stan's blog

The Future of Retrospective

stan — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 09:18:19 -0500

Most of the internet is about the now, and getting even now-er. Why wait for people to upload concert pictures the next day when they can send them straight from their phone to Facebook? This trend will certainly continue, but lately I've been thinking more about the flip side: the retrospective, the looking-back.

Most recently, Andrew Sullivan's excellent article "Why I Blog", (hat tip to Feld) hints at it when he says

On my blog, my readers and I experienced 9/11 together, in real time. I can look back and see not just how I responded to the event, but how I responded to it at 3:47 that afternoon. And at 9:46 that night.

I've noticed this with Twitter as well, where I can go back in time and see exactly what I was doing and feeling a year ago. I also encountered it when backing up old email archives from 10 years ago and finding powerful emails from friends mixed in amongst the business chatter.

What's interesting is that this fine-grained retrospective power is a New Thing.

For the last 3 years my Dad has been scanning his old slides and photos. He has now done over 13,000 of them, including writing captions for most of them. (He's blogging some of them at Vern's Memories)

That's pretty amazing, but it's nothing compared to the abundance of data that my generation, and especially the younger "facebook generation" will have! The other night at dinner my friends and I were joking about how our decedents will be overwhelmed with minutia about our lives (e.g. Twittering "At dinner, talking with friends about decedents being overwhelmed with minutia. Pork rib was good.")

The only point here, if there is a point, is that current web tools kinda suck at the retrospective. That's to be expected, because retrospective is impossible at the beginning. But when today's kids are 75 years old and looking back on their lives -- and most of the traces of those lives resides in twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever New Thing is around the corner -- you can bet that there will be a need for some better retrospecting tools.

Starting Again

stan — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 11:10:39 -0500

It's been a while since I blogged. I miss the interaction, but also needed some time away to re-set.

Of course, I feel like I need something extra overly amazingly dramatic and insightful to kick off again. This approach is the writing equivalent of trying to win back the money you lost at the casino, placing ever more desperate bets for the big one that will put you back in the black. Never works.

Ben Casnocha asked in an email a few weeks ago about a name for this effect.

Is there a name for the effect that completing a task becomes harder as each day passes with it remaining un-done?

E.g. Most new bloggers stop blogging after a month. Each day that passes makes it harder and harder for them to pick up the habit again. Until ultimately they drop it altogether. Same with going to a gym.

I stopped blogging once before, back in 2005. And started up again around this time of year. Maybe the cooler weather inspires me to write more, after summer's outdoor frolicking?

Jason Calacanis retired from blogging also, and I understand what he means by the pressure to be an A-list blogger. Not that I ever was one, but in the heady days of 2004-2007 there was a landrush exuberance--that you had to get in front and stay in front and never let your numbers drop.

I'm out of that race. But I miss the way that writing a post would focus my thoughts. It is always a transformative experience where I go in thinking I'm going to say one thing, and in the processes of putting thoughts it writing it all changes. That's good.

And see? It's happening already. I thought this would be a 2 line apology post, and you see how well that plan has turned out. :)

Compuserve Trademarked the Word "Email" in 1983

stan — Sat, 24 May 2008 09:28:27 -0500

After my comments about old content networks in my previous post about online identity, I had to share this gem about CompuServe attempting to trademark the word "EMail" in 1983. (From Modern Mechanix) Imagine if they had succeeded!

Last Night We Exchanged Letters With Mom, Then Had A Party For Eleven People In Nine Different States And Only Had To Wash One Glass…

That’s CompuServe, The Personal Communications Network For Every Computer Owner

And it doesn’t matter what kind of computer you own. You’ll use CompuServe’s Electronic Mail system (we call it Email™) to compose, edit and send letters to friends or business associates. The system delivers any number of messages to other users anywhere in North America.

A salient point from the CompuServe Wikipedia entry:

As the World Wide Web grew in popularity with the general public, company after company closed their once-busy CompuServe customer support forums to offer customer support to a larger audience directly through company websites...

The demise of AOL keywords and the future of Online Identity - A proposal for non-profit identity management

stan — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:06:12 -0500

The struggle for online identity has been heating up lately. Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, MySpace, and a slew of startups are vying to be the primary keepers of your online identity: your personal info, your communications, and (most importantly) your list of friends. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch recently observed, "In the last ten days, Facebook, Google, and MySpace have all announced ways to let people access their data (including friends lists) from other sites, except that what they are really trying to do is erect new walled gardens by positioning themselves as the primary repository of that personal and social data."

How will it all play out, and what is the best possible outcome?

In this longer than usual post, I want to show important parallels in today's battle for online identity and the battle for online content over a decade ago. Furthermore, I'll argue that online identity needs to follow a similar path. In short, the content battle was won by the internet largely because it was organized by a nonprofit agency instead of a for-profit company. Online identity is now in need of such an agency.

