Read at Joe’s

Preface: I’m not really happy about the conceptual uniformity of this post, but I wanted to get the ideas out. There are really two things I’m talking about. First is the idea of a Personal Publishing site identified by my OpenID rather than accounts on individual publishing or messaging services. The second is the notion that all messaging modalities are essentially the same in that they push or notify instead of working by polling.

One thing that’s become obvious to me after working on and thinking about Distributed Microblogging is that all forms of messaging are essentially the same. The only differences between email, IM, chat and microblogging are quantitative not qualitative. There are only matters of degree in length, asynchrony and number of recipients. While it is true that sometimes a matter of degree results in a defacto matter of kind, I’m convinced there is some kind of Grand Confluence of these different messaging modalities in our future.

I didn’t include blogging as messaging because the essence of a message is that the sender initiates the transfer. So even though you might subscribe to a blog using RSS, feed readers still operate by polling, i.e., periodically checking for something new. So blogging is still basically a “pull” operation, where messaging is a “push”.

But blogging and messaging can be thought of as similarly implemented if we separate two notions: message content and message notification. Think of sending a message as two operations. First, I create and store the message content on a place I’ll call my Personal Publishing Site or PPS. Second, I send out a short notification message to the recipients, with a link or key back to the stored post on my PPS. Third, using the link or key I provided in the notification, the recipients call back and get the content from my PPS. Now, in the case of small messages like IM, chat or microblogging, it would be a time and bandwidth saver to just send the message body along with the notification. One correlation that seems pretty consistent is that short messages like IM, chat or microblogging tend to get sent more frequently and with a shorter delivery requirement than say, email or blog posts, which can languish for days without being read.

What if all messaging operated this way? What if, instead of going to different sites to talk to friends there with different tools and capabilities, we created and sent (published and notified) all messages using our own Personal Publishing Site? What if community or other types of sites could receive our PPS messages and post copies of them or links to them?

We have a glimpse into the possibilities of this world with Identi.ca and the open source software that powers it, Laconica. What if everyone ran their own laconica service? That would be like a Personal Microblogging site. What if our OpenID page contained meta-data about what laconica server to use to contact us? What would that mean for the notion of community sites? Would they become more like simple mailing lists if you didn’t have to “go” there to communicate with your friends who might also be friends there? In this model of the world, we’d have discussions by a sort of Dueling Banjos publishing. I publish a message which you read, then you respond by publishing a message that I read. Depending on how subscription works only you and I might see the messages, or they might be seen by a wider group of our subscribers or anyone, sort of like an @ conversation on Twitter.

ps: The DISO project is attempting to address some of these issues, if you want to pop over there and do a little reading.

Tags: diso project, laconica, microblogging, openid, personal publishing

I can usually restrain myself from kvetching about bad English. I will admit it’s a thing with me. I see red when people make plurals with apostrophes. I wince when my friends online insist on using your when you’re is called for, their when they’re is needed or write then when they mean than.

Even though many of these transgressions are in hastily written emails or IMs, many appear in blogs, where you’d think people would care more about putting their best foot forward because they’re expressing their personal point of view for all to read. Even then I hold my tongue.

But today, I saw a blatant faux pas that just pushed me over the edge. I cannot remain silent any longer. This is a company’s web site. This is their product, their pride and joy. There’s only one and everyone from the CEO to the janitor has probably seen it. And here it is in screaming blue large font:

Here we have a mismatched noun and verb. It should read, “Finding events that are close to you”, or alternatively the contraction, “Finding events that’re close to you.” I prefer the former. Now, I doubt that even these idiots would say, “All my dogs is big”, but they appear to think that using the contracted form of “events that is close to you” is fine.

Alright, I’m prepared to believe that the programmer who coded this page may not have been a native English speaker, but God in Heaven Above, is everyone in the QA department, the marketing department and the management also illiterate? Did not even one of their proud Moms (probably closer to my age and schooled in an era where you learned these things in elementary school) not notice this painfully obvious mistake?

