Tag: Flock

Announcing Mashup Camp

mashup camp

So it serves me right that serendipity scooped me on this one, but I’d had this long post thing that I was working on about the Death of Web * Dot Oh but well, as it was boring and even longer than my other tomes, I never got around to finishing it. So I’ll summarize, since my point was extremely simple, if not pedestrian:

Whatever you want to call it, the point is, we’ve got some pretty decent technologies at our disposal now. And some of them are open, as in open source or open APIs. It’s about time that we stopped futzing around and built tools that worked for ordinary folks, yeh, the ones who don’t have time to live and breathe tech like the rest of us seem to. Most of the world is not like us (surprise!) and at some point, yes, we must break free from our autistic cocoon and realize, “Gee Spudsky, there are other people in the world who still don’t know what a web browser is. Well I’ll be. Dang nab it!”

(I probably should podcast that so you can hear the thick southern drawl on that endquote.)

Whatever, so that’s the premise and the treatise of my defunct rant: build good stuff with what we’ve got for ordinary, good people!

Um, so why do I bring that up? Glad you asked.

So I mentioned open tech stuff. Stuff that you can use without having to ask for permission because it’s granted or presumed granted or licensed that way. These are the tools of what’s coming next. (That which shall remain nameless. Grr.)

So what I want to do is two things. And I’ll be totally honest about this:

  1. I want Brad Neuberg’s Coworking idea to spread. And I want it to succeed and take on a life of its own, just like Bar Camp has. Those things which are simple and seem to have built in relevance to a community will survive and flourish when given proper sunlight and water. Coworking needs that.
  2. I want a venue and a space that I can go to and designhack with other skilled, interesting folks working on similarly interesting projects, where there is no ego involved, only the building of The Next; where there’s wifi, access to caffeinated beverages, chairs, tables, couches… and no distractions. Such an environment breeds innovation, breeds connections, friendships, revolutions. And when it can become distributed, plazeless even, you have a shot in hell at finding success.

So here’s the deal. January 17 we’re going to have a Mashup Camp at the Coworking space. No, it probably won’t be exactly David Berlind’s concept, even though he gets credit for blogging the idea first (goddamn procrastination!). Rather it’s going to be a day of intense GTD.

There will be 12 of us, mixed and mashed from a superlative cadre of geeks. It’s open to apply, but we’ve got limited space and time, so, 12. Anyway, we start in the morning promptly at 10am (after informal coffee, etc). We do brief intros, discuss our project, what we’re bringing to the table as far as knowledge, know-how and passion. We then break up into a couple groups based on what we want to get done and the utility of our offerings. …Spend the next couple hours drawing, writing, designing, architecting… getting to something with teeth but not code. Break for lunch and cross-polination.

Here’s where we could get tricky (it is a mashup camp after all). Maybe after lunch we play musical chairs with the projects. Y’know, mashup the teams? This means that the folks early in the day really need to be clear about what they want since it’ll be someone else’s fingers actually punching the keys and juicing the code.

Wait, do you mean that want a decent spec?

Uhm, yes.

Don’t worry, we’ll make something up. So after the mashing of people, a coding melee ensues and by the end of the day, we’ll have something. Scratch that, we’ll have a few things. Probably not all that pretty, but beginnings. And, I’ll tell you this in advance, one of the projects will be to construct the website that will host these projects moving forward… what shall become a proverbial open source treasure trove of mashups. Oh yes my friends, this is going to be good.

Ning, eat your heart out. No offense, but a bunch of passionate geeks in a room can run blindfolded circles around any prefab solution any day. Remember? this stuff is for real people. And for that, well, you’ve gotta have heart.

Improving composition in browsers

Blog QuillSo a bunch of us at the newly opened up Flock HQ were discussing the Performancing extension today, wondering how we could both support and benefit from their work… It’s clear that we need to improve the quality of composition tools available in browsers, period. Doing this by elevating the experience and smoothing out the behavior of the Mozilla editor (which both Flock and Performancing use) seems like the way to go, creating value for the open source, Flock and Firefox communities.

As it is, Firefox ships with this editor built-in. Thunderbird uses it too, as does NVU (though I believe that they forked awhile back). You can imagine that refocused effort on this editor could potentially lead to an alternative to plain textarea that’s both stable and adequately featured (as opposed to hacking on an embedded solution).

So the thing is, how do we go about defining and building out the specs for the next generation Mozilla editor? How do we better collaborate with folks like Performancing to make this a reality?

As for Flock, well, this effort really needs to exist as a community-wide project. We’re all already pretty focused on other aspects of the browser and while making changes the editor are essential long term, it’s not in our immediate roadmap. Sure, Anthony makes incremental changes here and there (replacing the span tags, for example), but we just don’t have full time resources to allocate at the moment.

And that’s where the work that the Performancing community is doing comes in. Ideally if we can collaborate and coordinate on the needs we both have, we can begin to craft a list of user experience and development requirements to support our comingled goals of bringing blogging to Firefox and Flock users.

