Not much more to say now, I'm fairly exhausted after the cross-country drive.

Plan to sleep then see what's up!

 4/17/2010; 12:39:46 PM  

Last time I came through Niagara Falls was at the beginning of an east-to-west cross-country drive in 2005. I only saw the falls from the American side.

This time everything's flipped around. I'm seeing the falls from the Canadian side at the end of a west-to-east cross-country drive.

Last time I saw there were these huge towering hotels on the Canadian side. I said "Someday I'm going to see the falls from the top of one of those hotels. That's exactly where I'm sitting as I write this blog post.

Pretty freaking spectacular.



If you saw what I'm seeing in Africa or Asia you'd think it was pretty exotic.

I'll be in NYC tomorrow for sure, Murphy-willing.

 4/16/2010; 2:31:31 PM  

Song of the day: "I've been across this country, from Denver to the ocean. And I never met girls who could sing so sweet as the angels that live in Houston."

To me there's nothing better than driving across the Great Plains of the United States.

It's like a meditation. What's left of the Rockies at one end, rolling hills and farmland in the east.

While I was driving yesterday, Twitter announced two new APIs that I haven't had a look at yet, but am excited to when this eastward movement draws to an abrupt close when I hit the Atlantic Ocean. Which seems will happen on Saturday.

The first new API gives us the Payloads I've been asking for since 2007. Awesome!

I was pretty sure it was coming this week when I wrote this piece last Friday.

Basically all the features of RSS attached to a tweet, with the same ability for ad hoc expansion. Very interesting computer science with, imho and if there are no brick walls, and if it performs reasonably well, infinite possibility for new apps. Once again, something worth getting excited about in TwitterLand. First time in a long time.

That's the good news. The bad news is that it doesn't exist yet. They haven't even released preliminary docs. Oy.

I was afraid of this. "The scary part is if Twitter announces the metadata capability but doesn't ship it. And you know what -- I bet they do that too. There's zero cost to them to announce it if they don't have to ship it immediately. In fact, they never have to ship it. But it has the effect of forestalling a similar effort by client developers, which I would get ready to do, no matter what Twitter does this week."

The second new feature is a stream-oriented API. I haven't had a look yet -- but this is the feature that made the FriendFeed API so nice. Let's hope the Twitter guys did it as simply.

Anyway, I have mixed feelings about announcing the payloads API without a hint of specification. If it's good there will be lots of fertile ground for meedia hackers like myself. Announcements like this, in the tech business, tend to take a long time to come to fruition, if they ever do. Let's hope this is for real.

Something to talk about at the 140conf next Tues in NYC.

Gotta hit the road. I'm headed toward Ann Arbor, Michigan tonight. In the Eastern Time Zone!

 4/15/2010; 2:41:27 AM  

I'm listening to podcasts on this trip, and of course doing the kind of thinking you can only do with hundreds of miles to drive every day, and the day after, and the day after that.

My friend Evan Paull, who I spoke with a couple of days before leaving, said he didn't understand how I could do this cross-country drive. He doesn't even like driving to L.A. or Santa Cruz. Me neither. But those drives are different. Every few miles another town. Traffic getting on and off. Stop and go. Your mind has to be engaged fully in the driving. Not like driving across Wyoming (yesterday) or Nevada (the day before) or Nebraska (tomorrow). Just endless miles of straight road. A mountain range 60 to 90 miles in the future, a pass, a downgrade, a big valley, and you do it again. In the Great Plains there aren't even the mountain ranges!

So I figure stuff out.

Like the iPad. I was listening to the Slate podcast about the iPad. They had allocated a whole half-hour to unboxing and using it. First impressions. I snickered cause I knew what was coming. I won't spoil the surprise, but let's say it wasn't the initial (amazing) out of the box experience they were hoping for. They spent the whole half-hour talking about how they didn't get what the thing was saying to them. They got stuck where we all get stuck but don't want to admit it. Click on the link if you want to spoil the surprise.

Their complaints about the product echo mine, but after reading JLG's excellent piece, and thinking about it, I realize they didn't get what Apple is doing, and neither did I. I mean I did get it in a certain way, it's a start-over. Let's try to recreate the Mac, but do it based on what we have learned since 1984. Gassee explains why Jobs doesn't want Flash. No least-common-denominator software here, says Steve. We are not part of a cross-platform strategy. Okay, I thought about it, not sure I'd play it that way, but I understand why they are.

To be clear -- the future iPad has a keyboard and word processing software. They're going to roll out all the features of the Mac, one step at a time, bud this time they're going to avoid the pitfalls. Their ace in the hole -- if they don't like how something is going, they have the power to nuke it. Adobe is the first BigCo to get the message. Everyone who follows will get the same message.

Another thing that shook up my assumption is that they approved Opera for the iPhone. Hmmm. Maybe they aren't trying to kill the web after all. But.. I wouldn't put all that work into developing an app, I couldn't, realizing they could cancel it any time, at will. And throw my investment in the trash. I'll take the judgement of the market, but if Steve changes his mind, or if I'm not reading the tea leaves correctly, that's not a reason for a product to die.

You gotta wonder why Steve didn't say what JLG said. That introduces doubt.

But then again, maybe they wouldn't reject a programming environment that didn't have any UI tools in it? One that just allowed me to write custom workflows that involved a tablet that communicates over wifi. After all their excuse for not allowing user programming of AT&T;'s cell network doesn't work if my iPad is wifi-only. See that's the part of the Jobs "I am sincere" pitch that does not compute. He lies boldly. Now tell us again why we can't write our own tools for the thing? I can't believe the Unix gearheads inside Apple don't want to. Sheez, I can't believe they don't share scripts among themselves that run on the iPad.

