I love those kinds of surprises, it lets me catch up, in a multimedia sort of way (it's better than reading an essay or blog post). A former CNN correspondent in China and Korea and founder of the Global Voices blogging network along with Ethan Zuckerman, now she's a prof at the University of Hong Kong. I got a really funny picture of her at the end of a movie in Nashville, a few years ago.

She has become an expert on freedoms on the Internet because of her connection to China; that's what she was talking about on OTM. Toward the end of the interview she said we even have issues with freedom on the net in the US. I thought she was being a little too kind.

This morning I saw a judge had let Viacom have all of Google's user data from YouTube, a very shocking thing for a judge to do. I thought RMack, with her perspective on Chinese freedom on the net would have something to say, and it turns out she does...

Rebecca MacKinnon: Corporate responsibility and the Internet.

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03.07.2008 19:51:37 - Scripting News

Hard link

Oh happy day!?

A Twitter clone that's all-the-way open?

Did Christmas come early this year?

http://identi.ca/doc/faq

Marshall has a writeup.

I am dave over there. Follow me!

First thing --> looking for an API.

It supports the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, which I had not heard about until now.

evan appears to be the author of the software, or at least the authority on it.

From the FAQ, it will support the Twitter API, but doesn't yet. There is RSS here, but I haven't found it yet.

Here's the RSS. http://identi.ca/dave/all/rss Just add "/rss" after anything.

I've hooked it up to FriendFeed, but it looks (much) less than optimal (and I'm being kind). They really need to work on the RSS, it's the first really lame thing I've seen in identi.ca.

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02.07.2008 20:44:02 - Scripting News

Hard link

Social cameras, on the way

Bijan got a preview of the iPhone 2.0 software, which adds location to the camera.

It's a piece of the social camera puzzle.

When you come back from vacation where there are lots of other people taking pictures, go to Flickr 4.0 and enter the location and the time, and voila, vacation pictures and you're in all of them. :-)

It's bad news for people cheating on their spouses. Now it'll be easier to follow your trail and who you were with. (I had a preview of this, when I was on a date, walking down the street the other way was Justin with his camera mounted on his hat and his broadcasting laptop in his knapsack. It was a long time ago, if you want to see who I was out with you're going to have to search through a lot of archives. Enjoy!)

A feature like this (which was obviously coming for years) will reshape what it means to take a picture. That's why people are confused, because we all come from the past, and this product exists only in the future (for everyone but Bijan, who I hate).

Just kidding of course. Heh.

PS: This originally appeared as a comment on Bijan's blog. An illustration of "chasing the news" earlier today.

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02.07.2008 19:43:11 - Scripting News

Hard link

How to stop chasing the news

My Internet writing is so distributed these days, there are five main places I write, and a host of others where I write peripherally. Here are the five:

1. Scripting News (and its RSS feed).

2. The comments here (managed by Disqus).

3. Twitter (used to be a lot, now much less).

4. FriendFeed (links, comments).

5. The OPML Editor (for software dev work mostly).

My writing style differs in all the places, it depends on its newness, who's there, what the tools let me do, what I'm doing there.

None of them are what I want them to be, but I'm happy because I feel like things are shifting, and I'm almost ready to understand what I really want.

First, like a lot of people, I have either found or invented systems to connect the five places. When I write something here, I ping Twitter. FriendFeed has been programmed to automatically pick it up. My writing sometimes but rarely flows through the NewsJunk website and out to FriendFeed and Twitter because it's like a radio station, again, pushing links and content where we want it to go. We're all set up for new destinations. The NewsJunk software (which is a major undertaking, like Manila was in 1999) is all about moving ideas around.

But movement isn't really what we want.

For a moment think about TechCrunch. Okay let's say one of the editors writes something longish over on FriendFeed and then realizes that would make a good post on TC. So he switches over to WordPress (the editorial software they use) and pastes it in there, makes some corrections, adds a picture, some links, edits some more, adds a few thoughts, then publishes. A few minutes later an update, he spots a typo and fixes it. Now what happened to the FriendFeed article? It's still there, unchanged by all the improvements. But what should have happened?