Ajaxian recently posted an Ajax Office Roundup that provides us some insights into how people are trying to use editing in browsers. The reality is, we don’t need Word for the web, especially when it comes to blogging, but we do need some established basics, like bolding, italics, blockquoting, linking and so on. And while those are already fairly well accounted for in the existing editor, we’ve got to look beyond formatting to natively supporting rich metadata in microformats and other forms of structured blogging.

I’ll be pinging the Performancing folks to see if they’re down for working together somehow. Maybe we start be cross-polinating each other’s forums.

After all, this is about choice and working on building awesome tools. This is what open source is all about. So hey now, here’s a quintessential opportunity for us to get some benefit and promotion for the work we’re doing anyway.

…Wanted to destroy something beautiful

Blood of Destruction

You have to understand something about Flock. Nothing is permanant. We’re hungry. Destruction is a form of expression. It’s a form of existing, of creating, of saying, we exist.

So if we have to, we will destroy Flock. Not in the way you think. Not in that stupid, insipid, “yes it ends here way”. No. In that, “nothing worth doing happens the first time around.”

We will destroy it because the ideas are weak, the promise less than what we desire, less than what we are capable of. We will kill it because it needs to be killed. Because evolution is inevitable.

We’re hungry. What this country gives us doesn’t feed our need to create, to produce, to solve and to connect. With all due respect, fuck you, we will create in the same action that destroys. We don’t believe in what we’re given; there is something better.

Damn you, I’m not kidding.

CocoaRadio interview posted

Factory Rockstar I’ve got another interview out in the wild, this time at Blake Burris’ CocoaRadio.

The interview was conducted at my favorite San Francisco cafe, Ritual Roasters, so there’s a bit of a din in the background. It also took place over a month ago, which makes some of the information obsolete (I wrote about cloning APIs here). On the other hand, I do talk fairly expansively about the vision for Flock… how microformats will help, what it’s like developing a cross-platform Mozilla app and where we’re in general going with Flock.

I think it’s probably the best real-world articulation of what Flock’s all about so far, so if Flock still doesn’t make much coherent sense to you, definitely take a listen and let me know what you think.

Open Source Fashion Statement #1: Wear a Flak Jacket

Flak JacketDavid Parmet offers excellent advice for folks looking to do the public releas early and often thing (yeah, like we did):

The whole release early, release often mentality is good in theory. When practiced against an impatient audience, it can quickly squash whatever goodwill and coolness factor a start-up can generate. And the process will only feed itself as more start-ups do alpha releases (if alpha is the new beta, what’s the new alpha) and invite-onlyl pre-alpha pre-releases in response to a blogosphere hungry for the Next Cool Thing(tm).

So what’s the solution? Managing expectations can only take you so far. So release early and put on your flack jacket.

Don’t believe the hype at Marketing Begins At Home

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Revving a classic cliché

Flock - Let's Blog

So there’s been some more talk lately about Flock and extensions and relevancy and Performancing’s new blogging tool for Firefox. I’m all for it. The more we talk about open source, about Firefox, about Flock, about coming up with better, cooler, faster and more usable technology, the more we’re inclined to just go build it. And in doing so, make sure that it’s relevant and actually meets the needs of real people.

I have to admit though, the potshots at Flock are becoming a little … tiresome.

So ok, I’m all about being skeptical. I’m all about looking a gift horse in the mouth, in its eyes, and … elsewhere… yah. (Y’know, you gotta make sure there’s no sneaky Greeks lurking about or whatever.)

And this post was going to about that old information autobahn thing and how there’s plenty of room for one more automobile manufacturer. And that was going to be my analogy for why Flock is a good thing for drivers, etc, etc. But I decided that’s a dumb idea. And boring to write. So let me get right down to it.

Here’s the thing. We’ve actually been pretty certain for some time that most of the features that we build into Flock will be eventually be ported back over to Firefox as extensions. Or become commodity features in other browsers. That’s the way open source should work — and the way software development plays off itself — and we’re totally in support of that! The point is not to make a bunch of proprietary tools that only work in Flock. That would be rediculous and counterproductive. I mean, our goal is to make using all the great tools now available on the web easier to use by building a more consistent user experience. Yeah, that’s our big top secret plan.

So why build our own browser if we’re in support of this whole extension model anyway? Well, let me paint a picture of my vision for Flock and why it at all makes sense that we continue doing what we’re doing, no matter how many extensions come out and attempt to mirror our featureset.

Cue lights … cameras rolling… pull curtains … 5, 4, 3…

So in the olden days, there was a web of interconnected computers and file servers and yada yada that were conceived of as a massive network of libraries containing all kinds of hyperlinked data and information. Now, pieces of that data had individual addresses, just like books in libraries had unique identifiers called Dewey decimal numbers. Thus pieces had a static position in the system and you used a web browser to pull up those pieces of data. So when someone added a piece of information to the network, say an online shrine about their cat, it got its own address, acronymically known as a URL.