We need an open source tablet that comes as close to the iPad as possible.

Switching gears...

We also need an open source Twitter client, so we can build it out the way we want it to go, not subject to the fears of app developers trying to be nice to Twitter Corp. As Barack Obama said in his acceptance speech at the DNC in 2008 -- "Enough!"

Twitter's newly-announced business model was not worth the wait. I have big plans for the realtime news system. I can't believe all that is on hold so Twitter could put freaking ads into search query output? Yeah things look a little different when you're inbetween the coasts driving slowly across the country.

More later.

From Laramie, Wyoming..

Your correspondent..

DW

 4/14/2010; 3:41:36 AM  

I've already done 260 miles today.

Going to try to get to Cheyenne, which is another 419 miles, but it doesn't seem likely I'll get there, esp because I lost an hour due to time zone change. I also mailed my tax returns in Wendover, UT and otherwise dawdled (and got a late start).

Park City is cool because it has a Starbucks where I can get a reasonably high-speed connection so I can add the metadata to our Rebooting The News podcast and re-upload. It's a good one. I want to get it out there before Twitter makes their announcements.

Update: Here's the MP3 of the podcast.

I'm listening to a lot of podcasts on this trip. If you have a favorite episode of a favorite show could you do me a favor and paste the URL of an MP3 as a comment to the post. I'll download it tonight and give a listen tomorrow. I'll be doing another 800 miles each day or so for the next few days. That means a lot of listening time.

The best one I've listened to so far is Chris Lydon's interview with Michael Lewis about people who predicted the financial collapse.

Second-fave: per Jay's recommendation, the This American Life episode on the same topic.

I'm also getting a lot of great baseball stuff, with the beginning of the season.

Driving in the west is easy. The best part of the trip.

PS: Bonus, there's a Whole Foods here. I'll be eating fresh fruit the rest of the trip and nuts and granola. Hola. Getting tired of Egg McMuffins.

Update: I made it as far as Laramie. 618 miles. If I cover the same distance tomorrow I'll make it to Des Moines.

 4/13/2010; 11:48:22 AM  

I made 500 miles yesterday -- not bad considering the weather on the drive through the Sierra was pretty bad, and I stopped for a 1-hour podcast in Auburn on the way up the hill. Usually on my first day out of SF, I make it as far as Winnemucca. Elko is 130 miles further east, and a much nicer town to stay in.

I remember Elko as one of the big rallies for Obama at the end of the 2008 campaign. I mentioned this when checking in at the front desk, and the clerk said the really big deal was when Bush II came here on Air Force One. She said the plane damaged the runway at this very small town's airport.

Overnight Twitter announced their initial revenue model. Adds on the search page. I figured this was it, that's why I was puzzled when Twitter COO Costolo said we were going to love it when we heard about it. I feel it's a no-op -- I never use search for Twitter. I think search on Twitter is meaningless. If they want to make search useful they're going to have to increase the size of the tweets. Or start indexing the pages people point to in their tweets.

The podcast we recorded was a really good one. Hope to get it up for download sometime today (on a driving break).

PS: While driving I decided on the title for my 140conf talk on the 20th -- Hello New York. I have ten minutes, and plan to use them to say hello to the city I now live in, again.

 4/13/2010; 3:14:43 AM  

I'm ready to zoooom out of here, driving from Calif to NYC. But rain in the Bay Area means snow in the Sierra, even in April. Hoping it slows down before sunrise, then I hit the road.

The NY Times has a piece about Twitter's acquisition of Tweetie. For once, an article about Twitter that isn't all gee-whiz. There's a lot of reality in this space that has yet to appear in the news.

I have two pieces on this topic, one written from Twitter's point of view, and the other from a developer's. Twitter has to compete with Google and Facebook, that explains why they're moving the way they are. But the app developers are doing the best they can with the APIs that Twitter has given them. The criticism they've received is undue. If Twitter were more aggressive with the APIs, there would be more interesting apps. Really. (There's a reason I stopped developing on their platform a year or so ago. I couldn't do anything more interesting within its limits.)

Once more it's clear that we need an ecosystem built on a platform that no one owns. Corporate ownership of platforms is a slippery slope that leads to a swamp. If the client developers were courageous we could have it right now. So far they have not been, and there's little reason to believe they will grow new courage in the future.

I think scripting.com is finally put back together. Knock wood. The benefit of the rain is that I've had a bit of time to move stuff to an older, more reliable server. I'm using new tools, including Dropbox, to make things work better.

Also have an idea how service providers can hook into Dropbox. I'd love to designate a folder in my dropbox that's meant to be served over HTTP. Not the limited version that the Dropbox company provides.

I love the product. I hope the company stays independent. I don't think I'd be as enthusiastic if it was tied to the strategies of a big tech company. I like it just the way it is.

BTW, I like it so much I paid them the $99 for a year of service, even though I don't need more space (and it's not clear how I could use it since I want my netbook to participate, and it's often connected over a relatively low speed line).

Anyway with any luck the next post should be from the road.

 4/12/2010; 12:59:04 AM  

All our cards were tossed in the air in the longest scripting.com outage in over 10 years.

If you're reading this it's almost all back on the air. Fingers crossed.

 4/11/2010; 6:48:22 AM  

The last couple of weeks have been Apple's.

Next week, barring some unforseeable disruption, belongs to Twitter.