Enough is enough. Just on the evidence of either ignorance or a patent disregard for quality, I wouldn’t join or use this site until they clean up their act.

And please, tell me about any mistakes that I’ve made in this post. At least I care enough to want to know.

ps. There are places where incorrect English doesn’t bother me. These are Twitter, IM, SMS and chat. Because brevity and speed are of the essence, ur is perfectly acceptable for both your and you’re, as are a host of other inventive abbreviations, contractions and slang.

1. Adults Only airline flights. Not that some adults can’t act like babies, but wouldn’t it be nice to get on an airplane and not have to play toddler tantrum roulette with your seating assignment?
2. Adults Only restaurants. I’m paying $200 or more for my wife and I to enjoy an exquisite dining experience. Can I please have it without someone’s kids banging silverware, running amok between tables and generally making a scene? K,ThxBai.
3. Excessive Perfume detectors at TSA checkpoints (thanks, @Hooeyspewer) and restaurant entrances - complete with flashing red lights and klaxons. Ladies, get a friggin’ clue. You stink!!

This Sunday, June 29, 2008, I will be attending DevHouseBoston. I’ve proposed a project called Distributed Microblogging. My primary goal for the day is to get a UI defined. If we can prototype something, so much the better, but I think the discussions going on in the online community really need to have some attention given to exactly what microblogging is, as opposed to how to do it. Many “how” proposals miss important requirements or add what I consider unnecessary ones.

So I’ve been putting together the following list of what I consider to be important features that a good microblogging function should have. In most cases, I’ve approached it from how it should appear to the user. If you are coming to DevHouseBoston on Sunday, you might want to read this list over and come prepared to argue the merits of different points, add your own, or if you’re a UI designer, contribute to a discussion of how to design a UI that incorporates these features.

Remember that one of the benefits of an open system is that there can be many different UIs to choose from!

So, following, is the list in a very raw and unpolished form.

Note: DMB means Distributed Microblogging.

Feature list for dmb UI

Omnipresent replies, direct messages tabs or buttons.
Tags on other microblogs, on posts, on other tags?

Direct support for conversations, replies, etc.
Main page. Like twitter. Update input box at top, but maybe with separate scrolling list of stream.
Multiple streams showing, replies, all, selected person’s archive, including user’s archive.
“Hide” check boxes for each user. Clicking it removes their updates from stream list, and places their name in the a “hidden” list for easy reinstatement.

Also would be able to show/hide certain groups.

Conversation support. Each tweet would have a “reply” button. Clicking it would add the @user_name to the beginning of the update, and also make a database entry linking the update to one or more previous updates. The @’d user names would be like the “to” list on an email. Each update could have multiple other updates it was in-reply-to. This is a many-to-many relationship. An update can be in response to multiple other updates, and clearly an update can have many responses to it.

Updates have GUIDs. Required by IMPP.

Tabs for different subsets of users = from Mike Gaines. “tag-tab”

Separate input area for different tag-tabs.

Topics for User experience
Conversations. What can you do? How are they shown?
Multiple addressees (like email?)
Latest on top or on the bottom? User pref?
Classes of messages
Direct
Narrowcast (to a group tag?)
Broadcast (or is this simply to all tags?)
Temporary silencing (show/hide checkbox) So I can turn off someone who is usually ok, but is just ranting or something.

Ad-hoc grouping. Drag users into a tab where you see only their tweets.
Public ad-hoc groups. All your followers can see tweets. You just filter locally.
Private ad-hoc groups. Just the people in the group see the tweets.

General question.. will adding private groups destroy some of the vibrancy and serendipity of Twitter?

How to present tagging in the UI so it’s intuitive with what it does for the user, as opposed to a geeky abstract function?

What can be tagged, and hence grouped? Users, convos, even other tags? Locations? languages? specific tweets having to do with a certain subject? others?