So so so, jump forward in time a bit. Welcome to today, a time of spheres… blaw-go…spheres… where currency is measured by one’s attention-magnetism and linkification, where if you don’t have a blog, you don’t have a pulse and you’re dead, kaput, worse than history, see ya later, sayonara, did you even exist in the first place? Oh yeah and what’s your feed again?

Hmm. So let’s slow it down a second here. Get this, here it comes, I’ve got a visual metaphor to sink yourself into: so say you’re walking down the street, a crowded street. Let’s put you in Manhattan, or Boston, DC, Copenhagen, Tokyo wherever. Look, it’s busy. 10,000 people trampling the sidewalk concrete and they’re all in chaos, no no, wait, calm, but y’know, this is chaos theory in motion.

This is 100,000 people walking down the concrete towards you, you, you’re walking the other way — who knows why? you just are — and there are these crescendoing voices around you, swirling, smashing conversations. You’re grasping at words, sounds; the ring of cell phones, change being dropped between high heels and rubber soles. A cacophonic masterpiece of human communication.

So listen, you hear something, it piques your interest, you think to yourself, “Aha.”

Moving towards it, crowd parting in front of you, shoulders meeting; you sideways, all arms and elbows, towards the sound. One motion, you blur, find the source. Listen, speak, are heard, enlightenment and voice. This is conversation. This is fleeting. This is connection and this is what sustains you.

Now there are ten of you. Ten. Or maybe ten hundred. And each one of you is having this experience. As you weave your way in and out of the throng, you’re merging and joining ongoing; nascent; 1,000-year-old conversations. Say your piece, move on. Don’t stay too long, surely something else as interesting is being said … just around the corner.

Ok.

Stop.

Curtain down, lights go on; watch your eyes, it’s bright.

Now that, that picture, that experience, that’s the web. Yeh, that’s the web today except imagine it with your eyes closed, with blinders on, with the sound fuzzed out and staticy, with orange icons all over the friggin’ place. And yes, every now and then some jack-in-the-box assclown pops up trying to sell you V_1agra.

It almosts make me want to go back to the old library model.

But no, see, that’s where Flock comes in. Or I don’t care, don’t call it Flock. Whatever you want, but that’s where the thing we’re building comes in. That’s why we exist, that’s why we matter, that’s what the point is.

Yeah, Firefox and Duct tape, it’ll help. Sure sure. It’ll get you some of the way there. But hell, when I’m talking to someone, engaged in a conversation that threatens my very existence, or that threatens to change the way I flip my omelettes, man, I do not want my mouth to fall off at the jaw because it wasn’t tested, wasn’t built right, didn’t have a million beady eyes boring down on it while it was being fastened to my head, making sure the stupid thing would function in the real world without needing pliers or a tire-iron to get it to work right. No, I do not want my memory to hiccup, to recede, for me to lose my place in line, to have my line of thinking severed when I’m talking to someone else. I need to be there, fully, to be there in the conversation, as a whole, as one integrated thing, yes yes, a fully functioning machine. No, I don’t want to be some bootstrapped, schizophrenic, unintuitive, semi-confused and incomplete afterthought kludged together and mistaken for a vision of the real thing. No, I want more than that, I want to be as in the conversations that I have online as the ones I have offline — I want to get to the point where there is no difference, that a conversation is a conversation is a conversation. It’s sharing understanding and it’s sharing confusion. I need a tool that helps me achieve that. It needs to understand things the way I understand them; it needs to reflect the reality of what’s going on online today.

When was the last time you thought twice about the fact that you’re talking to a digital signal every time you use your cell phone?

Or how about the fact that your instant messages (which indeed seem so instant) actually travel over thousands of other people’s computers and servers before they reach you?

And your email? Even worse. If you think herding cows is messy, you should see the way email is schlopped all over the place.

The point is this. These technologies have become second nature vehicles for communication and expression. And blogging, podcasting, vlogging and the whole lot of recent “mecasting” technologies aren’t as integrated, aren’t as easy, aren’t as accessible as they need to be for them to be picked up and made as commonplace as the telephone (or cellphone, if you prefer). Point Four Percent of the population is nothing (that’s 23.6 million blogs as a percentage of the world population by the way). And yet another extension is not the answer. I don’t even know if another browser is. But we need something that works to solve this problem… or at least to make it better.

Yep, we’ve got a vision for how a browser with a different understanding of the web can help. We wouldn’t be building it otherwise. This is what drives us to make Flock the best possible, most easy-to-use and most useful tool it can be, because we’re experiencing all the same problems that everyone else is. Just coz us at Flock’re a tech savvy bunch doesn’t mean this stuff comes easy for us either. And for chrissake, it’s got to get easier, so much easier, if these conversations are going to include and be accessible to those who most need a voice.