Category: Work

Out of stealth at 106 Miles

Speaking about stuff and nonsense

Went and was a “contender” at Joyce Parks’ and Adam “I Find Karma” Rifkin 106 Miles gathering tonight against Kevin “Rank that Tail” Burton.

Yeah well, I think there was less antagonism than Joyce might have hoped for, but nevertheless, it was a good chance to actually express some of my varied views on the state of open source, the Bubble 2.0, the whole stealth/beta thing… and a couple other topics. Maybe someone will podcast it, I dunno.

David Weekly told me his biggest takeaway had to do with having some humility when launching something on the web… which, I admit, Flock did not. And which, I admit, caused us to experience a trial by fire that taught us a great deal about the way things are… and about the important of expressing, with clarity and honesty, why you might not exactly have the kind of humility one should have when coming out and boldly pronouncing that you’re going to change the world…

Well, I’ll keep it brief, but the story goes like this: I came to San Francisco a little over a year and half ago. And when I got here, I knew no one. But through the power of networks, open source… getting involved in Mozilla and CivicSpace at the right time, hell, I was able to get the job I currently have now, doing what I’ve always dreamed of doing: taking back control over technology and putting it to work for regular folks (myself included!).

So when I came to Flock and helped formulate the vision for what they should build, well shit, I was full of vim and vinegar and busting to tell the world all about it.

And so I did. Publicly. On our website. On our website that asked for your email address. And that was just like the countless other “private beta” sites that cropped up around the Web 2.0 conference.

Which was fine and good and so on, but that now represents something dirty or tainty it seems. Well whatever, that’s not the important thing here.

The issue is how we launched Flock… and how all this beautiful enthusiasm and hope and optimism turned into vengeful anti-hype and disdain. And whether or not, given the opportunity, I would have done anything differently.

The answer, simply, is, “no”.

We endured a trial by fire that any project with our level of visibility deserved. We underwent a continued scorching that demanded to know whether or not we were legit or just the first in what might become a trend in Mozilla-derivative businesses using the success of Firefox to get ahead.

Are we? Well, I don’t know. Really. That’s not the project that I think I’m working on, but I’m just a lucky kid who happened into this mix of things. And I’m emboldened by the success I found on the Mozilla project; on having my ad in the New York Times, on being mentioned in Wired and Rolling Stone. These are things I never dreamed of when I came out here — why would I? But having experienced them — serendipitously — I’m convinced, as I was prior to Web 2.0, that what we’re doing is important, is relevant, has the potential to change things… and for the better.

What we didn’t communicate when we launched was a timeline — was how long it would take to get to the fabled One Dot Oh, if indeed that denomination even makes sense anymore. While I was going off on how we were going to change the web and, by extension, the world, I forget to mention that, Oh yeah, this’ll take us a couple years. So don’t hold your breath… just yet.

But y’know, at the same time — well, I’m glad that we said what we said. I’m proud of the vision that we have for Flock. It’s saying something — it’s taking a risk where it might make more “sense” to stick with conventional wisdom of what a browser is all about… And heck, I don’t know if we’re going to succeed and make this thing happen now, today, this time around. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that we’re asking these questions, now, that browser-makers can start to think about expanding beyond the baseline concepts of “history” and “bookmarks” in the browser and start to incorporate “people”… “web services”… “syndicated content”. And on and on.

Anyway, as I’ve just blabbed all this out, this is part of the humility — the mea culpa of saying, “Man, did we learn a lot!” And yeah, I’m sharing it with you just because, well, it’s worth knowing that if we had it to do all over again, maybe a touch more of humility would have helped, but no, I wouldn’t do it any different than what we did.

Autocomplete for my life

<img src="http://static.flickr.com/35/97329052_83e237710f_o.png" class="alignright" alt="So when creating blog posts, I’m constantly scrambling for some self-lovin’ link, something I actually wrote from awhile back, a link to a friend or two, or something that I read on the web, either recently or way back when. And there’s permutations there within, but what I’m talking about are linking to things from within and without the experience that makes up my life.

Write what you know, the saying goes.

Well, I tend to, except constantly typing in aye aych REF quote aych-tee-tee-pee-colon-backslash-backslash [link] gets really tiresome after awhile.

And filling out acronymns and abbreviations. Guh. I know what they are — calm-poo-tor, why don’t you fill in my lonely readers with what I’m brevifying?

So I had this idea for a feature a long time ago, except I envisioned it happening ipso post facto… once you were done writing the post, you’d run a little “linkification app” that would run through and fix your abbreviations, acronyms and even linkify words and phrases that you’d linked up before… So when I type Tantek, well, it knows that I’ve typed Tantek before and can add the link that I used back then, complete with XFN attributes and hell, even a title. Oh, and sure, turn it into an hCard while you’re at it.