And it's already started. First, Fred Wilson telegraphs that there are changes coming in the relationship between developers and the platform vendor. Then, yesterday -- late Friday afternoon (the deadest time of the work week in the tech blogosphere) Twitter announces they are acquiring the leading Twitter client on the iPhone, Tweetie.

So what does this mean for Twitter client developers?

First, there are other platforms that have excellent Twitter clients. And there are different types of clients, aimed at different kinds of users. Tweetie is unusual in that it aims for simplicity and elegance, where most of the others are designed for people who push Twitter to its limits. It could be that Twitter will acquire clients on other platforms, or designed for different users, but I don't actually think they will. I think Tweetie will be it in the client area, at least for a while. Instead of acquiring products on other platforms, I'd bet they'll hire expertise, and port the Tweetie code base to Android, Macintosh, iPad, Windows, maybe even Flash (I hope so, someone has to challenge Apple). The reason -- maintainability and cost. It's a lot easier and cheaper to upgrade one cross-platform codebase than it is to synchronize upgrades across multiple codebases.

So now there's Tweetdeck, Twitterific, Twitroid, Brizzly, etc. Would you, if you were them, just roll it up and send flowers to the Tweetie guys and go back to consulting or working at Starbucks? Or would you try to make a go of it in an environment where you compete with the platform vendor? I hope at least some of them try to make a go of it. And the reality is that they were always competing with the platform vendor whether or not they chose to recognize it. Nothing new there other than awareness.

I'd wait to see what else Twitter announces this week. If they announce the metadata-rich platform that I outlined in yesterday's post, and I expect they will do this (my post was not a complete shot in the dark), then you have a chance of producing a more specialized product aimed at a narrower niche, using the new status properties to tag messages invisibly with information about their origin (following the example of the dog-who-tweets outlined in that piece).

The scary part is if Twitter announces the metadata capability but doesn't ship it. And you know what -- I bet they do that too. There's zero cost to them to announce it if they don't have to ship it immediately. In fact, they never have to ship it. But it has the effect of forestalling a similar effort by client developers, which I would get ready to do, no matter what Twitter does this week.

The way you start is by offering an option to save your users' tweets to a public server in RSS 2.0. You're not exposing any data that isn't already public in their tweetstream. And you're providing a backup. You're also providing a way for other Twitter clients to find your users' stream without going through Twitter. This means you can upgrade the stream on your own schedule, without having to wait for Twitter. All this requires is that you cooperate with your competitors, the ones who, like you, did not get bought by Twitter. This has always been a tall order, but it's what you will have to do to chart the new waters. (And if you go first you don't have to cooperate, unless a big competitor decides later to be incompatible, in which case I recommend you capitulate and go with their way.)

I advised doing this, privately, to various client vendors over the last couple of years, but all of them held out hope that they would be the one that Twitter would buy. They may still hope for that, but everyone should admit that the chances are much slimmer now. Whatever you do will be answered by Twitter, so you have to make your stuff work better, and offer features they aren't offering, and independence to your users that they don't offer. You want to segment the market, as Fred even encourages you to do in his post, yet retain compatibility. It's hard but it's possible.

Why do I know so much about this? Because this exact advice would have served the Macintosh app developers in the early 90s before the web swept up our whole world and (thankfully) turned it upside-down. We were stuck in an unworkable relationship, all of us, with the platform vendor. If the developers had discounted the chances of being the favorite of the platform vendor and emphasized working with each other as equals, we might have had a chance. But as long as each of us was betting that we could be the Number One Wife, we had no chance. Same thing here, but now Twitter has made a choice, and that makes moving on easy, where it wasn't before.

PS: Another example, Microsoft went with PowerPoint instead of my product in 1987.

 4/10/2010; 5:37:44 AM  

As I pack up my Berkeley house, my posessions are going one of three ways:

1. Moved to the NYC apartment.

2. Moved to storage in Calif.

3. Sold or given away.

The vast majority of the stuff is in category 3.

Most of the stuff in category 3 was stuff that went into storage after my last move, from Woodside to Cambridge in 2003. This was the stuff I thought was indispensible, yet it all stayed in boxes in my Berkeley garage until this move.

I'm taking Bruce Sterling's excellent advice, which I heard in a speech he gave at Reboot in Copenhagen last summer. I'm taking photographs of things I can't part with but haven't looked at in 20 years. And scanning a lot of documents and publishing the interesting stuff that I can publish without hurting anyone who's alive (and most of the people are alive). I haven't found a way to scan disks in formats that I don't have hardware to read, so that stuff is going into storage. That, and stuff my grandparents left me and quilts my mother made for me. Stuff like that, that should be passed down through generations, if we get that far.

One of the letters I came across is relevant to the discussion about developers and Apple and Twitter, so I decided to put it up on Flickr and write it up here.



In 1987, my company, Living Videotext, had a hit product -- MORE. It was one of very few products selling on the Mac platform, having shipped in the prior year. It led a new category we called Desktop Presentations. The other product in the category was PowerPoint, produced by a company named Forethought.

I had a meeting with Bill Gates at Esther Dyson's conference in 1987, and he popped the question every developer wants to hear -- Can we buy you? I said of course. So we started negotiation, agreed on a price and due diligence began. Then I got a letter from Frank Gaudette, the CFO of the company, and a phone call from Gates, saying they decided not to do the deal. They were buying our competitor, PowerPoint.

I totally wanted the deal. In 1987 Microsoft was freshly IPO'd. The deal was for stock, and its value had doubled while they deliberated. So I sent a letter basically begging them to do the deal, but I got back the rejection above. PowerPoint became a household name, and MORE did well, but I probably would have had more fun at Microsoft, and certainly would have made more money.

