venomous porridge

Last night during my regular 4 a.m. bout of insomnia I decided...

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:23:00 -0700

Last night during my regular 4 a.m. bout of insomnia I decided to look up where the Skagit River Bridge was. Turns out it spans the Skagit River — or used to span, anyway, from 1955 until about nine hours prior — between Mount Vernon and the tiny town of Burlington, WA.

When I searched for “Burlington, WA,” Apple Maps gave me a random address fifteen miles away from me on NW Burlington Drive, Portland, OR. Not even the right state. I had to pan and zoom manually to find the crossing, which was tricky because in Apple Maps the entire Skagit River is unlabeled.

Google Maps just rolled its eyes, reached out with white-gloved hands to catch its top hat and cane, and found the spot instantly, already showing the missing section of I-5.

I don’t expect Apple to finish first in the maps race, but goddamn it, I wish they’d at least jog.

I still don’t quite know what to think about the Tumblr...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:25:58 -0700

I still don’t quite know what to think about the Tumblr acquisition. It seems an enormous gamble on both sides. Like a smart, hip young woman who, after a few indelicate stumbles, had finally started making her way in the world only to elope with a desperate, aging serial wife murderer. Maybe they can save each other. Maybe.

But this oddly chaste robo-truncated CEO tumbltweet is a perfect piece of poetry.

Tell you what: while you’re at it, compose a 750-word...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:38:00 -0700

Tell you what: while you’re at it, compose a 750-word essay on why you’re not quite ready to make payments online and include it on a 3-by-5 card (write legibly).
Be sure to write your 16-digit account number on the 3-by-5 card.
Still not quite ready to make payments online? How about now?
Oh, actually we’re gonna need that 16-digit account number on the outside of the envelope too.
Got any cute photos of your kids? We like to hang them up around the office. Glossy finish, 11x17 or larger recommended (do not fold). Having insufficiently cute kids could delay processing.
Be sure to write your 16-digit account number on the front of each child before taking photos.
Last but not least, could you throw in some of those crackers you bought at SAFEWAY INC on 2013 APR 05 (reference no. 55432863L00RY5BZB)? The chicken-flavored ones? Yeah, those.
Don’t staple or paper clip crackers to the payment slip.
Maximum check payment amount is $10.00. Excess funds will be applied to a future Not Quite Ready To Make Payments Online Fee in the amount of your check minus ten dollars.
Be sure to include an audio recording of yourself rapping your 16-digit account number to one or more def beats.
I mean they taste just like chicken, it’s so weird.
How about now?

"Plotnitsky goes on, however, to agree with Sokal and Bricmont that the ‘square root of –1’ which..."

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:35:16 -0800

“Plotnitsky goes on, however, to agree with Sokal and Bricmont that the ‘square root of –1’ which Lacan discusses (and for which Plotnitsky introduces the symbol (L)√-1) is not, in spite of its identical name, ‘identical, directly linked, or even metaphorized via the mathematical square root of –1,’ and that the latter ‘is not the erectile organ.’”

- The best sentence in Wikipedia

Useless Statements Found in Yelp Reviews, Vol. 2

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 09:20:00 -0800

“Speaking of the bathooms, they have an option to use regular soap or a powdered version.” — Rebecca R.

“They didn’t have pomegranate juice for my standard pomegranate martini.” — Allie S.

“Why a 4 star?? The wait was over an hour long!! …Next time- will just keep it simple and come with no more than 4 people” — C T.

“I have garlic coming out of every pore, which doesn’t bode well for any hot, or even lukewarm, marital action tonight.” — Rebecca H.

“[photo of a glass of ice water]” — Jando S.

“Here’s a tip if you’re homeless folks, don’t give your girlfriend money to paint on her eyebrows if you’re starving.” — Larry H.

“My husband is not feminine looking, and had a beard at the time.” — Bree C.

“Don’t ask me what style food it is, sheshwan neshwan, I have no clue.” — Linda A.

“Thus begins my fascination with the pluralization of the names of small sea creatures.” — Leisa H.

“Schweppe’s Tonic is so much better than the Coke product Tonic, which is bitter!” — Myra F.

“Fortunately the wait staff vibed these unchill folks out; where they were casted out to the wastelands of Matador with the rest of the mainstreamers.” — Papi C.

AND TODAY’S WINNER:

“If you’re going here, arrive at least an hour before they open, or suffer a 45 minute to 1 hour wait.” — Mark S.

(Previously: Vol. 1)

Still got it.

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:46:39 -0800

Still got it.

Absolutely, utterly fantastic video explaining how NASA...

