DISQUS

Robert: What about splitting the difference and carrying around a still camera with good video capabilities? My Canon S3IS shoots optically stabilized 640x480 video with stereo audio, and given that it has a 12x optical zoom, is still pretty compact.

Robert: Um, I don't think you understand what Dare was saying. You might wanna calm down a touch. It might be unfair to blame *you* for Twitter's woes, but Dare's analysis of the architecture is probably pretty accurate.

Open up Twitter... now, did you wait several minutes for your page to appear? If not, then something's being cached on the server side. It could be via memcached, it could be via "baking" your page instead of "frying" it, or whatever. But the data isn't being collected on the fly as you seem to believe. It's being pushed into the cache when you're not around to ensure UI response times remain tolerable.

Dare's point was that Twitter was built as a micro-blogging system, and that's how blogging systems work. You cache the hell outta everything, and you make a choice... make some users wait for extended page renders, or burn cycles in the background to ensure that everyone gets equal treatment.

Robert: In and of themselves, there's nothing wrong with those videos. I didn't find them interesting enough to merit the run time or difficulty in peering through the compression artifacts, but that's just a matter of taste. I'm sure some folks will find them fascinating. And hey, I'm a big boy... I know how to use the back button.

But when you hype your own work, there's gonna be blowback. Telling people how great you are is a surefire way to ensure that someone steps up to say that you aren't.

Scary stories about walled gardens don't work anymore. Back in the days of AOL, the walled garden was a problem because it was something forced on users who wanted access to other features. Facebook is completely different... the wall *is* a feature, not an imposition.

I'm not trying to pick on you, Robert, but this is your issue, not ours. You want to use services like Facebook as marketing tools that will allow you to turn "friends" into perceived prestige and influence... "hey, LargeCo, give me money or access, because I have the attention of all these people!" The Wall gets in the way of you executing your career plans.

But for the rest of us, Facebook is just a place to hang out and connect with people. Keeping the world out is exactly what we want.

Robert: Here's the thing... this whole debate isn't nearly as complicated as it's being portrayed. It's actually quite simple. To eliminate all privacy concerns, all Facebook needs to do is provide a checkbox during the "friending" process that says "sure, this person can take this relationship outside the service".

The only problems are:

(1) Facebook hasn't implemented such a checkbox.

(2) If that checkbox existed, almost no one would ever click it.

The first is Facebook's issue... they can't or won't add the checkbox. The second is Robert Scoble's issue... you *know* most people will never click the box, so you keep looking for ways to justify doing what you want in the absence of permission, and third-parties that will help you do it.

Those "news aggregators" of the late '90s that framed CNN and the NYTimes were loading the full pages of the originating sites as well... note what happened to them.

The sticking point in those cases, though, related to the fact that the framing sites were running their own ads. If Mahalo is careful to never run a third-party ad atop or around the framed content, they'll probably be okay.

Dave: I think Facebook *will* allow portability at some point... once they realize that virtually no one will ever use it.

I mean, think about it: to pass muster, such a feature would require that each of Scoble's 5,000 friends check a box that says "let Scoble cart data about me off to another service somewhere". Even in his extraordinary case, most of those people won't check the box, or won't be able to find the box, or won't understand it if they see it. So most of that data ain't going anywhere without TOS-violating (and arguably, trust-violating) screen scraping.

One thing that folks are going to need to accept is that this kinda thing is becoming less about "walled gardens" or "silos" and more about context. Just because I'm willing to declare myself someone's friend on Facebook doesn't mean I'm going to declare the same thing about his profile at Mr. Toad's Wild Bestiality Network. And what if I declare someone my "neighbor" on HomeTownNet, and he imports that connection into a service that uses a different term... like "Best Friends Forever"? I just wave to the guy over a fence every morning... I didn't agree to embrace him on the level that the second service implies.

NOTE: To those who equate this sort of thing to exporting an address book from Outlook... nope. Your address book only claims that you know certain facts about me. It doesn't suggest an agreed-upon, mutual connection.

Dave: I have my doubts about the overall utility of FlickrFan, but y'know what? I've been thinking about it, and who cares about utility? You're having fun, other people are having fun, and this isn't the time to be all Grinchy about people having fun.

So congrats on the launch, and I hope you prove me utterly, hopelessly wrong. :)

Robert: I obviously haven't seen Dave's app yet, but his descriptions make it sound pretty much like the Flickr app for TiVo.