 4/10/2010; 6:21:40 AM  

Hopefully I'll be driving cross-country next week when Twitter announces its new features at their Chirp conference in San Francisco.

The cross-country drive has become a ritual for me, it signals a major shift in my life, usually for the better.

Anyway, thinking about what Twitter may announce next week, I recalled that when the Google was getting ready to announce what everyone thought was their Twitter-killer, I wrote a piece outlining the product that I thought would be a good answer to Twitter. Instead Google shipped the disappointing in-so-many-ways Buzz.

Now, let's try that experiment in reverse. Suppose Twitter wants to make their offering much more competitive and at the same time much more attractive to developers. Sure, as Fred Wilson telegraphed, some developers are going to get rolled over, esp those who camped out on the natural evolutionary path of the platform vendor. But there are lots of things Twitter Corp can do to create more opportunities for developers, ones that expand the scope of the platform and make it possible for a thousand flowers to bloom, a thousand valuable non-trivial flowers.

The largest single thing Twitter could do is open tweet-level metadata. If I want to write an app for dogs who tweet, let me add a "field" to a tweet called isDog, a boolean, that tells me that the author of the tweet is a dog. That way the dog food company who has a Twitter presence can learn that the tweet is from a dog, from the guy who's developing a special Twitter client just for dogs, even though Twitter itself has no knowledge of the special needs of dogs. We can also add a field for breed and age (in dog years of course). Coat type. Toy preference. A link to his or her owner. Are there children in the household?

There's plenty of prior art. Two examples I can think of are Apple's Resource Manager and Amazon's SimpleDB. There are probably many others. (I should mention that Frontier's object database, the core structure around which it's built is also prior art. It's also open source. Feel free to use the ideas.)

There are some nice things that fall out of this architecture, if Twitter should choose to do it.

1. No more need for URL-shortening. The URL becomes just another piece of metadata attached to a tweet. If you need to shorten it on its way out through an SMS gateway, go for it. (Even though I've said it explicitly, I'm sure I'll have it "explained" to me that because of SMS, the URLs must be shortened for everyone, even if we don't use SMS. Pure nonsense. These guys should take an introductory course in Computer Science.)

2. You can attach a picture to every tweet, and still link to an article. Just make "thumb" or something like that a default bit of metadata. (An aside, why not use the conventions of XML to define the metadata. All the elements of the core namespace are reserved for Twitter. If you want to extend it, create a namespace and have a party. Please no meta-meta-language though, just let a little chaos reign. It must at some level.)

3. You can also support long and short-form tweets. The 140 characters can act as a synopsis for the longer text that's included in the tweet. This would give people the feature they're always asking for in RSS feeds -- full text.

4. A developer like Disqus could implement a full threaded discussion system for every tweet, and thereby give Twitter a way to compete with Facebook and if Google ever gets its act together, Buzz.

Now of course all the developer opportunities created by open metadata just open the door for more tears in 2014 when Twitter forecloses on the developers who figured out where the gold was in those APIs. But my friends the developers, that's how it always is when you develop for a corporate-owned platform. You have to make peace with that reality before you write your first line of code.

PS: The iMac that I usually write on is all packed up, I'm writing this at the kitchen table amid all kinds of boxes with my Asus 1005HA netbook. It's pretty good, but it's not as comfortable as my desktop. Please allow for that in your critique of this story. Thanks!

Update at 7PM Pacific: Twitter announces they've acquired iPhone Twitter client Tweetie. This is a huge deal of course.

 4/9/2010; 8:24:39 AM  

I'm following Bruce Sterling's excellent advice to make the changes you've been wanting to make when circumstances permit. Usually it's the end of a marriage, the last child leaving home, a parent dying. It's a long story how I decided to become a former home-owner, yet again (second time). But then again it was not such a long story.

Reminds me of one a neighbor told me when she called my house in Woodside many years ago. She said hello and then said she was calling all the neighbors to say she was getting some baby goats (might have been sheep my memory is bad) and that they'd be crying for the first few nights because they had just been separated from their mother. It was nothing to worry about and it would stop and they'd be happy soon.

I couldn't think of anything to say but "Why get goats?" She said it was because she always wanted them.

Same thing for me. I always wanted to live in Manhattan. It's been a dream since I was a little boy growing up in Queens. Now I've done it, so it's time to fully implement it. Will I be in NY for the rest of my life? Who knows. Life is an adventure. Here we go!

 4/9/2010; 8:18:03 AM  

I'm in Berkeley preparing either to rent or sell my house. Either way, I'm going through lots of boxes and closets. Lots of stuff that hasn't been looked at since the last move. Some stuff that hasn't been looked at for 30 years.

I'm moving from a large house to a one-bedroom NY apartment. The apartment is already furnished, and while it isn't cluttered yet, it will be soon. I won't be bringing very much from this house into the new one.

Now I have a similar problem to the one we had with Uncle Arno's books. I have notes and floppy disks, Syquest drives, products -- physical manifestations of a career's worth of work, a career that is still going on. I'm probably going to find a small storage space here in Calif, closet-sized, to hold this stuff. I have no place to move it to in NY.

But even better would be to donate it to a university that is interested in this stuff. Not sure anyone is. But I put that out to the universe to see what might come back. I've got the boxes, they're not all in great shape, but they need to be somewhere.

 4/8/2010; 7:13:05 AM  

Jackson Browne wrote Lawyers In Love, a prophetic song.

Corporations and love don't mix. But platforms are all about love, you can see it in Marco Arment's plea for fairness from Apple, the platform vendor behind the iPad. Marco's act of iPad love, Instapaper, is wonderful, a gift for Apple.

