2011-01-20
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Joanne McNeil on Twitter.: The Blog in 2011: More Pictures, More Words at Tomorrow Museum.
For what it’s worth, this is my feeling, too, but she’s right: the world has decided Twitter is the best link (and photo) propagation medium out there, and they’re probably right.
2011-01-08
Permanence, Discoverability, and Control
I stumbled upon this post by quietbabylon, called “For Sufficiently Small Values of ‘Permanent’”, which I’ve chosen to sum up with these paragraphs:
Anil Dash’s post is about the importance of putting your clever/important ideas in a medium other than Twitter. Quick summary: There are a lot of good ideas in circulation on Twitter, but if you don’t put them somewhere like a blog, they are liable to be lost forever.
Blogs used to be the poster children of ephemera. It took the rise of even more ephemeral media (status updates and Twitter posts) for blogs to seem permanent. But blogs are no more permanent today than they were five or ten years ago. See also: dead Geocities, dying Delicious, and constantly ailing Tumblr.
What blogs and website have that Twitter lacks is rediscoverability. Twitter’s search is incomplete, missing what I’d think were basic things like searching a person’s timeline or limiting the scope to a list of accounts. On top of that, while the posts aren’t lost, we do lose the ability to search past 3,200 posts into the past—I needed Google to find that Dorsey tweet.
This is true, and far from unimportant, but there’s another thing that blogs tend to have that Twitter doesn’t: control.
If you own (although as the post notes, they’re strictly rented for a period from one to ten years) your own URL, and have a copy of your data, then you have a lot of control over your site. That’s most obviously true for a self-hosted Movable Type or Wordpress account, where you have the database and can edit the software yourself, but it’s also true even for Tumblr or Blogger. When Vox shut down, I lost control over the blech.vox.com domain, whereas if and when Tumblr closes, I can repoint the notes.husk.org cname to somewhere else, and (providing I can either replicate or redirect the /posts/id mapping) nobody will be able to notice the difference. (This isn’t just hypothetical, either: Tom Insam recently posted code that did just that.)
Discoverability is certainly important (and Tumblr’s archive pages are generally good for this), but a certain level of control is useful too.
2010-12-23
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Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s “before you tweet” checklist (via intercourse with biscuits).
Oh dear. I mean, I know Twitter is many things to many people, and for a while it’s been more about distribution than ambient intimacy, but really- should people be advising that every post should be clickable? It’s especially galling since Twitter doesn’t even have room for full URLs (or a mechanism for including them in metadata as opposed to taking up space in the post).
Perhaps if I look at that as advice for corporations, as opposed to people, it’s less vexing. (Except, of course, for the fact that I care about people, not companies. Ah well.)
2010-11-14
Above London: a retirement notice
Over three years ago, at the Yahoo/BBC Hackday in Alexandra Palace, candace and I knocked up Above London and Above SF, two Twitter bots that would alert followers in one of those two cities that the International Space Station (or an Iridium flare) would be visible.
I’m happy with the reception it got, and I still prefer its output to that of some of the subsequent services that provide the same service (such as @overlondon or @twisst). However, it was always a bit of a pain to look after (true to the word “hack” in the event title, I cut corners when it came to handling DST, and occasionally the cron jobs running it would fall over).
Two things have finally done for it: Twitter’s move to OAuth, and more importantly, the fact I managed to leave the only copy of the code on a server that’s now sitting, unplugged, in the UK. Even the service on which I posted the write-up of the hack has now closed. Given that, it’s probably best that I post a message to the Twitter accounts, and formally shut up shop (for now, at least).
Thanks to everyone who followed either the San Francisco or London account, and good luck with one of the aforementioned alternatives. I hope you got to see the ISS at least once. It’s always warmed my heart to look up and see the few humans that circle the world, shining brightly in the evening twilight.
2010-10-11
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2010-09-04
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2010-05-08
A First Look At Annotations
A couple of hours after I gave my talk about Flickr machine tags and their possible lessons for Twitter’s new annotations, Raffi Krikorian gave a talk at Warblecamp on that very subject. He’s now posted slides of the talk, which are well worth a look.
In them, he expands on the format for annotations (they consist of types, attributes and values; types can be repeated, but attributes can’t), and mentions an annotations “explorer”, which will contain both “statistics of most used, adopted and trending attributions” and a “wiki page so developers can document their attributes”.
This dual approach pretty much fixes the main points I was worried about, combining a “pave the cowpath” method (looking at actual usage data) with a more editorial take on the wiki.
Anyway, the talk touched on even more (including the beta rollout plan, which will be based on OAuth-enabled apps, rather than feature flags or user lists), and mentioned release dates (which are reassuringly close). All in all, it’s pretty exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they get used in the wild.
Edit: there’s now a video of the talk, thanks to Farhan Rehman.
Annotations and Machines Tags
I’m at Warblecamp (unsurprisingly, they also have a Twitter account), where I gave a short talk about Flickr’s machine tags and possible lessons for Twitter’s upcoming annotations feature. You can download the slides (6MB PDF), but they’re very much from the “big word / big picture” school, so feel free not to bother.
The idea was to breeze through Flickr’s implementation of tags, machine tags, machine tag extras, and exploring hierarchies via both URLs and the API, and point out the features I liked and how, perhaps, Twitter might learn from them.
The discussion afterwards was interesting. One point, which was well worth making, was that Twitter’s stream of text is very different from Flickr’s archive of photographs. (One more difference is that tags (and machine tags) are editable later; annotations are set in stone at post create time.) Aral Balkan suggested a registry of Twitter annotation namespaces, along the lines of his Twitter Formats proposal. Personally, I prefer the “pave the cowpaths” approach of discovering what’s actually in use in the wild (and is also why I built the machine tag browser). I didn’t mention this at the time, but there was an attempt at a Flickr machine tags wiki, which failed, perhaps colouring my view.
There was also a question about size limits for annotations (turns out it’s 512 bytes) and a discussion on the more RDF-ish aspects of triple tags (and how you say what a thing is, which also touched on establishing concordances). Generally I don’t get hung up on the semantics of machine tags, but I’m sure there are people who do, and they might be reassured by the points (mentioned in the Twitter preview post) about the use of schemas:
People could add some agreed upon “meta-annotation” that points to something which *describes* the annotation or annotations that person is using. Think something sort of like XML DTD, though not necessarily machine readable.
For a few slides knocked up the evening before, I’m vaguely happy with both the talk but very happy with the response and the way it’s made me think more about the idea.