Universally unique tags vs. private tags. UUtags would be very helpful for organizing large tagging efforts. But, how to agree on a tag for say, “SocialMediaBreakfast8″?

theRQ would be great to be able to send/post an out “out of stream” message to someone that they get upon login- wouldn’t age off. (subject to spam abuse?)

Search - Let Google do it? What about private mblogs? Can individual servers be expected to support a general search capability? Thru XMPP? Thru HTTP?

Show me when I have new, unread DMs.

Multiple addressees for DMs. Now it’s beginning to look like email.

Show me when I have new, unread messages.
Show me when I have new, unread messages from specific people or groups. (on that tag-tab?)

Auto-update (ala chat) vs. manual update.

Rich content. Photos, audio. (How to transmit to mobile devices?)

How to add these features without sacrificing the simplicity?

A few lines when you request to follow, so you can explain why. Either that or a listing of common friends on different sites.

What about the Twitter community? Can it be made part of DMB? Can we build an interface to Twitter? Will Twitter participate in DMB?

What about other communities that start up? Twitter has very amorphous sub-communities.

Implementation questions:

Use XMPP archiving or external? (some xmpp archiving options not applicable, like off the record, although they might be of interest)

How to do multiple servers?

How to map mb posts onto “collections” in xmpp archiving. Another reason to use external archving?

If we did external archiving it would relieve the burden of archiving on servers that could be used. Although they’re more likely to support archiving than pubsub.

Tags: distributed microblogging devhouseboston

I sent the following letter to the editor at the New London Day this morning.

The Democratic Party and indeed the nation owe Rep. Charles Rangel of NY (Dem 15th) a well-deserved “Thank you, sir!” According to accounts released yesterday, it was Rep. Rangel who delivered a much-needed dose of cold reality to Sen. Hillary Clinton regarding the necessity of her unequivocally conceding the nomination to Sen. Obama, and leaving the stage.

Her refusal to acknowledge the facts of the situation has and continue to be embarrassing for the party and herself. This excruciating exercise in patent self-deception may indeed have irretrievably damaged any further chance she may have at the White House. I would certainly not want a president who could let herself be enclosed in such a bubble of inside opinion. It is in no small sense a chief executive’s express responsibility to see through the haze of “yes-men” blinded by loyalty. Sen. Clinton and her supporters have been living in a self-manufactured fantasy world for the past few weeks, if the truth be told. Such a capacity for utter denial is not a quality becoming a presidential hopeful. I hope her statements tomorrow reveal a cleared head and no further circumlocution about who won. If she finally does the right thing, we can thank a little tough love administered by Rep. Rangel.

People are blogging and commenting on Twitter’s blog about Twitter’s current degraded service status. I will admit to being torn about this. Being a developer myself, I know the kinds of strange and inscrutable things computer systems will do for no apparent reason. I myself have a website that I haven’t done much with lately, and which has its own set of issues which include no-apparent-reason failures. Try the same thing an hour later, and everything’s fine. So I really do understand and empathize with Twitter’s small band of developers and system engineers that try their best to keep the beast running smoothly.

There is a difference, however, between their situation and mine. I’m a single person, with some borrowed time on a shared hosting account, with no money to throw at the problem, although I do have time. Twitter has received several million dollars in venture financing, and while a not-insignifcant part of that goes to simply server, bandwidth and SMS service fees (which can be substantial), there’s still a lot left there to hire someone who can scale up a web-site. It’s not really uncharted territory. There are innumerable sites out there that carry tons more traffic than Twitter. Why can’t Twitter do it, then? The answer that comes to mind is that their management, or more likely their investors are not willing to spend the money on new hires or consulting hours to get to the bottom of their issues and fix them.

That said, I still have empathy for the people who are doing what amounts to rebuilding the engine and drivetrain of a car while it’s roaring down the highway at maximum speed. It’s a hard task, for sure. I just hope the management and investors are taking this seriously, and giving those engineers the resources they need to get the job done. In my experience, it’s rarely the troops on the ground that are to blame, but rather the people running the place and paying for it.