It seems there should only be one copy of the story, and when it changes on TC, it should also change on FF. Further, when he adds some pictures, or links to a podcast, or embeds a video, that should happen in both places as well. And of course there shouldn't really be two places, there should be one, with two views. TechCrunch is a flow of articles grouped around a name, with the judgment we assume comes with it. But the idea originated somewhere else (it seems all of them do) and after it migrates it still exists there.

I go through a similar process with pieces that flow to the Huffington Post. First, I get the piece in perfect shape over here, and then copy it over there. Of course it never is perfect, and then I'm stuck making changes in both places.

Now should the comments in both places be the same comments? Ahhh, at that point I'm nto so sure. We'll have to try it out and see what happens. (In the Huffpost case, definitely not. I don't feel like a member of the community there, even though the comments I see are in response to my writing.)

If you want to get more ideas about this, revisit Web 2.0 Gas Prices, a piece that tells the story about how an idea sprouted in one place and then bloomed in another. Lots of data were integrated from pictures to maps to MP3s. Try to ignore the issue of wheher it's fair to McCain. That was the point in the discussion on FF, over here on SN, what's interesting are the editorial techniques and what kind of software will be needed to support them.

A few weeks ago for the first time a reader noticed the double-entendre in the name of this weblog. People always assumed it meant "News About Scripting." Sure to some extent that's what it means, but we all know, not so much these days. But it's main meaning was "The application of technology to news." Scripting is the verb, not the subject. You always have to be looking for that with me, I have a devious mind and sometimes (not often I hope) I lead you in one direction, when the action is in a different one.

PS: I've been working on a new "junk" site, this one for tech news. I'll have a writeup here soon.

PPS: What I've learned from the political NewsJunk, the MSM guys have figured out blogging, and generally do as good a job as the amateurs, though some of the pros are just running linkblogs and not much more. They typically don't like NJ, for some reason. Go figure.

PPPS: It seems postscripts should have lives of their own too. The next one should live here, and also live in the FriendFeed Feedback room.

PPPPS: The Reshare command in FF, it seems to me, shouldn't create a copy, rather should add the item to my flow, at the top of the list, and any comments that appear in either place would be seen in both. It's understandable that copies must be made when things move among silos, but within a silo why not deal in pointers? (Or give the choice to the user.)

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02.07.2008 17:44:11 - Scripting News

Hard link

Podcast with the Gnip guys

I caught up with Eric Marcoullier and Jud Valeski of Gnip in Eric's car, this afternoon.

http://mp3.newsjunk.com/interviewWithGnip.mp3

Earlier today, on Scripting News, I asked Twitter to use Gnip to communicate with developers so the network can come back on. I wanted to find out if anything had come of it.

Nothing had...

Meanwhile, the guys believe there's no technical reason that Twitter can't turn back on all the services that were hooked into the XMPP gateway -- the protocol is designed for that kind of syndication.

It seems, therefore that the reason must be economic -- which leads to the conclusion that Twitter, which was founded as an open platform, with a Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom philosophy, is now headed in the opposite direction.

We know where that leads, to the place where Instant Messaging foundered, which motivated the development of XMPP to route around the problem. (Oh the humanity!)

Gnip raises the question in about as clear a way possible, will Twitter come back to developers, or are we looking for a new platform to do the wonderful things we were hoping to do with Twitter.

Eric, like me, is friends with Bijan and Fred, on Twitter's board, so we're posing this question, which is potentially controversial, in a friendly way.

Here's the smiley to prove it:

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02.07.2008 02:43:34 - Scripting News

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Scripting News

Why FriendFeed is growing faster than Twitter

Announcing Tech.NewsJunk.Com

Independence Day

XMPP and Twitter, coming back on?

Federating identi.ca?

RMack on Internet freedoms

Oh happy day!?

Social cameras, on the way

How to stop chasing the news

Podcast with the Gnip guys

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