In the analogy of platform vendors and developers, Instapaper is a healthy baby. But Apple, the father of the platform, is confused, it can't decide if it's really not a mother. This is the confusion that comes when platforms have vendors who are corporations.

Much better if the platform vendor is a void. If you look for control and find none. The Internet is the only such platform in the tech world. And it's the only platform that works. Finding a platform with a platform vendor that works long-term is as impossible as finding Jackson Browne's lawyer-in-love. We all want to find one, dear, but they just don't exist.

You see Fred Wilson, who is a board member of Twitter, telegraph their intention to assume the markets of several of their developers. In this case it was a mistake for Twitter to ever see their product as a platform. It's a mistake they will withdraw from, gradually, having already kept for itself the juiciest APIs. This is the same problem Marco is having with Apple. And the same problem twitpic and bit.ly, and probably a few others, will soon have with Twitter.

I've spent most of my career studying the relationship between developers and platform vendors, on all sides -- as a user, as a vendor and as a developer. There's no way around these problems, other than to do away with the vendors. That works, but the vendors won't go for it, of course.

 4/7/2010; 6:13:38 PM  

I was going through some stuff in the garage today, here in Berkeley, and came across a scrapbook my mother put together for me when I was 39. After spending a few hours sorting through stuff to give to Goodwill and other charities, I decided to scan the pictures and some of the articles.

One of the things she included was a 12-page copy of a newspaper I started with two Bronx Science friends, Mark Hayes and Jordan Plitteris. I haven't seen either of them in a long time, although I did email with Mark a few years ago.



I think it's kind of cool to link up that early effort with this blog.

 4/7/2010; 4:17:22 PM  

There were a huge number of comments on yesterday's iPad piece, including a lot that said "You don't get it" or "You're too old to get it" or "It wasn't designed for you" or "It wasn't designed for what you do."

This is all nonsense, of course -- I'm merely sharing my observations, so there's nothing to "get" or not get. Apple hasn't said who they designed the iPad for, or what it was designed to do. This is smart of Apple because my guess is they don't have any idea who it was designed for, or what it was designed to do. I think they've been planning a larger form-factor iPod/iPhone for a long time (the one we all have now is the iPod) and that's all they know. They arrived at this product by following the technology, not by anticipating what it would be used for. They hope and expect we will all figure that out.

One of yesterday's comments was very insightful and led me to try something at a restaurant over lunch with a longtime friend Yvonne Burgess. She's a bit younger than me, a professional IT consultant, so she's quite technically aware. She has an iPhone. She also loves music, as I do.

I had been trying to think of a song by Simon and Garfunkle. I started to hum what I remembered of the tune and little snippets of the lyrics. "I hear words I've never heard in the Bible," and "try to keep the customer satisfied."

I whipped out my iPad and entered "keep the customer satisfied" into the search box on the browser and scored a direct hit. That's the name of the song! So I brought it up on YouTube and in a few seconds we were listening to it right there in the restaurant. (If you clicked on the link you're listening to it too!)

We could have done that with my Droid or her iPhone, but it wouldn't have been as much fun, because we both could see what I was doing. (An aside, we wanted to find out when the song came out and that was not so easy. We both searched, she found it first on her iPhone.)

I marvel at how these days we carry around all the world's information in our pockets. My uncle, who always had an Almanac nearby, would have loved this. I wish he had lived to see it. But I love it on his behalf. (Ken I miss you!)

Anyway, that's a unique thing the iPad can do, one-on-one presentations. And it's a business application too. If you're in a tech role at a corporation that has a sales function, get busy. You're going to be using a lot of tablet computers, whether they're from Apple, HP, Google or whoever. One person telling a story to another person, that's going to be a big use of tablets.

PS: Very young children love iPhones and iPads. If you've got a toddler around, check it out. They have a lot of fun with the pictures and how they move and the sounds it makes. (Some people take this as demeaning of the products, but I don't intend it that way.)

PPS: While we're at it, a lot of people seem to think you have to be either for or against something like the iPad. This is very wrong thinking. People should find out what they think by having experiences, and then reflect on them and try new things out, always feeling you have the right to change your mind. Like a lot of people I was brought up by a father who thought it was a sign of weakness to change your mind. As a result I have a very strong will about that and welcome any new idea that might shift my perspective. I wish more people did. I'm neither a Republican or Democrat, not right or left. I am Jewish but I wasn't bar mitzvah'd. Like you, I am my own person with my own mind. As LBJ God said, "Let us reason together." As Jerry said: "It's even worse than it appears."

PPPS: Lost last night was great! I couldn't help thinking "These guys dig The Matrix like I do."

 4/7/2010; 6:30:49 AM  

If you're old enough to remember the vice-presidential debate between Lloyd Bentsen and Dan Quayle, you're also old enough to remember the PC jr.

Quayle, a fit young man, probably chosen as a running mate because of his fitness, was likely told by his handlers to compare himself to the fit young John F. Kennedy. When he did, Bentsen, who was many years his senior, and was probably briefed to expect this, said: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

Entrepreneuers make the same mistake Quayle made, they always compare themselves to the winners, never considering that losers outnumber winners by a huge margin. Most of the teams in the NCAA championship are not Duke. Most of the major league baseball teams did not win the World Series, and most football teams did not win the SuperBowl. And most new tech products, no matter how daring, well-executed, fun to play with and just plain sexy they are, don't turn out to be game-changers. Those are few and far-between.