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 12:27:00 -0800

Absolutely, utterly fantastic video explaining how NASA couldn’t have faked the moon landings, because it was impossible to.

That’s right: it was harder to produce a convincing bogus moon landing for television than it was to actually land on the moon. What a bizarre saddle point in the evolution of technology 1969 must have been.

STOP. Listen. Collaborate. OR How Not All's Fair in Comments and Misogyny

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 16:45:07 -0800

STOP. Listen. Collaborate. OR How Not All's Fair in Comments and Misogyny:

Lucky for us, there are some struggles that we can get rid of or, at the very least, conceive of a world without through lessening the loads of our brothers and sisters who have different experiences from our own. There are things that come easy to me that don’t come easy to you and I want to help.

My friend Michaela wrote something important.

Is a federated Twitter even possible?

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 10:54:00 -0700

Toward the end of my last post, I mentioned that I’d like to see App.net move toward a federated architecture. Broadly, what that means is that instead of being a central service that each client connects to directly, it would become a loosely organized mesh of independently controlled nodes. Users and devices would connect to whatever node they liked best — you can run your own if you want — and the nodes would talk to each other in some clever way to collectively maintain the appearance of a single unified social network.

The advantages are numerous and comparable to those of the web itself: no single point of failure, no concentration of power, no risk that the entire network will be sold to Facebook.

But does this work for a service like Twitter? Can the behavior we’ve come to expect from social networks be reproduced in this model?

Let’s find out. Since every good blog post needs a list of three things, here’s a list of three constraints we’ve come to expect of our social timelines:

Immediacy: if a post has been made by someone I follow, I can see it in my timeline right away (or close enough that I don’t notice the difference).
Chronology: posts always appear in order by time posted.
Monotonicity: timelines grow only from the top; older posts are never retroactively inserted.

The problem appears to be that no federated architecture can simultaneously satisfy all three of these conditions. You can have any two: for example, if you let go of immediacy, your node can just wait until it’s received the latest content from every other node before displaying anything. But that’s not very scalable, and it makes real-time conversation impossible, so let’s keep immediacy. Now we have to decide what to do when content from a far-away node arrives late: if we’ve already displayed newer posts, we have to violate either chronology (by posting the older content above the newer) or monotonicity (by inserting it chronologically into the timeline).

Violating chronology is bad because it turns conversations into nonsense, but violating monotonicity means you can’t assume you’ve seen everything once you’ve read to the top of your timeline. Your client will have to maintain read/unread status for every item, and you’ll have to keep winding back in time to pick up things you missed. Which might be fine, but now we’re talking about something less like Twitter and more like email or RSS.

OK, so all of those options suck for conversations. But chronology is really only important within a conversation. So what if instead of replicating Twitter exactly, we shoot for a hierarchical, threaded model? The timeline would be a list of threads, and chronological order is preserved within each thread, but the threads themselves show up in arbitrary order. Oh, and you see a thread if you’re following the person who started it, I guess? Never mind, at least we’re getting somewhere! We’ve invented Usenet.

Oh.

The moral of the story is that the qualities that make Twitter interesting — its mix of conversation, discovery, and one-to-many communication — are direct consequences of its centralized architecture. Without the centralization you can still have something interesting, but it’s a different thing.

I’d love to be proven wrong.

App.net isn’t just a country club

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:24:00 -0700

Back in the early 1990s, when you went online, you either dialed up a local BBS or you used a national service like Prodigy or America Online. These services each had their own user interfaces and content and jargon and there was no easy way to communicate between them. If you were on one and your friends were on another, you had to get different friends.

You could connect to the Internet if you knew how (I found a university library with a public VAX terminal I could dial into), but there was no World Wide Web yet so there wasn’t much to do. When the web finally arrived, the walls around the Prodigy and AOL gardens crumbled. They just couldn’t keep up. They became irrelevant. CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, and the rest all disappeared and AOL became a dumb pipe. But before that happened, I remember trying to explain the web to my parents, who loved their AOL, and getting blank stares. Why couldn’t they see how incredible, how game-changing this new thing was?

Today, App.net is getting the same blank stares, and worse. Anil Dash echoed Tess Rinearson in calling it a “country club”; others have alluded to its slightly-less-than-diverse demographics. Most of this criticism stems from a perception of the service as a Twitter clone that costs money. Which is totally fair because right now, that’s all it is. But it’s also a bit like calling the web in 1993 an AOL clone for rich white college students. Fair, but entirely missing the point.

Let’s back up for a sec and consider the main components of a typical social architecture:

The social graph (who follows whom) determines the audience when a user publishes something (tweet, status update, blog post, checkin, baby bunny), and each user receives a stream or aggregation (timeline, dashboard, news feed) of the things their friends have published.

