Out of Towner Meetup: Joey “Accordion Guy” De Villa

AccordianDon’t forget, this Sunday we’re having another Out of Towner meetup featuring some accordian playing dude named Joey De Villa. He’s in the ‘rati top 1000, so you probably already know who he is… I mean, his blog is worth nearly $300,000 so you should know him if you don’t already.

And besides, he’s a friend of Miss Rogue, so we owe him a good welcome at the very least.

So after the pigskin’s been laid down and the Steelers have whooped the Seahawks’ derrieres, head on over to 21st Amendment around 7ish and say hello! Word has it, Joey will even have his accordian with him…

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Me and Microsoft, Part II

Executive summary: Had dinner the other night with Jim Allchin and some other wonderful folks. We talked broadly about open source, Internet Explorer and Windows, Window Media Center, identity management and passport and widely about DRM and how effed the whole system is. And though there were certainly MSFT-friendlies around the table, it was refreshingly not a total MSFT lovefest. Details follow. Part 2 in a series of a couple.

Me and MicrosoftOkay, so you wanna know what I think? I don’t think MSFT is a bad company. Maybe I’m basing that only on my interactions with Scoble and Jim, Linda, Neil and James and others from MSFT that I’ve historically interacted with, but really I think that there’s some decency in there. Thomas told me that of the AGYM companies, MSFT employees seem to be the most open and willing to engage in honest conversations about the failings of their employer. Are there bad apples in the mix (maybe the wrong analogy to use, ehmm)? Of course. Has MSFT been arrogant, closed, anti-standards, proprietary and at times evil? Yeah, probably (though that last part is often in the eye of the beholder). Achieving the ol’ American dream doesn’t come without crushing some toes.

So here’s my beef (and Tara was totally right to push this issue with Jim): when it comes to certain, shall we say, “politically-charged” (and economically-impactful) issues, why doesn’t MSFT shore up on the side of democracy and freedom of information and expression and rally its allies against the intellectual police state? Ok, fine… scrap the hyperbole, here’s what I want: just let us use our media however we damn well please! Eff this DRM bullshit. You know it’s not good for your customers and it’s ultimately not good for your bottom line, either.

O o o wait. Ok. Call my bluff, go ahead. Well, see, I’m not that naive and Tara isn’t either. We know it all comes down to business (as usual).

We know that quote-unquote consumers are only part of your audience — that Hollywood is also one of your most well-endowed customers (I’m talking big feet, here); that they rely on you to lock down and handicap the technology and tools that you build so that they can maintain their stranglehold on eff-you-ectual property.

I git it, I git it. Duh.

But how about this? Who said I ever cared about bidness (as usual)? Now, I’m not down with making threats much (I mean, this is a personal blog, big friggin’ whoop what I have to say here), but it is obvious, at least to me and everyone I know, that you’re fighting a losing battle. I don’t even have to back it up. Time will tell. What the system can’t break down, it will route around. And DRM schemes are being broken so fast that the money you’re spending researching new ones is almost certainly costing you future allies in the Doomsday fight against Hollywood. So you’re losing in both respects: you’re certainly not getting points with your Media Center enthusiasts who just want to be able to play their legally purchased media anywhere and by not making a stand against the DRM that-turns-our-computers-against-us, it’s you that looks bad, even though you’re only pushing Hollywood’s agenda.

Oh, and about blaming it all on Apple and the iPod…. for a minute there you had me going… It did seem to make sense that geez, Apple’s the real offender here, keeping iTunes and the iPod all locked up and proprietary. But then hey, I realized that if your players were decent and you’d won the player war, you’d be doing the exact same thing that you accuse Apple of, which, by the way, is perpetuating their winning streak going and keeping you outta that business (hmm, didn’t you do this with the desktop? what comes around, goes around maybe?).

You can’t just say “well, they’ve found success with the iPod, they’re making boatloads of cash, they’re the ones that should fix the DRM problem and take on Hollywood.” That’s bullshit and now that I’ve thought about it, a bit insulting that you would suggest that MSFT has nothing to do with the problem.

But I’m jess sayin’, yoo kno?

Anyway, I’ve got nothing against you guys personally. That’s the beauty of working for a monolith: your individual actions have much less bite when it comes right down to it. So let’s call this an academic exercise: you all get F’s in my book for sticking up for the little guy and hell, I would’ve suspended Hollywood by now and sent it off for a remedial education in the importance of sharing ones trucks in the sandbox of life… but truly, I’m a peon in the scheme of things; you guys are the ones building your “open” DRM into our tools, into our media and into our computers. You do have the power to make a difference. So, uhm, sorry if I don’t buy your logic that Apple’s all to blame or that the problem is out of your hands. Personally, I can only choose not to buy your DRM’d crap and instead spend my money supporting causes that are working to dismantle the intellectual police state that you’re creating.

Ok, I’m done. Remember that this totally isn’t personal — hey, I like you guys — it’s just your and Hollywood’s big picture I ain’t too fond of! Kbai.

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.

Microformats + Thunderbird

Microformats + ThunderbirdThe things that bother me about Thunderbird on OSX are certainly many, but I can come up with one above all others that totally kills me: the lack of integration with the Apple address book. Nothing more than this illustrates the source of Tantek’s fervor for wanting data portability and his resultant hope in microformats.

Think about it. If Thunderbird stored hCards, and Address Book.app read hCards (or used them as its storage format), there’d be no problem.

One format to rule them all: XHTML! Best of all, you could use Spotlight, Applescript, and whatever other Mac-centric technologies on this data as well. No weird one-off formats that nothing else supports, no conversion, no special readers or parsers… and you could upload your address book and view it on the web… anywhere.