How the Internet won the battle for online content

An TV advertisement for Ford used to end with "Go to AOL Keyword: Ford". AOL wanted their keywords to be THE gold standard addresses for content online. When someone thought "I wonder what Ford is up to?", AOL hoped people would launch their software and type the "ford" keyword. To the extent that Ford Motor Company believed this, AOL could charge a lot of money for that 4-letter keyword.

AOL wasn't the only one in this game. Some of you might remember other networks like GEnie, CompuServe, Prodigy, and many others. All of them hoped to be THE place where people would look for content.

However, all of those content networks were blown away by the internet. Few people today are aware there was ever an alternative. But why did it win? The internet had no advertising budget. It didn't negotiate exclusive deals with MTV or the NYSE. And it had a tongue-twisting syntax: TV and radio announcers everywhere struggled to enunciate "h - t - t - p - colon - forwardslash - forwardslash - double-u - double-u - double-u".

But the internet also had great advantages. Most notably, no one owned it. As a small company, you didn't have to negotiate a deal with the internet to publish your content there. As a big company, you didn't worry about the internet being purchased by a competitor. You also didn't need the internet's permission to download all it's content for analysis. It's no accident that Google didn't launch first on AOL! So companies flocked to the internet: big and small, old and new, useful and ridiculous. The "Dot Com" suffix of the internet's naming scheme became the became the label of the internet's victory as THE online network.

To say that "no one owned it" is not to say the internet was total chaos, devoid of any oversight. Someone had to connect "www.ford.com" to Ford's servers. In fact, all those dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, and dot-edu addresses were managed by the United States Department of Defense. And DOD merely delegated internet addresses to one smart and funky-looking guy at UCLA, Jon Postel. When he died tragically in 1998, oversight of internet naming was transferred to a newly created non-governmental and non-profit agency called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Every time your browser loads a page you are using ICANN.

This system has worked so damn well that we all now take it for granted. There was never a fear of Postel or ICANN turning evil. There was no fear that they would start injecting ads at the top of your pages. There was no fear that they would sell your traffic data to your competitors. There was no fear that they would force you to buy proprietary server software. There was no fear that Jon Postel would call you one day and say "Sorry Ford, I've decided not to renew the contract for your domain name this year."

How does internet naming work?

The internet's naming system is, in essence, a big phonebook full of names and servers. This phonebook is called DNS. So when you type "www.wanderingstan.com" into your browser, this name gets looked up in the DNS phonebook. The listing for "wanderingstan.com" is listed as "70.85.249.98". That's a server owned by my hosting company which I rent for $14 a month. But here's an important bit: If my hosting company starts to suck, I can always go change my entry in that book and have it point somewhere else. And when I do this, I don't have to tell everyone a different address. I own "wanderingstan.com" in perpetuity, and will always have it point to the server of MY choice.

(On a related tangent: For end users, search engines are beginning to usurp DNS as the primary addresses.)

What this has to do with Online Identity

Just as AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe and others battled to control online content, a war is brewing right now over online identity. Every company wants to be THE gold standard address for your identity. When someone thinks "I wonder what Stan is up to?", Facebook hopes that people go to my Facebook page. MySpace hopes people will go to my MySpace page. Same for LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Flickr and tons of others. Companies like SocialThing, FriendFeed, and Plaxo Pulse take the problem up one level and try to be THE gold standard by aggregating all the other would-be standards. But all of these "solutions" just shift the problem. I don't want my online identity tied to Facebook or Plaxo any more than Ford wanted their online content tied to AOL or GEnie.

Ford can now tell people to go to "WWW.ford.com" instead of "AOL Keyword: ford". What a huge difference there is between WWW and AOL! WWW is not going to get bought by Time-Warner. WWW is not going to set rules about what can or cannot be put on Ford's site. WWW is not going to show advertisements against Ford's content. WWW is not going to prohibit Ford from sharing data with 3rd parties. WWW is not going butt into the conversation between Ford and it's customers.

The problem for you and me today is that we have no place to run to. There is no WWW for our online identity. There is only "facebook.com/id=252800001" and "myspace.com/wanderingstan" and dozens of others. Unlike for Ford, there is no ICANN or Jon Postel for our identities. There is no phone book we can get into without someone trying to monetize it. There is no social network that won't butt into our conversations. Who can we trust to give us a lasting home for our identity?

Proposed Solutions

Michael Arrington recently described his ideal solution. He writes, "Ultimately I hope that I can keep my identity...at any service provider that I trust...and just tell sites like Facebook and everyone else where to grab it." His proposal would look like this:

The problem is that I have no permanent address, just a lot of forwarding addresses. It puts the onus on me to provide my forwarding address to every service out there. This is impractical given the number of services that exist. Furthermore, it thwarts innovation by tilting the favor towards the established networks. Why would I risk using a newly launched service if I wasn't sure all of my friends had left "forwarding addresses" there?