Twitter and Facebook have happily provided #1, subject to various restrictions, rate limits, and arbitrary shutoffs. Any photo sharing site, blogging engine, or even RSS feed provides the second. But if I want to start a new social app, even if I piggyback on existing social graphs and publishing platforms, I still have to come up with #3 on my own — and that’s where it gets tricky. That’s what Instagram did: they built #2 and #3 while bootstrapping #1 off of Facebook and Twitter, and it was such a monumental achievement that they sold the company a year later for the cost of the first two Mars rovers. Scaling is that hard.

How many great ideas for socially-aware apps or services haven’t been built because there’s no common, open infrastructure to build them on?

Twitter could have become that infrastructure if the advertising people hadn’t won. Imagine if 140 characters of flat text were only one of the things that a tweet could be. What if when you added a photo to Flickr, say, your Flickr account “tweeted” (on your behalf) a block of data, tagged as a Flickr photo? People reading your stream from a Twitter client would never see this, because Twitter clients only know how to display text-based tweets. But a Flickr client? It would see just the Flickr data, allowing it to build an aggregated photo stream using Twitter as the plumbing. Now we have the equivalent of Instagram, and we didn’t have to build or scale or maintain any social networking infrastructure.

But Twitter has made it abundantly clear — or at least firmly vague — that they have no interest in being anyone’s plumbing. Twitter is for tweets, and tweets are one thing only. But with App.net as the back end, anything is possible — and not just social publishing and aggregation. Devices in your home like your security system or your TiVo or your sprinkler timer could publish their own feeds, and then you could have a single app that monitored all of them. You could turn iTunes Store release data into App.net feeds and follow your favorite bands to hear when new albums come out — and this extra data wouldn’t pollute your main social timeline, because it would all be tagged by data type for clients to filter to their liking.

Of course, none of this is likely to come true as long as App.net costs $50 per year per account and another $50 for developer access. I can’t imagine it will keep this revenue model forever, though. Maybe users would pay per data source they publish from, or developers would pay per user and recoup that cost in app sales. Ideally App.net would adopt a federated architecture, so I can run my own node if I have the interest and resources. But I don’t want it ever to be free, because as we’ve seen with Twitter, free pipes tend to make the pipe owners get possessive about the stuff that’s in the pipes.

So let’s take back our stuff. I love Twitter’s product, but I believe it’s on the path of Prodigy and CompuServe: so desperate not to become a dumb pipe like AOL that it will soon become nothing.

The web democratized publishing. Ad-funded social networks are locking up distribution. I think App.net just might be the way to unlock it. If you agree, you can join here and follow me here.

With our new API guidelines, we’re trying to encourage...

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:12:26 -0700

With our new API guidelines, we’re trying to encourage activity in the upper-left, lower-left and lower right quadrants, and limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.

I thought Twitter’s bullshit matrix needed a more consistent user experience, so I fixed it for them.

I’m doing my best here

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 23:06:00 -0700

Daughter, 3: Daddy, the rover landed!

Me: It did! Lots of smart people made that happen by using their brains and working really hard for a long time. It’s called science.

Daughter: Yeah.

Me: When you get bigger, you can learn science and do amazing things too.

Daughter: And chew gum.

Me: Yes, and chew gum.

Thirty-seven times a day.

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 20:36:09 -0700

Thirty-seven times a day.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Ads

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:34:00 -0700

You’d think paying $80 for a piece of software would earn you the right not to be treated with contempt by its publisher, wouldn’t you? Well, Parallels now has “in-product notifications” that can’t be disabled. Ads, in other words.

The justification is that the notifications are used for important things, like bug fix updates, therefore they can’t be turned off. Which, of course, is complete nonsense. That story is how you sell ads to sponsors, not how you sell a product to users. What’s actually happening is that Parallels is abusing a critical information channel by stuffing paid content into it, and then pretending it’s not their fault. It’s like running ads over the Emergency Broadcast System and claiming you have no choice because it’s for emergencies.

[W]e occasionally share special offers from Parallels or other third party companies who provide special deals for our customers.… However, because customers need to receive important product information, there is not a mechanism for customers to completely disable notifications.

“Need”? Hmm, I think I read something about “needs” once, in a psych textbook or somewhere.

Yup, there it is. No problem then.

maniacalrage: Scratch — Your Quick-Input Notepad We’ve made...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 12:19:00 -0700

maniacalrage:

Scratch — Your Quick-Input Notepad

We’ve made loads of apps for clients at Karbon, but this is the first app we’ve made for ourselves. I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of Scratch. We hope it will become your favorite quick-input notepad. It’s crammed full of features like customizable and Markdown toolbars, Dropbox support for appending to existing files or creating new ones, built-in sharing to Twitter and more. It launches lightning-fast, too, and it always jumps right into edit mode so you can start typing right away.