As for an AppleTV+browser... that won't do anything to help sales, unless they license the Wiimote from Nintendo and get to hacking.

And finally, the benefit to using an Xbox or PS3 for your media viewing is that you're gonna have one of those boxes in your living room anyway. If the average person is anything like me, they can only switch three hi-def inputs, and mine are all taken up by a 360, a Dish DVR, and a Wii.

Robert: Here's a question for you... what will you do when you add someone who has NSFW material in their shared items? I thought about adding you, just to play around with the new feature, but didn't want to be responsible for giving a new father a heart attack. :)

If nothing else, consider this a cautionary note... you never know what your friends will find interesting on a day-to-day basis.

(Hey, Mihai! Any chance you can give us a "Share Restricted" feature that will only display the item's headline when viewed as a shared feed?)

Robert: Facebook is intended for real people. "Robert Scoble" isn't a real person anymore... he's a public identity. Similarly, a business isn't a real person... it may be an entity for tax purposes, but it ain't a person.

For that sorta thing, you want MySpace. It happily embraces the notion of "people-as-marketing-tools", and as Tila Tequila can attest, you can have way, way more than 5,000 friends.

Zuma is my curse. I love it, and have played it virtually every day for a year now... but once I reach Stage 4-1, it becomes absolute hell for someone who is color blind. I've powered my way up to stage 9 via pure stubbornness, but I've given up the dream of getting anywhere near 13.

So now, I just work at maxing out my score from 1-1 through 3-5, and use the game as a kind of meditative thing... it's pretty easy to play on autopilot if you really need to think things through.

Kudos to IMSafer for coming up with a slightly-less-creepy version of child surveillance. I still see the whole concept as an enabling technology for crappy parents, but at least these folks have *attempted* to find a middle ground, and I applaud them for it.

Donna: Yup, it's a great "gateway drug"... my wife loved it pretty much from the get-go. Although probably the best book in that vein (IMO) is Craig Thompson's _Blankets_, which even managed to win over my 60 year-old mother.

Jake: I just wanted to add a quick shout out to the series' primary artist and co-creator, Pia Guerra. Her work is deceptively stripped-down, and keeps the tone of the book grounded. With another artist, the line-work could overwhelm Vaughn's dialogue (which happens occasionally with Ex Machina)... they're a perfect team on Y.

Robert: Nah, I won't be sharing my OPML. (Although an old copy of my subs may be in there somewhere.) There's just not any incentive.

I mean, first off, the service doesn't actually *do* anything beyond create Yet Another Top 100 List. But more importantly, I do a lot more than read blogs with feeds.

I'm subscribed to lots of "utility feeds", for example. New referrers for my blogs come to me via RSS. Email comes to me from Google's Atom feeds. Private forum messages. Up-to-date VersionTracker info. Ego searches from Technorati and PubSub and Icerocket. So even if much of it weren't inappropriate for public distribution, it still wouldn't be of any use to anyone else.

The only OPML I can see sharing would be generated from my blogrolls. Anyone who wants that info, though, can get it without going to a third-party site.

"Reading lists" have a certain limited appeal, but generalized OPML sharing just doesn't make sense to me.

Igor: Well, technically, you *are* redistributing content. (In fact, you're creating a derivative work.) But your basic point has merit... the web is built on such stuff. As I said somewhere else, when viewed from a certain perspective, the entire web is one giant copyright violation.

If used as a personal proxy, I don't think there's any legitimate argument in opposition to Feed43's service. The problem is that far too many (and arguably most) people don't use RSS via private desktop apps... they read their feeds on Planet portals, in search-engine-accessible online aggregators, and so on. In that context, Feed43 causes problems.

Igor: Let me say quickly that I'm not casting aspersions on your motives. I'm sure you intend Feed43 to be a wholly positive service. In the short view, it *is* a positive service.

Hell, I'm not even opposed to the concept behind Feed43. I don't see anything wrong with an individual user of a desktop aggregator using it to subscribe to a feed-free site. I'm not worried about anyone's ad-supported business model, as the AdBlock extension in my browser attests. My machine, my rules.

But when it comes to web-based aggregators and syndication applications, Feed43 starts to look extremely problematic. It opens up aggregator developers to lawsuits based upon the actions of Feed43 users, and makes it easier than ever to redistribute content without authorization. Folks like me keep reminding content producers that they need to take responsibility for how they publish their material, and Feed43 removes one fundamental avenue of responsibility.

