Twitter API

Personal, Web Standards

I think the opportunity has passed for the Twitter API to become a lingua franca for the real-time web. WordPress.com, Tumblr, Typepad, SocialCast, and Status.net all added support for the API in a way to make it as easy as possible for Twitter client developers — all they had to do was change the endpoint. The clients would then become a hub for users across different services, and had the ability to flourish regardless of the direction of the service they originally built on.

However because of perceived lack of market or a rush trying to keep up with each other and new features in Twitter’s API, like geo-location, we’re now close to half a year later and support for alternative endpoints in the major clients is haphazard at best. One of examples we all used to point to, Tweetie, is now owned by Twitter Inc. and doesn’t have much motivation to support other services in the future. Neither do the other official clients they’re rolling out. (Twitter.com/downloads is now a 404 page.)

For the record I completely support Twitter creating or buying official clients for every platform, including desktops. It’s what I would do in their position. However the third-party client developers that contributed immeasurably to Twitter’s success thus far are now in the awkward position of no longer being useful to their parent. It makes no sense for Twitter to have its user or signup experience mediated by a third party. None of the third-party clients have innovated enough in the user experience (for the most part they do not look or work significantly different from when they launched) or in cross-service support and flow.

If any of the clients had added seamless third-party API support when the opportunity first arose we’d all be pointing to them and promoting them. Now we’re more in a situation where, like Twitter, it makes more sense to build and promote our own because our users are demanding a multi-modal experience.

Facts Backfire

Personal, Quote

“In reality, we often base our opinions on our beliefs, which can have an uneasy relationship with facts. And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we’re right, and even less likely to listen to any new information.”

— Joe Keohane in How facts backfire. Hat tip: Ramit Sethi’s psychology bookmarks.

Six Apart and Live Journal

Personal,

I’m a little late to this, but the word is that Six Apart is buying LiveJournal. Congrats to the 6A and LJ teams! Big news, however you cut it. However, the question is: what exactly are they buying? LiveJournal has about 5.6 million accounts, but only about 2.4 million of these are active. That’s still pretty nice though, considering I imagine it’s about 24x what Typepad/Movable Type have now. Is it the technology? That’s already open source so they would have access to that anyway, and it’s Perl (which is 6A’s core competency) so I’m sure they could find they way around. (I wonder what will happen to the Open Source project after the dust has settled though?) That leads me to think it must be the people and engineers at LJ that 6A is after. Is this enough to position them against Microsoft and Google, as many have been suggesting?

98.6% of LiveJournal users don’t pay a thing, but that still gives 6A ~93,000 accounts paying $25/year. That revenue will be nice, especially since 6A has so many employees, but I don’t think it’s the coup most people are expecting. Remember the people who invested $10M in Six Apart are expecting it to be a quarter of a billion dollar business. It’ll be interesting to hear what the official word is on this, if and when an official word comes out. I’m probably missing something obvious. (And where is Yahoo in all of this? They better hurry up and buy someone too.)

CNN on WP

Press, WordPress

Many of you have written in that CNN’s new Political Ticker blog is on WordPress. We know! They’re part of our VIP program which allowed them to launch quickly and serve millions of pageviews with no problems. The team there has launched dozens of blogs on the system, including ones for Fortune.com and CNN Money and is a real pleasure to work with. To the extent blogs are going to have an impact on the 2008 election they need to be able to reach millions of people in a short period of time without problems, I hope that WordPress.com provides that platform for folks.

Virgin Wifi

WordPress

I’m on a Virgin America flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco and there’s wifi! I was on one of the test international flights where they did wifi like 5 years ago but I haven’t been on a flight that has had it since. I wish this flight was actually longer. I’m getting 140ms ping times to wordpress.com, it’s a great connection.

The Most Frustrating Thing

Design, Google, Wikipedia,

It’s Friday, so I’m going to take a few minutes to describe the most annoying concept I see espoused by 95%+ of blogs I read, people I talk to, and friends I have. The problem is until you let go, you’ll never be able to build something truly useful to a non-trivial audience.

Technology doesn’t matter. Design doesn’t matter.

There, I said it.

Continue reading The Most Frustrating Thing →

Books in 2017

Books

Here’s what I ended up reading this year, in roughly chronological finishing order. (I usually have 3-4 books going on at once.)

  1. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss.
  2. The Art of Stillness by Pico Ayer.
  3. Out of Your Mind by Alan Watts (audiobook, really a series of lectures).
  4. Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Mushashi (audiobook).
  5. Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.
  6. The Best American Short Stories 2016 edited by Junot Diaz.
  7. Feynman by Jim Ottaviani.
  8. My Gita by Devdutt Pattanaik.
  9. From Plato to Post-modernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author by Louis Markos (another lecture series).
  10. The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy.
  11. The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam.
  12. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
  13. Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles.
  14. When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain: History’s Unknown Chapters by Giles Milton.
  15. Widow Basquiat: A Love Story by Jennifer Clement.
  16. 32 Yolks: From My Mother’s Table to Working the Line by Eric Ripert.
  17. Identify: Basic Principles of Identity Design in the Iconic Trademarks by Chermayeff & Geismar.
  18. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity by David Lynch (audiobook).
  19. The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone.
  20. The Leavers by Lisa Ko.
  21. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. (Update: On Obama’s 2019 book list.)
  22. Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman.
  23. The Executive’s Compass by James O’Toole.
  24. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom.
  25. Dance of the Possible by Scott Berkun.
  26. The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang (short story).
  27. Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss.
  28. After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley by Rob Reid.
  29. Principles by Ray Dalio.
  30. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (audiobook).
  31. The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams by C.G. Jung.

A fairly random selection, and hopefully I can get a few more in next year.

All book years: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020–2023.