Factory Joe

Hey, uh… Google?

Two-Face So first you get props for telling the government to go eff itself and then you go and basically give the government an awesome loophole to circumvent the fourth amendment.

Brilliant!

No really — you do realize what you’ve done here with Google Desktop, right? By storing in plain text all the contents of someone’s harddrive on your servers, the government now no longer needs a search warrant to go after that data… they only need a subpeona for your servers. If it’s my data, I don’t even need to be notified!

And this is exactly the point that the EFF has made. I mean, hey, props for taking on the government, but history’s proven that no matter how big you are, you’re still not bigger than the government — regardless of your stock price, but dude, they are the ones who enforce the legal system that makes it possible for you to exist. Don’t fuggit that.

And yeah yeah, I know you’ve built in a means for getting my data off your servers, but the fact that it’ll take 60 days seems a bit… worrisome… as well:

If you cancel your Google Account or uninstall Google Desktop, the files indexed in the Search Across Computers feature will no longer be accessible through Google Desktop and may remain on our servers for up to 60 days before being deleted.

I mean, that’s kind of like leaving your credit card receipts and wallet at your ex-girlfriend’s place and not being able to make sure that indeed she’s not using it for nefarious purposes (or sharing it with her new boyfriend who’s in the FBI) for two months. Except my ex-girlfriends don’t tend to keep my data in a vault behind some Fort Knoxian security systems. But I digress.

Seriously dudes, ‘sup wit dat? You’re reaaaaaally startin’ to freak me out.

USPTO to hold open source meeting

My buddy Steven M. Nipper tipped me off to a meeting being held Feb 16 by the USPTO to further work begun in December, to ensure that patent examiners have improved access to all available prior art relating to software code during the patent examination process.

Unforunately I won’t be able to make it to Virginia in time, but if you’re interested and in the area, it might be good to have some small-time representatives there to vouch for the little guy! They’re limiting attendence to 220, so sign up ASAP.

FeedBurner launches Developer APIs

Could be pretty useful for future Mash Pits: FeedBurner – Developer APIs.

Flock seeking interaction designer…!

So I have a funny thing to post… Flock is looking for an interaction designer — which is similar to the role I’ve played so far except that it will be far more… erhm… focused! Yes yes, we’re looking for someone who can really execute on pushing pixels into place, on coming up with real world, grounded solutions, and someone who can design user flows, soup to nuts and really get inside someone else’s thoughtspace to understand the problem opportunities that Flock can solve.

Check the description for details; the first test is whether you can figure out whom to contact about the job (hint: serious applicants won’t apply in my comments!).

Out of stealth at 106 Miles

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.

PovertyBox G4

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?

Not To Do lists

Brad (of Coworking fame) shared with me a brilliant idea last night when I ran into him at Ritual: “Not to do lists”.

Damn, wish I’d thought of that.

As someone leading four or five lives’ worth of stuff to do (my own estimation, since everyone should probably be able to get away with sweating a little less these days), having a “Not to do list” when I’m getting jammed up makes a lot of sense. It means being more aware of what you’re wasting your time on and — as Brad lucidly pointed out — frees up more time to be filled with real good stuff. In fact, in his experience, every couple months when he refreshes his list, adding things not to do, something inevitably better comes down the pipe to make use of his newly available time.

I’ll have to give this a whirl and see how it goes.

Apple “Show Fonts” Doesn’t

So I realized that Apple really dropped the ball going for mega-control over font output in Apple apps… “Show Fonts” does anything but.

I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of options in there to tweak — but I think the problem is made worse by the number of things going on.

How about this? Ditch 90% of that UI (and I’m an amateur type snob, so this would represent a big loss of control for me here!). Try this: offer a selector for “Voice”. As in, y’know, “what voice do you want to convey this thought with?”

So you’re writing up a document and man, that sans-serif just ain’t conveying the emotion of what you’re trying to say… Maybe you need a little more snark? Maybe anger? How about a whimper. Those are things that you can achieve in type. It’s not hard — there are new styles being released all the time. It’s like a Photoshoppian “Layer Style” for your thoughts.

Now here’s one more UI brainstorm: start out with the voice option and in step 2, toss up the recommended voice style encircled by similar but slightly different type styles… to “hone your voice”. Click on one of the other styles and the “voice cloud” rotates and now uses that new style as its central axis. Actually, this is very much like how Quicksilver’s eye-gooey Constellation UI works.

Eh? Eh? Whaddya think?