What news feels like

Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy

I was walking down the street today when I glanced sidelong at a newspaper box and caught the words “Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy”.

A fleeting moment of relief came over me and I thought to myself, “Finally.”

But sometimes we believe into existence that which we want to see. And sometimes that belief, though powerful, proves false.

Upon further investigation I suffered the let-down of all time: just like always, the Onion was not reporting real news, but merely made up fantasies that were too good to be true.

What’s interesting about this has nothing to do with The Onion, though. Instead it has to do with the medium and with the message.

For one thing, the fact that what I thought I saw was in newsprint still carried with it a certain kind of psychological weight or trustworthiness… it wasn’t like reading Tailrank about some spoofed headline… if it was in print and on the street in one of hundreds of thousands of newsstands around the world, surely there must be some truth to it. Alas, the medium betrayed me.

As for the message — it is revealing to me how sharp the sudden sense of relief was at that the thought that “the war is over”. I mean, facing fact, this is the largest war that my generation has ever seen. We’ve now seen more soldiers and coalition forces killed than went to my high school. More than ten times that have been injured or wounded. And yet the thing keeps dragging on, to no certain end.

Y’know, I’ve always liked war movies — especially ones about World War II. If there was ever such a thing, history has recorded this affair as the feel-good war of the century — where boys were turned into men, women filled the factories and smoking and Coca Cola became icons of the American psyche. The same can nary be said for the current war.

And, whatever the reality of earlier wars, this one seems even further away from reality — even more impossible — and even less certain about its ultimate goal than the previous black-and-white conflicts.

…which I suppose is why the faux-headline in the Onion caught my attention and gave me a sense of, well, hope. Because that’s what this war seems to lack — there is no real villain anymore, no hero, there is no sure outcome, there is no obvious way to end this black hole that’s been unleashed. My dad and my grandfather were both enlisted men and if either were involved in active duty today, I’m not sure that I could really understand what they were after.

Oh sure, protecting freedom; certainly, saving face after removing Saddam without a plan for winning the peace; planting democracy in the Middle East? Um, okay? Saving the world from terrorism? Making the world a better place? How does making war make things better?

…

Y’know — I live a very privileged life. I’m so grateful to have the things I have: to live in a fantastic city with a fantastic woman; I help run an amazing upstart business situated in a terrific space with some incredible individuals. I work on things that I love and that I’m passionate about. I’m pretty much in touch with my family and I have the most fabulous friends all over the world.

So when it comes to this four-year-old war — with all the good things that I have in my life — I guess I’m just stuck wishing for a headline that indicates something other than that it’s just got to keep going for sake of… keeping going.

Journler 2.5 is out and worth a look

Journler 2.5

Last year during MacWorld, a Mac developer by the name of Philip Dow came to stay with us after he found us on Can I Crash. It was a rather happenstance occasion, one not lacking in a certain serendipity given that I’d just discovered his application — a nice little gem called Journler.

Well, it’s just about a year later and Phil’s come out with a new version — that is blazingly fast and does everything the previous version did but better.

On top of being a really exciting release, Phil has also developed his own license — one that will hopefully support his work as an independent Mac software developer. The terms are pretty simple: if you use Journler for personal use, pay whatever you’re able; if you use it in a more professional or shared context, you’re obligated to pay $24.95. Phil explains:

The basic idea behind changes to the license is fairness. There’s none of that thirty days nonsense, annoying reminders, superimposed warnings or greyed out menus. You are not a child. Simultaneously, if you are capable of purchasing the program or donating, do so. With these changes I’m working hard to stay true to my original intentions as the creator of Journler while also ensuring that I can continue working on the program under the conditions I am now.

I really respect this approach to development and charging, though I know it’s a harder path to take. In any event, if you’re looking for a journal, note-taking, GTD, media-collecting, personal-snap-shot-taking, podcasting or blogging tool (yes, it really does all those things), do give Journler a look.

Highrise follows trend with OpenID signups at 9%

Opening door to OpenIDIn announcing a number of welcome changes to their pricing plans on Highrise, their new CRM tool, 37 Signals also provides some welcome figures on the uptake of OpenID:

Another interesting stat is that 9% of the people signed up are using OpenID. Lots of early adopters on board!

This is more or less consistent with Ma.gnolia’s rate of uptake:

So far, over 15% of new Ma.gnolia members are seeing the advantage and getting their OpenID when they join Ma.gnolia. Considering how new OpenID is, and that it takes a bit of un-learning of old sign-in habits, we’re really delighted to see this adoption rate.

Jason Fried has also suggested that OpenID will be making its way to their other products soon:

We’re still learning about OpenID and OpenID implementations with Highrise. There are still some bugs to work out. Once we feel we’ve really nailed that we’ll look into spreading it across the rest of the product line.

As we see more mainstream coverage, like the USA Today article suggesting that OpenID “cuts down on Web registrations”, it’s likely that we’ll easily surpass 100 million OpenIDs by the end of the year as more and more small businesses reap the benefits of the advance of this technology in how it reduces the greatest barrier to attracting and retaining new customers: signing up for yet another account!