The great thing is Scratch allows you to quickly clear your existing note, but stores all cleared notes in a searchable history so you never have to worry about losing anything. There’s no silly file management to deal with.

Give it a try, we think you’ll like it.

I guess this is as good a time as any to announce that I joined Karbon a few months ago. They’re a talented bunch, and Scratch is a beautiful app. Write notes in Markdown, synced to Dropbox? With a gorgeous, customizable toolbar? For three bucks? I can’t be serious!

Scratch was Shawn’s project, not mine, but I did contribute one tiny piece of code: the animation when you delete a note. By my calculations, that alone is worth at least eighteen cents. Go get it.

I know I’m always telling you to watch six-minute films...

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 11:19:59 -0700

I know I’m always telling you to watch six-minute films about John Baldessari, but this one is narrated by Tom Waits and it’s so goddamned good.

sexpigeon: Really, though: Vanity Fair’s eagerness for a...

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 18:32:50 -0700

sexpigeon:

Really, though: Vanity Fair’s eagerness for a narrative arc has led to the publication of at least two completely preposterous sentences.

Three. (Two, one.) Can’t fuck up now. AppleCare’s...

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 21:15:00 -0700

Three. (Two, one.)

Can’t fuck up now. AppleCare’s expired.

To Behave Like the Fallen World

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:09:08 -0700

To Behave Like the Fallen World:

sinker:

An amazing essay about Romney’s high-school bullying, adolescence, guilt, and redemption.

Do not miss this extraordinary piece of writing.

Replies, promoted tweets, and a crazy idea

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 09:16:00 -0700

Indulge me in a fantasy.

Currently, reply scope on Twitter works like this:

If Alice replies to Bob’s tweet, everyone who follows both Alice and Bob will see the reply.

What if, instead, it worked like this:

If Alice replies to Bob’s tweet, everyone who follows Alice and saw Bob’s tweet in their timeline will see the reply.

The difference is subtle but significant, because following Bob isn’t the only way I might see Bob’s original tweet. Someone else I follow could have retweeted it into my timeline. Alice herself may have done so, in fact. So one effect of this change would be to eliminate that awful “dot-reply” cheat: instead, just retweet the original before replying and all of your followers will see both.

Another effect is that it gives us a way to meaningfully interact with promoted tweets. Today, replying to a promoted tweet is all but pointless. The promoter won’t hear me — they’ll have thousands of replies to sift through, if they even bother to look — and beyond that, only those who already follow both me and the promoter will see my reply. That’s not likely to be very many people, since the whole idea of promoting a tweet is to put it in front of people who aren’t following the promoter. But under this new rule, all of my followers who saw the promoted tweet would also see my reply. Now we’re getting somewhere.

That’s step one. Step two is where this dream gets crazy:

Using an algorithm similar to that of Top Tweets, when a reply to a promoted tweet receives a large number of retweets and/or favorites, the reply should also be promoted to the same audience.

It might look like this:

(Original tweets.) Completely nuts, right? Why would any advertiser ever go for this? It’s not fair, you may be thinking: Microsoft paid good money to have their tweet promoted, so why should any random nobody get to ride that train for free?

Here’s why: like it or not, by introducing promoted tweets, Twitter has declared that popularity and money are equivalent currencies. Your tweet can gain exposure organically, by virtue of your own following and the viral nature of retweets, or you can just pay up and they’ll stick it in everybody’s stream (or some large subset of everybody). What’s unfair is that due to the way replies currently work, the paying voice speaks alone. It’s paying to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.

Which, of course, is what advertisers want, so this will probably never change. But to me, that’s an unfortunate failure of imagination. Banksy, or possibly Sean Tejaratchi, writes:

Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

What if this idea of freedom to rearrange and reuse were baked into the concept of what ads are? What if online ads became less like discarded flyers blowing down a busy street and more like living, breathing fragments of human conversation? What if users were treated like thinking beings and not like credit cards with eyestalks? Wouldn’t everybody win?

Naturally, not all replies to promoted tweets will be favorable to the promoter, and that’s OK: when you barge into a crowded room and start shouting through a megaphone, people don’t always say nice things. That’s part of the deal. And the longer ads continue to live on a weird plane of their own that barely intersects reality, the less effective they’ll continue to be, and the sooner the things we love that depend on ads will stop being able to exist.

I’d rather Twitter didn’t have ads at all, but if we must have them, let’s at least try to do something better than throwing rocks at heads.