Rubénerd!

There hasn't been any annoumcenet of it yet on Gowalla's blog, but it's being reported across the tubes the checkin service has been bought by Facebook. Seems I jumped ship just in time.

I wish the team the best of luck in Palo Alto, and hope they do the right thing and allow us to easily export our checkins. Our Atom feeds have been dead for months and their promise to "definitely" develop export tools have gone unfulilled. During early 2010 I used Gowalla to track our last journey through Europe, and would desperately like to not have that stuff lost.

UPDATE: Was about to take a crack at their API, but then rediscovered the gloriously named export.synack.me. Got my checkin history emailed to me in a JSON file. Brilliant! The Hairy Lemon!

I disagree with Robert Scoble's assessment that Twitter needs to be more like Google+. If anything, from using Google+ I've learned to appreciate Twitter's simplicity! Oh yeah, and pudding.

It's not easy being green

In an entry on Google+ (makes sense) and on his blog, Robert goes into detail how Twitter now seems boring, and that the only way to change this would be for Twitter to broadly emulate Google+. MG Seigler posted a rebuttal, which I'd be able to take more seriously if it weren't quite as scathing, and hosted on a site that requires people to use a Facebook account to leave comments. Still, I found myself nodding my head in several places.

On the one hand, I can see Robert's point. With a [paltry!] 1200+ followers myself, I'm acutely aware of how frustrating it can be to receive comments from people on a regular basis without knowing which tweet they're commenting on! With tens of thousands of followers and commentators, there's no denying Google+ facilitates tracking theses threaded conversations more easily for people like him.

Claiming this can be fixed by making Twitter more like Google+ though makes absolutely no sense to me, just as John C. Dvorak's claim that Apple would only gain market value and share by licensing Mac OS X didn't. You're awesome John, but what were you smoking my friend?

Google+ is cool, but so is Twitter

Since Twitter's inception people have complained it's missing feature XYZ, but fortunately Twitter's managers have [largely] ignored such demands unless their users overwhelmingly form a consensus, such as with @replies and retweeting. The appeal of the platform is simple: 140 characters to do what you see fit. If you want more features, clients like Twitter's TweetDeck (that still sounds weird to say that) provide them.

The proof is in the pudding. Mmm, rice pudding. Services such as FriendFeed and Google Buzz have attempted to come along in this [relatively] free marketplace to introduce lacking features such as threaded comments, but they never really gained any significant mind share. It makes sense for Google+ because that's what the service started as, and because they're a clone of Facebook... who ironically bought FriendFeed and attempted to clone much of Twitter's features.

Now I have no qualm in hypocritically acknowledging that Twitter does need a few more features. The ability to automatically block obvious spammers (those who only send links to strangers and have no followers) and perhaps "associating" a URL with a tweet as I suggested in January would be fantastic, but the key is these features would arguably make the system simpler.

I love you Robert Scoble and am a huge fan, but I really believe copying Google+'s features would miss the point of Twitter entirely, and I sincerely hope nobody there takes your advice. The Google+ team should be taking it as a compliment though, they're obviously doing something right!

As a matter of disclosure, I know its not cool to admit but I've been a Twitter user since Q1 2007, and I have Google+ and like what I see.

Google recently released Google+, a new social network. Do you think you need another social network? ~ The Daily Post

You mean, another Google social network, or another social network in general? I've had revolutionary Orkut, Knol, Jaiku, Wave and Buzz accounts that went nowhere, so it's hard to muster enthusiasm for yet another of this company's efforts. If it gains some traction I'll look into it further.

One thing's for sure, Facebook sorely needs some competition. I'm uneasy about trusting Google with my personal information (not necessarily their fault), but I trust them far more than Facebook. Then again, I'd trust Diaspora more.

As for the name, it's almost as lame as Apple's Ping, but not as bad as Qrocity!

This was originally going to be a part of my recent URL shortening critique (RubyURL joins urlTea, parrots), but didn't get it done in time. My premise: Twitter could almost completely render URL shortening obsolete... if they wanted to.

Vegetable shortening is good for baking, right?

Originally tweets consisted of short messages about what we were doing... remember when Twitter used to ask us that? Shortly thereafter people started sharing links, and using TinyURL to shrink them down short enough to fit into the character limit. I'd hazard a guess that most tweets consist thesedays of either an @reply to another Twitter user, or a link prefaced with a short comment.

I've been saying since 2007 that Twitter and Identi.ca/StatusNet (oh and Jaiku and Pownce... bless 'em!) should provide the ability for tweeters to associate a URL with a tweet. This would mean:

• We would have the full 140 characters for the comment
• It would allow previewing of the full URL, not an obfuscated short URL
• More cheese steak jimmy's, rock on
• It would clean up our twitter streams and make them more usable
• It would eliminate one of the two biggest need for the ever increasing list of URL shorteners almost overnight (the other being the ability to easily tell people long URLs over the telephone, et al).