But so here’s the brainstorm I had this morning (in the shower, where all my good ideas come from — don’t ask me why — but I really would love one of those scuba boards next time you want to buy me somefing nice). The idea is a small adjustment to this concept… Hey, if the browser is indexing everything I’m visiting, and we’re grabbing events and people data from microformats, why not autocomplete in real time — pulling in from my events, my locations, my friends and contacts — even from the photos that I’ve uploaded? If the the browser is your context for composing, it knows everything (well almost) that you’ve touched on the web — including comments you’ve left, photos you’ve uploaded, pages you’ve favorited it. Yeah, Matt could even do this with a Greasemonkey script for WordPress.com that autocompletes from your delicioius account.

Anyway, point being, I at least tend to write about my experience — and things that I come into contact with. Why can’t the browser (or whatever editor I’m using) make it easier for me to link to the things that I’m talking about so that other people have a richer understanding of what it is I’m usually rambling about?

The death of the beta

Guardian Technology Icon

The term "beta" will also collapse into irrelevance in downloadable software, predicts Chris Messina, who calls himself director of experience at Flock, a startup developing an open source browser. Users of Microsoft products know that when software products move out of beta, users are flooded with security and quality patches in short order, meaning that version 1.0 isn’t so much a magic milestone as just another point in a continual cycle of development.

"I see gradients of validity where for my mom I might wait until Flock gets to 0.8 before I install it for her," Messina says. "For friends who I like I’ll give them the development version that won’t crash the system, and then for people I don’t like they can have the nightly builds. So I think we’ll have three tracks."

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Are you a dummy for beta software?

So there you have it, if I don’t like you, go download an nightly hourly build. 😉

No, just kidding.

But the point stands — software development is indeed becoming more organic, without really even realizing it (or maybe it has been all along, but we’ve fought its natural state for business reasons — after all, selling upgrades is a lucrative bidniz). Sure, you’ve still got holdouts and beta logos plastered all over the place, but the reality is this: software is a process. It’s never really done. The longer we go on pretending that the vaunted one-dot-oh somehow indicates a sense of finality, security or stability, the harder time we’re going to have convincing folks not in the geek world that there will always be bugs, that there are no right answers, that, just like natural systems, we’ve got to design for imperfection, frailty, accidents and hell, the irrationality of human actors.

So listen, I’d read somewhere recently (I forget where — I wasn’t using Flock so I can’t full-text search my history) that this whole BETA program fad is just a way for companies to shirk responsibility for the apps they deploy. It’s like, you call something "beta" and poof, no more responsibility. Well, clearly no one really does read EULAs anymore or you’d know that, beta or not, no one takes responsibility for anything anymore. It’s all the in the EULA, usually in some big bold type like this: WE DON’T CARE IF YOU BLOW UP YOUR COMPUTER WITH OUR SOFTWARE, IT’S NOT OUR FAULT AND THE LAW IS ON OUR SIDE, GET OVER IT (copied from the IE7 beta 2 EULA).

(No, just kidding).

Anyway, I think the point that Schofield makes in his article is a good one, and I enjoyed the chance to talk to him about it. But really folks, and this was raised in that conversation, what the heck are we going to do with desktop apps and the ever-present push towards one-dot-ohs? I don’t see them going away any time soon and yet they simply don’t reflect anything useful, especially since webapps have the luxury of never really worrying about that problem and can be in a constant state of flux and no one really cares… As it is, Thunderbird has been downloading updates every other day, asking me to restart it so that it can update itself… I have no idea what version I’m running — only the knowledge that somebody, somewhere is working on the thing and that its stability comes in fits and spurts. And that’s ok, because I’ve come to Jesse baby, hallelujah!, praise the Ford, Zen-master dojo, taekwon-do and on and on. Yeah, now that software development is becoming more zen-like, how do we help the rest of the world cope with the realities of such uncertainty?

Incurring the wrath: tags vs labels

Tags vs LabelsSo now that the Google Toolbar has added support for “labels” (and not tags) it seems like there should be some consensus built about the heck we should call these little jellybeans in Flock.

Vera has repeatedly told me that “tagging” is a hard word to use in documentation because it has multiple purposes… whereas “labeling” is a bit more clear and more singular in its utility. Let’s face it, when you label something, it’s pretty clear what the before and after states are. When you tag it, not so much.

The other thing we have to consider is this: since Google is obviously throwing its hefty weight behind labels and not tags (consider Gmail, Picasa, your search history, the toolbar and elsewhere), we might do well to realize that the de facto “word” for this behavior will not be “tag”, but will instead over time become “label”.

Sure sure, we need consider what Redmond will standardize on, but from what I’ve seen of IE7, etc., they’re playing a game of catch up and will do whatever the consumer market standardizes on first. (Imagine that… what happened to that whole bit about needing a monopoly to innovate? Guess that didn’t work out after all, eh guys?)

Anyway, Flickr has tags, delicious has tags, ‘rati has tags and most other Web Two projects seem to support tags… so when Google goes the other way and pushes labels, seems we ought to pay attention.

Mind you I’m not advocating one or the other or suggesting that we all change course now (especially within Flock), but instead proposing that we think seriously about this now before the rift between the two starts to hit teh long tail and we have massive confusion between one term and another.