I don’t disagree with people who say, “what do you want for nothing?” But unless Twitter does something to really fix their performance and stability problems, someone’s going to come out with a service or solution that does fix the problem, and that will be the end of Twitter.

There has been a lot of discussion today both on Twitter and in the blogosphere about @arielwaldman’s lack of success in getting Twitter to enforce its terms of service regarding harassment and abuse. This is the most visible TOS incident due to her name recognition, but there have been less publicized incidents involving @Dayngr and others in the Twitter-realm. So I got to thinking what would happen in situations like this if we had a truly open and distributed microblogging environment.

Like Twitter, an open microblogging protocol would in theory allow anyone to follow anyone and would, I hope, allow a user to block someone from sending them updates or receiving their updates. So, if someone were being harassed, they could take action on their own with their own provider (which may be their own server) to block harassing actions.

But there the similarity ends. Unless both the harasser and the user were hosted by the same microblogging server, the victim would have very little in the way of recourse, outside of a libel or harassment lawsuit in the courts.

In this sense, it would be pretty much like regular blogging. You can say pretty much anything you want on your own blog within the limits of the law. This blog, for instance, is hosted on a private account with a well-known web-hosting service, DreamHost. If I wanted to start name-calling on someone from this account, and that was all it amounted to, what would be their recourse? Not much except if I made patently threatening or otherwise illegal statements. There is, basically, no one to complain to in this situation unless what I publish is actionable in a court of law. Dreamhost’s terms of service questions and answers page says it all.

“I don’t like what your customer is writing - I’m going to sue you!”

As the host of tens of thousands of web sites and as a company residing in a rather litigious country, we receive this threat pretty often (so often that it has long since stopped being “scary”). Why? A cursory glance at the law will show that online service providers such as DreamHost are not liable for the speech of their customers’ web sites.

This is for good reason - web hosts are unable to judge the veracity of their customers’ speech, nor are they the ones actually engaging in that speech. Were the law structured differently, web hosts may very well shy away from hosting important (but controversial and disliked by somebody!) sites - even those who are ethically in the right.

The legal reasoning for this is as follows: The Communications Decency Act enacted by Congress in 1996 specifically grants legal immunity to online service providers for the content of their customers’ web sites (”No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider”). This law has since been upheld in a number of federal and state cases, including Blumenthal v. Drudge, Zeran v. America Online, Inc., Scheider v. Amazon.com, Inc, Jane Doe v. America Online, Inc. and Barrett v. Fonorow.

For this reason, we ask that you address your concerns directly with the creator of the content you are concerned about.

Is this a good thing or not? Think about it and offer a comment. I find it interesting that a web publishing service (which Twitter in a large sense is) would put such hard-to-define language in its TOS to begin with, since there seems to be no precedent for doing so in the larger world. Would anyone using Twitter not have signed up if those terms regarding abuse and harassment were not in there? If they weren’t there, would people be as upset? Why does being part of the same server community make a difference? I don’t know… you tell me!

I like “unconferences” like PodCamps and BarCamps. These are conferences that are user-generated, the meeting equivalent of open-source software. They’re usually no or low charge and there’s no profit-making agenda behind them. Their purpose is to bring people together to help each other out. Sessions are done by attendees, as opposed to “big name” invited speakers. The organization is very ad hoc and go-with-the-flow. I love them because of the parties and the socializing that happen at them. I get to meet people in real life that perhaps before I had only known online, and I get to reunion with friends I’ve met the same way before. The real value of unconferences is in the friendships that you make, not the sessions, although they can be catalysts for making worthwhile new acquaintances.

The physical space where an unconference is held can have a dramatic effect on the experience that the attendees have. After attending several BarCamps and PodCamps, I’ve begun to formulate a concept for the Perfect Unconference Venue. Herewith are my ideas. I would love to hear what you think.