Demo Demo Demo-kun

So how would this work in practice? Well this is what a tweet with the current system would look like currently. That sentence had a lot of currents. I like blackcurrents.

Did you read this post? That Ruben character is such an aartard. http://rubenerd.com/?p=7921

It'd be rendered on the Twitter site or in client software like this:

Did you read this post? That Ruben character is such an aartard.
Reference link

I'd implement this on my own StatusNet server (aka my work stuff), but it'd mean any updates exported to Twitter would still have to have the links shortened and the rest of the message truncated by enough characters.

Alexei Oreskovi over at IT News Australia is asking:

Can the next hottest dotcoms live up to Wall Street's expectations?

Certainly with regards to Facebook: nah. At least, not long term anyway. I'd stake my reputation as the most respected person on Rubénerd.com on it. None of the other writers here have anything on me.

That said, Wall Street doesn't need to worry about being profitable, they'll get a bailout if they screw up, right? Its corporate welfare which (unlike those super evil commies that want it for regular people) is totally okay! Not that I'm cynical or anything. Or cyclical, I don't have a bike yet.

I've continued to receive emails from people demanding an explanation as to why I've "deleted" them from my Facebook profile. In the interest of alleviating their fears, I'm writing this post.

Clear as mud

Firstly, I would like to make one thing clear. I like grilled cheese sandwiches. There, I admit it, its out in the open, nothing more needs to be said.

Except for this. To those who have frantically emailed me and analysed our friendship in great detail to attempt to find a reason, I did not delete you from Facebook.

I deleted my Facebook profile entirely!

It's people who get upset over a token gesture like why I don't have you on Facebook any more that was one of the reasons why I stopped using the service. It's like high school popularity contests all over again. I suspect more than a few people who never attempted to talk to me until my profile disappeared only wanted me there to boost their friendship numbers so they can outdo someone else or look cooler. You see, there's a direct correlation between how many "friends" you have and how socially secure and awesome you are.

The fact that:

• The site is a front for some very dodgy companies doing dodgy things in a dodgy way without regards to privacy (or even security, *cough* Firesheep *cough*)

• Mr. Zuckerberg is the personification of all that's wrong with my generation (with people like Matt Mullenweg being an example of good)

• I like grilled cheese sandwiches

• Ultimately I didn't dervive much value from the service, which is lame public relations speak for "I didn't use it!"

... are all auxiliary reasons. Well maybe not auxiliary, they're all a mesh of things that came together that left a bad taste in my mouth, along with the social aspect I described before. Bad mouth tastes have never happened with a grilled cheese sandwich. Except that one time the cheese had expired and I didn't notice. That was right royally rank.

Yes, I just used the word rank with alliteration

I may attempt to make another profile in the future under a complete alias and fill out the interests and hobby fields with complete BS, but for now I'm savouring not having to worry about that site any more. Its a tremendous relief :).

Is Oh Ess Two free as a name? I'm having a small obsession with OS/2 at the moment, will be the subject of a new post soon.

Putting my self imposed exile on Twitter and my blog here aside for the time being because something so critically important has sprouted up that I need to discuss it in painstaking detail here. And it has nothing to do with The Bird being The Word, though that would also be important. Derp.

Hysterical, wait Historical

When I was in high school I had multiple machines with multiple browsers on said multiple machines. Each machine had multiple browsers, and I had multiple machines. In a nutshell, I had a ton of browsers, a multiple amount of them you could say. This whole paragraph could have been condensed down into: I had lots of browsers.

Oh, but it got worse. Because I'm a paranoid neat freak when it comes to computers, every six months or so I reformat my machines, cleanly reinstall them and use the time to clean up my data folders and make sure my backups are all in order. The upshot of this obsessiveness is not only did I have bookmarks in hundreds of thousands of millions of places, but they were regularly being deleted, or having to be manually restored every time I performed a system re-installation.

Needless to say, keeping track of these bookmarks was becoming increasingly difficult, and I was tempted to use an extension like Foxmarks (what it was called at the time), but it seemed like a bandaid solution. There had to be a Better Way.

There's an answer here somewhere

The answer came in the form of del.icio.us, a beautifully simple site where you could store your bookmarks, tag them, and share them with people if you so wanted. Because they were sitting up in The Cloud (before we even started calling it such) it didn't matter what happened to my local machines, or even what machine or browser I was using at the time, all my bookmarks were there ready to go each time I fired one up. It was amazing.