And when companies set out to create a game-changer, they're even less likely to create one. IBM didn't try to turn the world upside-down with the PC in 1981, however, in 1984, they did, with the PC jr, and failed. And in 1987 with a new architecture, and failed. In this industry, expectations usually kill the game-changing quality of products. Actual game-changers are not often hailed by victory parades on Day One.

David Bowie plays inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (2006) which I watched yesterday on a flight from NY to SF. Of course I watched it on the iPad, and the experience was very nice. I was not the only person on the plane with an iPad, there was at least one other person who had one, a man sitting in the last row of business class (I was in the first row). He had his iPad on a stand, sitting on his tray. I watched mine reclined, holding it up with my left arm. When it fell asleep, I switched to my right arm.

Back to Bowie, who has a great line in The Prestige about innovations. "The first time I changed the world," he says, "I was hailed as a visionary. The second time I was asked politely to retire." That's why he was creating his new products for magicians. Funny that Steve Jobs calls the iPad magic.

On the airplane there were lots of people who were curious about the iPad. Most asked the same question -- when did it come out? (Saturday.) Is it like the iPod Touch? (I don't know.)

Like everyone else who got one, I am trying to figure out how to make it my own. I keep hitting frustrating limits. I want to use it to write. Impossible, I've discovered. None of my writing tools are there. Not just the ones I use to enter keystrokes into the computer, and edit and revise them, but also the tools I use for finding information I want to reference in my stories. For example, when I wrote this piece, I paraphrased the quote from Bowie, expecting that later, when I'm revising it, I'll be able to get the exact words either by looking it up on the web, or by playing the movie on my computer and transcribing the words. Both are of course possible on the iPad, assuming the movie is already on board, but the looking-things-up part can be really awkward, at least for me, now. Maybe I'll learn the elegant way to do it.

But learning how the iPad works is in itself trouble. When I got off the plane in SFO, I wanted to find out if I had time to eat a late lunch before the one hour train trip to Berkeley. For that I had to use my Droid. The iPad was already stowed in my luggage, and the Droid can communicate on its own. But it has different user interface conventions. This is no accident of course. Software-makers always make it difficult to use their product with a competitor's product. It's simpler to make a choice, either be all-Apple or all-Google.

It's definitely not a writing tool. Out of the question. This concerns Jeff Jarvis, rightly so. This is something my mother observed when I demoed it to her on Saturday. Howard Weaver writes that not everyone is a writer. True enough, and not everyone is a voter, but we have an interest in making it easy for people to vote. And not everyone does jury duty, but easy or not, we require it. Writing is important, you never know where creative lightning will strike. And pragmatically, experience has shown that the winning computer platforms are the ones you can develop for on the computer itself, and the ones that require other, more expensive hardware and software, don't become platforms. There are exceptions but it's remarkable how often it works this way. (And to Weaver, there's a reason why no one evaluates Amazon products this way, the concern that the Mac, an open platform we depend on, will receive the same treatment.)

Most of this is negative, and it reflects my feeling about the iPad, which is generally negative, even though I have a lot of fun discovering the problems with the device. It feels so nice to use. It's so pretty and the touches are so incredibly thoughtful and theatric. I feel like it's a great Hollywood movie that I control. That's coool. I like using it the way I like driving my BMW.

And the battery performance is astounding. Apple, who seemed never to understand how important batteries are to the untethered creative person, has apparently attained that understanding. My iPad still has 44% of its battery left after flying across the country, in use the whole time, and on train trips to and from airports, and reading the news this morning at breakfast. That's remarkable, not just for Apple, but in comparison to the netbook that I admire for its battery life.

Further, in the iPad's favor -- the screen is uncluttered with the 30-year history of personal computer development, and my netbook screen is. As a result, even though the netbook has a slightly larger screen, the iPad actually feels larger, and effectively is larger. That's why the map application feels so much bigger and more useful, because it has more screen real estate to play with. But this comes at a substantial cost. There is lots of missing important functionality. And even where the functionality is present, it's hard to find, and because it works differently makes it hard to use both the netbook and the iPad. And I believe that, for me, the open platform will win, for a variety of reasons.

Some of the clutter on the netbook is necessary. The biggest missing piece for the iPad is Xmarks, the bookmark synchronizer I use. I have two computers in NY and several in Berkeley. I have a netbook and a MacBook that travel, and now the iPad. And a Droid. It would be nice if the Droid supported Xmarks (feature suggestion). But it's necessary that the iPad support it, or long-term I just can't use it.

In an earlier piece, I said it was terrible that all data had to flow onto the iPad through iTunes. Later that day I discovered that this is totally not true, if you use Dropbox, as a I do. I installed it on the iPad and within a minute was watching a movie that I had in a sub-folder of my dropbox folder on my Mac. I have to dig into this some more, because it needs the ability to only share a subset of my Dropbox. I don't want all my data on the iPad. It has limited storage, and I worry more about losing it than I do my other computers.

As I continue to struggle to find an iPad workflow that makes sense, I wonder if I should be doing more stuff using its web browser, or in the apps. It's confusing because there are two almost identical desktops on the iPad. There's the array of icons that is the actual desktop, and there's the array of browser windows. And some apps forget where you were between invocations. But the dual competing desktops is a real head-scratcher.

Finally, to the question of whether the iPad is a game-changer, consider what Shea Bennett wrote on Twittercism. No matter how great a new computer is, as long as you're still you, the experience doesn't change. It's fun to play with new toys, I do lots of that and it's important to me. No sarcasm. But reading a book that changes my perspective, or meeting someone who opens a door for me, that really does change the game -- much more than using a new device. If you're looking for game-changers look into yourself, that's where change comes from.