Tom Raftery catches me in the AM

Factory RockstarThat spikey Irish-bloke Tom Raftery (who I met at Les Blogs) interviewed me the other morning.

A little poppy, but y’know, might be worth a listen if you’re into sadomasochism and listening to a web geek waxing intelligent floats your ship.

Anyway, a podcast that smells like bacon must be good and Tom does well grilling me on Flock, Web Two Dot Oh, and software that I’d marry (are you listening, Jitkoff?). I also go off the deep end about DRM and robot take-overs and say something in French that someone else told me to say. I mean, it was like 8:00am, gimme a break.

send_pings and losing my innocense

Sleight of handI’m writing this post with some real hesitance, feeling like I’ve just stepped into a cigar-smoke filled backroom with the bunch of thugs who really run this town… and they’re pulling out their tommy guns to take me out as I’m frantically trying to write this.

Heh. 

Yeah, I tend to get a bit melodramatic when I write, but this time I really feel like I’m tossing it on the line… I mean, this is my job I’m talking about here and though I’ve feigned to be so direct before, this issue cuts at the heart of the work that I’m doing. And fuck if I feel like a piece of me is dying as a result of this.

Darin posted yesterday about a new ping attribute being added to link anchors in the trunk builds in Firefox. Basically links that used to look like this:

<a href="http://flock.com">Flock</a>

can now be written like this:

<a href="http://flock.com" ping="http://myeviltracker.com?source=factoryjoe.com/blog">Flock</a>

The result? Well, hover over the link and you’ll get a handy little status bar message telling you that Firefox is about to open (in this case) flock.com as it silently pings myeviltracker.com in the background. The benefit to you? Well, supposedly because you’re no longer visiting the redirection sites prior to hitting your final destination, pages will be perceived as loading faster. Whoopee.

At least, that’s the idea as spec’d by the WhatWG. Including it’s inherent evilness (see #4).

So why does this matter so much to me? Well, because I’m working on building a browser based on Firefox. Decisions made upstream obviously effect this work since the Mozilla technologies that power Firefox make up the core of Flock. And the decision to enable browser.send_pings by default trickles down to us. We inherit that decision and all the baggage and rationales that come with it. Including the impact on privacy.

I’m not so naive that I don’t recognize that all of our behavior is being tracked, analyzed and quanitified already, both online and off. (Hey, I saw the Matrix too!) But right now, as Hixie pointed out, it’s being done by advertisers via a series of obfuscated redirection URLs. Ever use a service like eBates? Notice the 5 or 10 servers that you’re bounced across before you land at the final page? This ping attribute is designed specifically to address that "problem"… to make landing on your final destination… smoother, faster.. more calming… wha? huh?

Sorry, I dozed off.

So while all the greedy hands in an online transaction will presumably be daylighted in the status bar (yeah, like they’ll all fit), it’s how this feature is being pushed through that scares the bejeebies out of me the most.

And dammit, I feel like more of my online childhood is being robbed from me. 

Think about it. Why is this feature being introduced? Who does it really help? Who does it really stand to benefit the most? Lemme give you a hint: it’s not you and it’s not me (despite what the proponents might say). Let me quote:

This change is being considered in large part because some very popular websites have asked for a solution to this problem.

Gee, can’t imagine which "very popular websites" those would be. Scoble, are you asking for features in competitor browsers again? C’mon man, we talked about that!

Oh wait, not that kind of popular… that kind of popular! As in… "all knowing, all seeing, all controlling"?

Oh oh, I get it; yes, exactly: to make tracking your behavior easier for advertisers.   

And here I thought the next name for Firefox would surely be Volksfoxen.

If the features of the next generation of browsers (Firefox 2 Alpha is just around the corner etc etc) are being driven by advertising, TBL help us.

I mean, sure, we’re trying to ask some serious questions about what the next 10 years of browsers look like too and we’re also funded by dudes with stogies in dimly-lit rooms (oh what, I’m not supposed to say that?), but, as far as I’m aware (remember, I’m young, dumb and naive), I haven’t been asking what the advertising industry has on its wishlist when I design features. Nor the et al. Nor enterprise. And no, that hasn’t happened with Firefox just yet, but I’m just concerned that if we’re not vigilant, it might. (Hey,shuddup, it might!)

I mean, the future of the web that I’m interested in investing in doesn’t treat people as statistics to be quantified. No, instead it’s more about what they have to say, what their contributions to this massive jerky conversation pool might look like, what bit of brilliance they might shine on the web that will change my life forever. It’s happened a couple times already and it didn’t result from monetizing the web better.

This send_pings feature reeks of special interests. So hey yeah, just because we’re downstream doesn’t mean we’ve gotta accept everything that trickles down. Insomuch as I’ve yet to be convinced that this feature doesn’t do anything to humanize the web or improve web standards, or help people communicate better, I’m moving to keep it from landing as default "on" in Flock. Call me a luddite, fine, but bug logged. Consequences, well… be damned.