Of course, over time I set up my blog to do automatic backups of my del.icio.us bookmarks just in case the site went down, but aside from that I had nothing but reliable service from them. Well, at least until now probably.

Trouble brewing

Sounds like someone making instant International Roast or instant Nescafé. That stuff is rank.

1. The first sign of trouble was when Yahoo bought out del.icio.us in 2005, and went about changing the site's backend from Perl to PHP. Those who know Yahoo know that they use PHP religiously for their disparate services, so it was natural to expect this. Unfortunately, it didn't simply require a porting of code, but an entire rewrite. For some reason, this necessitated an entirely new site design which was less space efficient, had some glaring usability flaws that I remember Frank talking about on The Overnightscape all those years ago, and it generally felt more sluggish. Still, the bookmarklets in my web browser toolbars still continued to perform as normal.

2. The second change occurred when the otherwise clever domain hack http://del.icio.us/ was changed to http://delicious.com/ to make it more accessible. Unfortunately, it also meant the site lost its elitist appeal, because only hardcore users of the site such as myself could ever remember where to put the blasted full stops in the word delicious in the URL. Big problem. Huge.

3. Finally, when the threat of being bought by Microsoft seemed real, a lot of us started scrambling for alternatives. The idea of using Microsoft Delicious seemed far too terrifying to contemplate, partly because it wouldn't be called Microsoft Delicious, but probably Windows Live Bookmarks Express Online Home Corporate Enterprise, then later Bing Bookmarks which is just a downright embarrassing name.

My point, and I do have one

Anyway so it seems after all these gradual steps in the wrong direction, coupled with the loss of the del.icio.us staff from Yahoo's payroll, it seems the site has been slated for "sunsetting", which we can only assume means eventually shutting it down.

There have been calls to open source the site (the eventual graveyard for so much software that a lot of people have stopped caring about), but with its rewrite depending on so much internal Yahoo PHP I doubt that would ever happen, unless they open sourced the original Perl system which may or may not be able to have the current features and people's data backported to. I suppose a couple of astute developers could give it a shot.

In the meantime, I'll be looking into alternatives, probably writing and hosting something of my own. I didn't really use the social aspect of the site much, so a painfully simple database with a table for the the EARL, a title and a timestamp, along with a table of tags should be easy enough to configure.

Fortunately, del.icio.us has always made it easy to export data, so I'll be getting some XML goodness out of it soon enough.

Uh oh

My biggest concern right now is my late mum was a huge del.icio.us user, and obviously I can't ask her for her password any more. I'd hate for her stuff to disappear, maybe I'll have to contact Yahoo support and ask if I can have her password reset or if they can send me her exported data. Not sure what their protocol is for stuff like that.

It was nice knowing and using you del.icio.us, but I guess you're destined for the Web 2.0 scrapheap.

Update

It seems they're looking for someone to buy the service, but not shut it down. Still jittery. MerchantCircle it, I suppose?

In response to the continual antics of Zuckerberg and Co, today was the International Kill Your Facebook Day (or variations upon that theme).

Unfortunately, I have such tenuous link with so many people I still need my account, though today I took the opportunity to scrub it of all my information other than my name and a fake religion called "fake-account-ism". I'm still one of Zuckerbergs pawns, but at least I'm no good to the third parties that cut his cheques. Well, less good, at least now they'd have to trawl their database looking for items people think they deleted but were just stored somewhere else or with a different database flag.

Its a reality check

Reading books such as Hoodwinked you could be forgiven for thinking the people of my generation are more ethical and have more of a desire to good socially and for the environment than previous generations. I suppose Zuckerberg is a splash of cold water and a solid reality check on this view. There are people of every generation who's motivation is profit above people.

Here's hoping Diaspora or another similar project can do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace.

The Whole Wheat Factor

Of course I'm also a hypocrite, as Jim Kloss pointed out this morning my time:

Thanks for adding the Whole Wheat Radio Player Ruben. We both made compromises. I wrote the unbelievably contorted code to add a simple link to Facebook profiles and you logged onto FB. ;-) ---Jim

He's right, of course! In my defence, I figure the information from this widget is in the WWR community silo and not Facebook, and unlike most widget developers I trust Jim :).

For those who don't know, Whole Wheat Radio is an internet radio station and community wiki showcasing entirely independent music.

Okay everybody, calm down. CALM DOWN I SAID! Everything is going to be okay, just CALM DOWN!!! Repressed memories from 2007/08 flooding back! CALM DOWN EVERYONE! But I don't think I can sir. AAAARGH!

Soylent Greenbes: You are not Facebook's customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers -- advertisers. Forget this at your peril.

Alas, forgetting still doesn't give you the ability to permanently delete your account and have Facebook forget you. Which is a shame because in Soviet Russia, Facebook forgets you.