 4/6/2010; 3:32:17 AM  

A few quick observations.

It's so quiet!

People are so polite.

They smile a lot in an embarassed sort of way.

They walk so slowly.

There are birds chirping. (Wish they'd hush up. That infernal racket is giving me a headache.)

Where are the crazy drunks screaming at everyone?

Where are the outrageous trannies with their boyfriends?

How come I can walk down the street and no cab tries to run me over?

I'm sorry but I miss the big city.



 4/5/2010; 3:27:03 PM  

Amid all the hububbling and kerfuffling about the iPad, it's full-on springtime in NYC (and probably a few other places).

Here's a view down Bank St near 7th Ave:



Click-through for a larger version.

And a slice of the goings-on in at Washington Square Park:



That picture is made of brightly colored sand.

 4/4/2010; 3:41:24 PM  

On Thursday I showed the seating diagram for business class on an American Airlines flight from JFK to SFO I'll be on tomorrow.

Here's what it looks like this morning.



Well, my hope to have an empty window seat next to my aisle seat didn't work out. Now it looks like it will be a full flight. The question is, should I switch to a middle seat in the first row?

 4/4/2010; 5:35:08 AM  

After an intense day of play and exploration and question-asking, some conclusions on the iPad I bought:

1. I will carry it with me on the trip I'm about to take to California.

2. I will also bring my netbook. When I watch movies on the airplane, it'll be on the netbook. I'm right now working my way through an excellent series about World War II, produced in 1974. I have AVI files. It isn't worth the trouble to re-process the files so I can watch them on the iPad. (I may buy a movie in the iTunes store to see what it's like. Thinking of getting Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I saw in theaters, three times. It's one of those movies, like Fargo and The Big Lebowski that gets better as you watch it more times.)

3. I love the way maps work on the iPad. Much better than on the iPhone. In some ways not as good as on the Droid (after all that's a Google product and the maps are from Google).

3a. I could have loved the way news works on this thing, if the NY Times and been willing to ship a beautiful reverse-chronologic view of their whole news stream. They chickened out with a little mini-dip-into the stream. It's like sipping the news from an espresso cup when I want to be inundated by Niagara Falls. (I said to Derek Gottfried this evening that the motto of the Times is "All the news..." not "A teentsy taste of news..." A company whose mission was news and who was clear on that mission could never have shipped so little news. But then Apple is supposed to be a company that loves computers. See the next section on iTunes.)

4. iTunes is a crazy way to connect something as powerful as this device to local resources. A nightmare. Whoever thought up this way of doing things hates users. It's as mean as anything Microsoft ever foisted on its customers.

5. As explained in the excellent Engadget review, I am one of those people who use a few apps in my work. They all run on my Asus, most of them don't run on the iPad. And even if they did, they can't run at the same time on the iPad, so for my work, the machine isn't a fit. The usual fanboy rebuttal is that it is not designed for what I do. Absolutely correct.

6. However, I have a mind and a lot of experience using computers, and designing software for them, and helping people use them. I also work with people who are not very deeply skilled in computer technology, exactly the kind of people this product is supposedly for. It won't work for them, because they need to multi-task too. We learned a long time ago that inexpert users don't use less resources, they just use them differently. The argument that the Mac wasn't a serious computer was nonsense. I was there when all these arguments were fresh. This is not a replay. Keep dreaming if you want, but if you give the iPad to your mother expect the light to go on for you. At that exact moment you will realize how poorly prepared it is for that.

7. I'm going to demo it for my mother tomorrow. I expect to wow her with the map application. But in so many ways it could not replace her Mac, although her Mac is terribly inadequate and confusing, with so many layers of contradictions. Too bad this product is so far from being able to replace it for her. I am, however, going to keep trying to get her to try an iPhone.

8. I promised a verdict, so here it is. With the caveat that it's after one day and I reserve the right to change it at any time: Today's iPad, the one that I just bought, is just a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future. Today it's something to play with, not something to use. That's the kind way to say it. The direct way: It's a toy.

 4/3/2010; 5:50:08 PM  

Unboxing it now.

The first thing you have to do after turning it on is connect it to iTunes. Here we go with the synching, the part of iPhones that I totally hate. It's why I use a Sony Walkman and a Droid. Ugh.

Hmm. I thought I downloaded iTunes 9.1 last night. Quitting and relaunching. No good. Going to itunes.com.

Meantime I'm wondering what'll happen when I connect up the iPad to my desktop Mac in Berkeley (where I'm going on Monday). I'll do what I do with my iPhone, I won't change anything till I get back to NY.

First glitch, it says an iPad has already been synched to this copy of iTunes in May 2009. Hmm. Good trick!

Okay so the iPad has a problem that lots of software has, when you finish the basic setup -- now what? There are no movies, newspapers or books on the device, and no clue as to how to get them on there. Those are the first things I want to do, see how it plays stuff. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I should disconnect and see what I get.

Okay, so the first thing I did was bring up the maps. Yes, this is the way the maps app should work. Lots of room, more room than I have on my laptop. And lots more room than I have on my phone. Now you gotta wonder -- when you're looking for something as you're walking around, which will you pull out -- the phone or the pad? What do you think?

First conclusion: I love the way the Maps app works. Love is not too strong a word. You know I'm very circumspect, and I think Apple is just too precious. But this is how maps should work.

I just checked out the web browser, and set up email. I don't remember how to synch contacts with Google, I have to do that.

My review in one tweet.

Next I want to upload some pictures to the device, and Fargo (although I'm not sure which version, probably the big one). Maybe instead this time I'll go for The Big Lebowski (just for a small change of pace, always go with a Coen Brothers movie, cause you can watch them a million times without getting bored).