Obeying robots.txt is a wonderful thing, and you should be applauded for it. In fact, that alone is enough for me to withdraw the "toxic" statement I made earlier... it demonstrates that you're interested in playing fair.

Perhaps you could take a leadership role in this situation? What if Feed43 evangelized an "all purpose" user-agent for scraping services, one that would make blocking (via robots.txt) a one-step process? In addition to obeying references to "Feed43 Proxy", you could also respect references to "All Scraping Proxies"... other well-meaning service providers could do the same, and blocking those services as a whole would become pretty darned simple.

These types of services are *extremely* toxic to the RSS space... they're the syndication equivalent of Napster, and if they become popular, something's gonna hit the fan.

If a site doesn't have a feed, there's a reason. When someone complains that their feed is being republished somewhere, we typically say things like "hey, you're the one producing a syndication feed." These services undermine that argument, and ensure that anyone running a public aggregator will be visited by lawyers sooner than later.

Personally, I'll be blocking access to Feed43 URLs in my subscription code.

Robert: "Shhh, Phil, see when people say they for partial text feeds only what they really mean to say is 'it’s all about the advertising.'"

In some cases, sure. But most of the bloggers I know who stick to partial content do so because they don't want to encourage the republishing of their content. They're not interested in being reblogged, publicly aggregated, or splogged, and a full-text feed is an invitation to all those things.

Robert: "you assume most people will move soon. In my experience that totally is NOT the case."

I suspect that the people who won't move are also the folks who won't use RSS. They're just not looking to improve their experiences.

With that said, your particular problem would be solved by a switch to an aggregator that automatically installs an autodiscovery tool into IE. With Newzcrawler, you can right-click a page in IE and click "subscribe"... no hunting for XML icons or viewing source required.

"When you are looking at a blog tool for your business, you better make sure it has failover to another data center in a different city."

Robert: Normal businesses have their primary web presences sitting on overloaded, shared servers in the corner of a datacenter somewhere. To them, thirty minutes of downtime is a really good week.

Robert: Hosted services have to pick reasonable defaults for all customers. The fact that the default doesn't suit your specific needs doesn't mean it "sucks".

You know this, of course. So I'm left wondering why you'd waste time with virtiol instead of simply asking how to tweak the default.

"I just tried my Atom feed and I couldn’t even get it to load up in the browser. That certainly is not good usability..."

Agreed. That means your aggregator is broken.

When you request a properly-served Atom or RSS file, your desktop aggregator should launch and help you subscribe to it. Unless you use a web-based aggregator, in which case you should be clicking your autodiscovery bookmark instead of playing "hunt the feed".

Robert: Ideally, there wouldn't be an RSS icon or link of any kind on a page... feeds should be found via autodiscovery, and presented to the user on request.

"First, almost everyone has access to e-mail and can read it online as well as offline; unlike web forums, where you have to be connected to the internet all the time."

Eddie: You're using the wrong forum apps. :D Any decent forum in 2005 produces RSS feeds, which have all the offline benfits of email without the spam.

"Second, e-mail is almost immediate, when someone sends out an e-mail to a list you’re subscribed to, the e-mail shows up almost instantly in your inbox, compare that to constant manual refreshes to a forum web page."

Again, RSS. There's really no reason to refresh web pages anymore.

"Compare that to the ease of writing an e-mail and publishing to the list (once you subscribe)."

Subscribing to a list and becoming a member of a forum are pretty similar processes. And there are forum apps that will let you post via email, dedicated offline client, etc.

But that misses the crucial point that writing an email is often *too* easy. Anyone having to sift through the morass of bottom-quoted, full-quoted junk that piles up on a list knows the bliss of reading your way through a well-managed discussion thread.

Which brings us to management, something that is impossible on a list. Thread drifting? Everything on a list is either on- or off-topic. If it's off-topic, you're expected to move to a different list or just drop the subject. In a forum environment, the conversation moves to a different group/topic/category, and following requires as little as a single mouse click. Individual conversations can be subscribed to (again, via RSS), obviating the need to join an entire list to participate in a single conversation.

Then there are issues like archiving and accessability. For example, right after I click "submit comment" on this post, I'm going to hit the "publish to Furl" button on my Firefox toolbar. My comment will be bookmarked on Furl, and my blog template will automatically fetch the bookmark and display it in a list, effectively creating a public breadcrumb trail and searchable archive of my interaction on the web. Duplicating that with a mailing list requires far more effort than any reasonable person would ever expend.

In short: HTTP is our friend. SMTP is the devil. :D