All in all, good news for OpenID and for 37 Signals customers.

ClaimID adds social networking

claimID.com XFN creator

In spite of previous disavowals of having social networking aspirations, identity link aggregator ClaimID has now added the ability to add other ClaimID members to your profile as contacts.

Interestingly, they restrict you to adding friends who have OpenIDs (since every ClaimID profile URL is an OpenID) and use the to define your relationship.

This is a significant decision because, presumably, every OpenID has an owner. As such, adding one of these “verified” OpenID URLs as a contact to your verified OpenID URL could represent a higher trust level — a stronger “claim” as the lingo goes — than simply using the XFN rel-me attribute to create a “weak” relationship claim. Or so goes the theory.

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been reordering my Flickr screenshot collections and have created a set devoted to adding friends interfaces. If you have examples of similar interfaces, leave me a link to the source and I’ll get them added!

37 Signals’ new app Highrise launches

Login to Highrise with OpenID

With narry a word on the 37 Signals’ blog SvN, the veil has been lifted on their long awaited CRM tool called Highrise.

There are a number of posts that capture some of the many features of Highrise on the SvN blog and are worth a look:

In the meantime, I’ve collected a bunch of screenshots (nice catch Allen) — in addition to their great tour — that will give you a sense of what the app is all about.

I’m totally excited about their adoption of OpenID, but I have to admit, their implementation — especially in the forum — is a little odd. I love the auto-adapting interface for inputing your OpenID, but the fact that I can’t sign in to the forum with the OpenID that I created my Highrise account with kind of misses the point.

And still no sign of microformats either, but a guy can hope right?

Anyway, it is exciting to take a look at all the interface greatness in this app — definitely some fine work. Whether I’ll become a paying customer is up in the air, especially as open source solutions like CiviCRM exist (though without the interface trappings that make 37 Signals products so attractive). I do like what I see so far, though — and if I can find a way to fit it into my workflow, I’ll likely end up a pretty satisfied user.

Twitter is performance email

To all you Twitter-naysayers who don’t care what I had for lunch, what the weather is around me, what brilliant insight I just had was and to all the rest: that’s fine. I’m not *performing* for you. I’m performing for me, and for my friends, and as a result of being so ostentatious, they are ostentatious back which nullifies any traditional sense of egotism.

Just as Flickr chose to make uploaded photos *public by default*, Twitter does the same for SMS, email and IM and it’s *really* effing interesting. To me. To my friends. To people who care and who relate.

So if you’re some automaton and you’ve forgotten that human connections and communication are fundamental, go back to your cog-in-the-machine day job and let us revel in the freedom of open performance and better living through Twitter.

Apollo Alpha is out, the WOW comes later

TechMeme in 3DWeb

There’s a ton of buzz being tossed on the alpha release of Adobe’s new . And reasonably so, as ZDNet blogger Ryan Stewart points out, in a world of Web 2.0 internet-goodness, this is the desktop rearing its head again in the form powerful RIAs.

I’ll leave the coverage to other folks, but in the meantime, I installed the runtime libraries and ran the sample apps included — grabbing a bunch of screenshots along the way that you should take a look at.

I also set up a Flickr group for other screenshots and a Ma.gnolia group for collecting news and other Apollo-related links.

I’m particularly excited about Apollo given its advance of the state of web tech… and the best is yet to come (though Finetune gives a taste of where we’re starting from). At the same time, I’d prefer a slightly lest costly and more open — but equally intuitive and capable — solution. OpenLaszlo, where y’at?

i use this adds support for OpenID

iusethis openid association

I’ve give credit to Tara for provoking this one.

i use this, one of my favorite Mac OS X software sites, has enabled OpenID consumption using miyagawa’s OpenID plugin for Catalyst.

Note: I hadn’t realized, but despite its Rails-like trappings, i use this is actually a Perl app powered by Catalyst. One issue that was revealed in using the Catalyst library concerned Yadis discovery of delegated OpenIDs. Until I hear from Marcus, you’ll either need to use your direct OpenID URLs or the traditional meta-tag method of delegation until support for Yadis is baked into the library.

The primates of Twitter

Henry Halff, Larry‘s dad, makes a very interesting comment:

It’s been proposed (sorry that I can’t dig up the reference) that we humans in our earlier days formed bonds amongst ourselves through mutual grooming and that these grooming circles were limited in size to about 50.

It’s also said that, as we evolved, our hands became far too, well, handy, to fritter away in grooming. So, our ancestors came to maintain their social bonds by inventing speech and yammering at each other whilst they were using their hands to make tools, stir pots, change diapers, whatever.

It turns out, in fact, (again, sorry I can’t dig up the reference) that our conversations are still dominated by inconsequential blather, what some might call “noise.” This noise, as you point out, is ideally suited to maintaining social bonds.

What is interesting about all this is that what with all the twitter posts from mobile phones and keyboards is that we apparently have returned to using our hands to maintain social bonds. Perhaps its because we don’t want to waste our voices on such mundanities.