Where can I get a book to try out for $0?

I also have to get Netflix. And the NY Times. What else?

Okay I want to copy bigLebowski.avi onto the iPad. How? (I'm going to try copying it into the folder I'm synching pictures from.)

Well I couldn't figure out how to play the movie, but I did get it to play via Netflix, but that isn't going to work on the airplane.

Time to upload some pictures and get on with my day.

I figured out how to upload movies. It's not in the Movies tab at the top (and these guys have the gall to lecture on UI design) it's in the Movies section in the sidebar. No matter, it won't take an AVI file, saying you can't play it on this device. So much for the idiots who told me it would play the movies in my collection (when I said I was pretty sure it wouldn't -- guess I win that bet, eh). My guess is that the movies must be MP4s.

BTW, I thought I should mention that my netbook has no trouble with AVI files. It runs VLC, an open source app that plays anything as long as it isn't DRM'd (and some stuff that is DRM'd).

So far, the only thing the iPad does better than my netbook is maps. There probably are other things. I don't read books on the Asus, or on my Kindle, so maybe the iPad works better. I hear the Scrabble game is great, but I hate Scrabble (love crosswords though).

PS: They do give you a book to get started with -- Winnie The Pooh. Wish they had thought of something a bit more adult.

 4/3/2010; 8:04:20 AM  

Each of the companies is explaining what you can do with their APIs.

First presenter is from Foursquare.

I'm using my MacBook to do this with the screen turned way down. I'm not plugged into power, so we'll see how long my battery charge lasts.

The Foursquare guy clearly did not rehearse his demo. (It started off badly but got better as he went through it.)

Here's a Flickr set with some pictures.

Next company is Flatworld Knowledge. They publish textbooks and give them away online and you can pay $30 to get a printed copy. All books are licensed under Creative Commons. 17 books in their catalog. They just got $6 million second round funding. No API. They brought all the XML for their content.

drop.io is next. I'm listening to the presentation but I don't know what this app does. Seems like it's a free version of Amazon S3, but they say they use S3. I don't get it. (I used to understand it, but that was a long time ago, and I think it's changed.)

Now there are some people from the NY Times. "We have a newspaper and a website, check it out." Hehe. Derek Gottfried is doing the presentation being very humorous. Someone is "no longer with us." How did he die? He moved on.

Snooth is a wine database. It has an API at api.snooth.com.

VoteReports is up. "Rational Ignorance." Politician report cards.

learnbat is an online tutoring platform.

Hunch. Ben says we're awesome. He's really excited. He's awesome too. They do recommendations. Like Netflix or Amazon but for everything. They have a cool Twitter predictor app.

Knewton.

http://try.mongodb.org/

 4/2/2010; 4:33:25 PM  

I think Gruber is wrong and Doctorow is right.

Apple is eating our seed corn. That's why you should buy one Eee PC for every iPad you buy. Buy something that you can pervert in any way you want. Something you can plug anything into. Buy something you can copy all your data out of. If you must have an iPad, then buy (and use) something open to balance things out. Buy a Mac if you like. Or something that runs Linux. It doesn't have to be open source. It just has to be an open box.

If we don't have open boxes lying around we'll wake up 20 years from now and wonder why there are no more hippie programmers, like Woz. Sheez, like Jobs was when he was a kid.

We also need some VCs to compete with Twitter and FourSquare. There are more ideas out there than Fred and Bijan can finance. We need more user-VCs.

Gotta run to the NYC Hackathon now. I'll expand on this some more later if there's interest.

Update: Pictures from the Hackathon start here.

 4/2/2010; 3:36:08 PM  

In the background of all the hype about the iPad is the question about the future of Amazon's Kindle. But I wonder how much Amazon really cares about it.

A few thoughts.

1. I own a Kindle, but I have no idea where it is. I've read a few books on it, marveled at my ability to carry a small library with me as I traveled, and then reverted to carrying a book. But I expect at some point someone will make a device that works better and I will stop carrying physical books. Maybe. But I still go to the movies, even though I can watch movies on my netbook. Who knows. Regardless, sorry, but I don't like the Kindle enough to travel with it.

2. Isn't Amazon making their money selling books? The Kindle sure looks like a loss-leader to me.

3. Doesn't Amazon's software run on the iPhone? Doesn't it seem likely that they will port it to the iPad? I don't doubt that Amazon would choose to not sacrifice their healthy business selling books to protect their healthy business selling hardware, but what about Apple? Given that Apple has rejected podcatchers because they conflict with functionality built into the iPhone -- maybe Apple won't be so open-minded about Amazon porting their software to iPad? Maybe they want to be the exclusive distributor of books for the iPad?

4. Amazon is a funny company too -- their EC2 and S3 businesses must generate a lot of money and don't seem to have anything with being a store. So maybe Amazon has a reason to want to be in the Kindle business? With Amazon there's always a bit of mystery as to why they're doing what they do.

It's just not as simple as some of the analysts seem to think.

But I wouldn't bet against Amazon coming up with a new Kindle that's competitive with Apple's iPad. And I wouldn't bet against Apple being a major bottleneck and trying to keep competitors like Amazon off their platform.

PS: I continue to hold Apple stock, the only tech company I am currently invested in. As I hope you can see, it does not in any way color my analysis. Probably should buy some Amazon too. I think both companies are great investments, even if I don't always like what they do to the ecosystem.

Update: See PC World's comparison of books on iPad vs Kindle.

 4/2/2010; 6:08:58 AM