A single, large, openly connected space is what I have in mind. In a house, it would be called an “open floor plan”. So far, the best space I’ve personally experienced was PodCampBoston2 last October. It was held at the Boston Convention Center which is a HUGE facilty. We had a small corner of it, but it was wonderful in that all the session rooms, including the main ballroom-sized space, were adjacent to each other off a common main corridor. The corridor itself was wide and spacious and had comfy benches to sit on with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Boston skyline. As you probably know if you attend conferences, the best part often takes place in the corridors, where you can meet and talk to whomever you want, without the constraints of a formal panel or presentation.

Spaces that are on different floors or in disconnected parts of a building, or worse different buildings make people feel disconnected and stranded. You lose track of the people you want to see and be with. You feel isolated and alone. That’s not good. Unconferences (or regular conferences for that matter) ought to foster a feeling of connectedness and community, not isolation and loneliness.

Again, socializing is key, and ready availability of coffee, food and liquor and comfortable, quiet, cozy spaces would significantly enhance the experience for everyone. And let me emphasize the quiet aspect. As someone who is not young anymore, I have a hard time following conversations when there is a lot of ambient noise. It is not hard to create spaces with noise-dampening surfaces. Why make people yell at each other when they can have a calm, quiet conversation in an atmosphere that suggests closeness and encourages openness?

In my mind, I see the perfect venue having a circular overall architecture. Meeting rooms and large auditorium fanning out from a central terraced core socializing area which would funnel downward toward a central food services hub containing one or more bars, coffee and food vendors. The terraced architecture would let everyone see and be seen. People love to people watch. And at a conference, you would want to be able to spot your friends and acquaintances-to-be within that large open space.

The terraced socializing area would be furnished with many ultra-comfortable seating areas-some large, allowing a group of 10 or so to collect for an ad hoc conversation, and some small, intimate spaces for a few or even just two people to have a private conversation, yet still be semi-visible to others in the space. Ideally, the space would be adjacent to a hotel where attendees would stay and yet be convenient to an urban area with a host of independent restaurants and entertainment.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s a pipe dream. But damn, wouldn’t that be just perfect? I’m going to try to get my son, the architect, to put a rendering together on his CAD system and post it up here. Would love to hear your ideas on the Perfect Unconference Venue.

BarCampBoston3

I had the pleasure of speaking at BarCampBoston3 this past Saturday in Cambridge, MA on the topic “Distributed Twitter”. This was a well-attended event and the geek energy was high! BarCamps attract and cater to hard-core coders and implementers. Not many marketing, PR or media types were in evidence, but there were quite a few startup CEOs there looking for help.

One particularly useful session for me was at the start of the day, when Matt Douglas, CEO of MyPunchBowl.com, brought together companies looking for help with developers looking for work. It was very informal, we all got 10 seconds to say who we were and what we were looking for. I made a couple of promising connections there, so that in itself was worth the 90 minute drive from my home in Connecticut to Cambridge. Thanks, Matt and MyPunchBowl! This kind of Hook-me-up session should be a part of every BarCamp.

I was pleased that my session on Distributed Twitter attracted a packed room. Unfortunately, I completely zoned and missed the fact that sessions were only 1/2 hour, so I had to cut things short, but I did meet some interesting people who were interested in trying to get a project off the ground to actually build something.

I had some interesting follow-up discussions later in the day with people who were at my talk, but unfortunately, did not get to tell all at the meeting about the Distributed Twitter Google Group. Probably no biggie since I’m going to have to change the name of the group anyway, to avoid the inevitable cease-and-desist letter from Twitter.com’s lawyers for using their name.

One of the big reasons I went to BarCamp was to try to connect with mobile developers since a big part of decentralizing a microblogging platform is to provide the mobile connection that Twitter has. Many people use Twitter almost exclusively on their phones. I did meet two young fellows who seemed very interested in creating a mobile app to interface directly to a microblogging platform. Their advice was to skip SMS for demo purposes and simply use the mobile IP connectivity. Their POV was that SMS will go away in due time to be replaced by the more flexible and extensible IP protocol directly to apps on the phone. I’m not sure I buy the argument that you don’t need to have an SMS connection. SMS will be around for a while to come yet, and not having it could hamper uptake severely.

I had other interesting conversations regarding the use of XMPP as the “carrier” protocol for microblogging services. It was suggested to use Google’s gTalk service to experiment with since it’s a fully compliant (I think) XMPP end-point.

I continue to have some challenges with XMPP proponents not fully appreciating that microblogging is more like blogging than instant-messaging or chat. I’ll confess I don’t understand the differences completely myself, but I do see that there are some and that they are significant to a proper implementation. For instance, microblogging does not have the requirement or notion of presence. As a user, you don’t need to be “present” to get all the updates that people may send. You should be able to go back at any time and get the complete history of a microblog’s updates, just like it was a blog. Related to presence is the notion that senders of content aren’t responsible for keeping a permanent copy around for receivers to reference and search. More about this at a later time, but one shouldn’t have to rely on being “present” or having your receiving server make a copy of everything that a microblog sends to have a complete record. The sender should be responsible for keeping a permanent, permalinkable copy.

So, all in all, BarCampBoston3 was definitely worthwhile but I could have done better had I taken two consecutive sessions, which is allowed, and not have been so pressed for time.

Coming up…

In the weeks to come, I’m scheduled to do two more presentations about Distributed Microblogging.

1. IgniteBoston3 - May 29th, 6 pm at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA. This will be a quick, 5 minute “drive-by” preso just to introduce people to the topic. I’ll probably just get enough time to describe what it is, why I’m involved and to pimp preso #2 (next) and refer people to the Google group. If you’re interested in coming, be sure to register because they always fill up!
2. Berkman Center Thursday Night Meeting - June 5th, (time: tba), at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, 23 Everett St. Cambridge, MA. I’ll be speaking on Distributed Microblogging. I’m not sure, but there may be other presenters as well. This is my first time at a Berkman Thursday Night meeting and I’m very excited.

Tags: distributed microblogging twitter barcampboston berkman

Waiting to be seated for what turned out to be just elegant sushi at Haruki East in Providence last Friday night, Hilary Mason and I were chatting about my current interest of trying to create an open and distributed Twitter-like microblogging design. “I’m concerned that might destroy the Twitter community”, she said. I was somewhat taken aback by that notion, having not thought much about the unintended consequences aspect of what I was doing. But I see now that that concern is well-grounded.

Twitter is a place and a culture, a “scene” you might say, as much as it is a tool or an application. There are norms of behavior, customs and vernacular all of which foster a real sense of community amongst Twitterers. We think of ourselves as belonging to that scene, and we’re proud of it. We have bonded with it and each other and silly as it seems, we are drawn closer together by the shared hardship of dealing with Twitter’s many outages, slowdowns and bugs.

I’m giving a talk this Saturday at BarCampBoston about Distributed Twitter, and hope to recruit some developers and perhaps designers to work together to create one or more prototypes. But it seems I have to add an item to my agenda now, which is “how to maintain the Twitter sense of community” even when people by design will be using different UIs and server implementations to connect into the microblogging cloud, as it were.

This should cause us to ask some really interesting questions. What causes people to have such allegiance to a community? Twitter isn’t just one community, it’s thousands of overlapping sub-communities of friends and friends-of-friends. Could those sub-communities break off and form their own microblogging server center? Could there be another “community” site that just kept track of the binding -together of people and left the status updates, SMS interface, and database crunching to the “medium”?

Kinda makes you say, “Hmmmm”. Thanks, Hilary, for the whack upside my head on that one.

Tags: distributed twitter microblogging HilaryMason community