Those of you geeky enough to know about OpenID may be thinking that it is the solution we're looking for. But the same problem arises in a different form: Your OpenID identity must always be tied to an internet domain. So of course, companies are now scrambling to have their domain be THE place to have your OpenID. AOL was the first big company to make all of their user accounts into OpenID accounts. They lost the war for naming online content, but now want a stake in naming all online identities. So now I can now login to any OpenID site as "http://openid.aol.com/wanderingstan". Why do I want this? Why would I stand to have an "aol.com" as part of my online address, my identity? Once again, I don't want my identity in the hands of AOL.

If you're a true nerd reading this, you probably are saying "But Stan, you DO have a personal identity: it's your domain at wanderingstan.com!" The thought here is: we can use the current DNS system and map identities onto it. This is was Loic Le Meur asked for in his widely cited post My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog. This is also a motivation for ".name" domains, like "stan.james.name". This approach has the right idea, but fails to account for how identities are fundamentally different from a web site or company. For one thing, people won't pay to register a domain for their identity, especially when it doesn't get them anything. This is a topic unto itself, but we need a way where people can create and use identities (and multiple identities) for free, without being overrun by spammers.

Where do we go from here?

There are several ways that this could work, and the nerd in me is tempted to start explaining how OAuth, OpenID, P2P, and other acronyms could be combined to make this work. But I'm not here to sell a specific solution, just the idea that (a) we need a permanent home for our online identity(s), and (b) this home cannot and should not be tied to a organization that must try to monetize them. But I believe that we need some neutral ground for our identities, just as ICANN did for internet content.

Like the internet itself, maybe the solution is as simple as a phone book of pointers. So maybe "wanderingstan" points to Facebook today, and next year I'll switch to MySpace. The important thing is that my change doesn't mean a new address, re-creating my friend list, and typing in my favorite bands again. Maybe the phone book stores some actual content, like my avatar or friend list.

Sure, there are a lot of challenges to this approach. Personal Identity data is a lot trickier than Ford's homepage. Privacy, for one thing. Ford wants "www.ford.com" to be viewable by anyone. Not everyone feels that way about their profile. (Although most people feel comfortable with part of their online identity being public, e.g. when reviewing a restaurant.) There is also the problem of allocating identifiers (what if someone else gets 'wanderingstan' first?), and dealing with squatters. However, these are all manageable problems.

Some might object that identities are more expensive to manage than simple domain names, and thus companies deserve to own our identities in exchange for the costs involved. Bullshit. The amount of data we're talking about is pitiful. The costs of storage, bandwidth, and processing continue their march towards free.

Twenty years ago it was sensible to ask, "In the future, will more people read the news on AOL, Prodigy, or the internet?" That's a fair question, but we now know that "reading the news" is only one of the zillion things that you can do with online content!! eBay, search engines, blogs, photo sharing, Wikipedia, social networks, and more every day. We would not have all these wonderful things if AOL had won the battle for online content. Even if they had a developer platform.

Today the sensible question is, "In the future, will everyone login to sites using their Facebook, MySpace, or Google login?" Twenty years from now, I'm sure this will seem as silly and short-sighted as the first question. As if "logging in" was the only thing you can do once you settle the identity issue! I wrote my thesis about one such application, and am frustrated that its full potential cannot be realized until identity is allowed out of the current data silos. I'm sure there are hundreds of applications that others have thought of but aren't possible.

I'm not sure how it will happen, but I hope you'll agree that we need a Jon Postel an ICANN today for our identities. The first step is to recognize this corner that we've been backed into. Perhaps the Facebooks and MySpaces and Googles of the world will cooperate to make this non-partisan agency. Perhaps, like with Postel and the DOD, it will emerge from a government agency. Perhaps it will grow out of non-profits, as did Craigslist or Wikipedia.

Or, maybe I'm full of shit and overlooking some obvious reason why this won't work. Maybe the internet managed only because was able to organize itself before there were millions and billions of dollars at stake. Maybe Google, Facebook, MySpace and others will fight it out for years to come.

In any case getting tired of uploading my avatar to a new service each day, answering all those friend requests, and dreaming of all the amazing services that can be built once this war is over.

Nonsense Customer Support

stan — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:55:46 -0500

Do you ever get the feeling that customer support people don't even read what you've written? Here are 2 recent favorite interactions of mine. If you have some of your own, please send them in for my growing collection.

My email to MySpace support:

Everything on MySpace has turned to Spanish for me since I came to Colombia. I do not speak Spanish.
I clicked on "English" when it first gave me the option, but still everything is in Spanish.
HOW DO I GET MYSPACE IN ENGLISH SO I CAN USE IT?

HELP!!!

MySpace's answer

Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:29:41 +0000
From: help@support.myspace.com
Subject: Re: Not Found (-4) - no subject found in database (-4)

Hello,
It looks like there is incorrect or defective HTML code somewhere in your profile. Only if you have a Music account are you able to choose "safe mode" to locate the code and remove it. Otherwise, an avid HTML code user could look for the bad code and remove it themselves.

To edit your HTML code, after logging in, go to "Edit Profile". If you see code you did not include in one of your sections you should delete it. Another option is to delete the code that's present and repaste the code to that section. One of these options should take care of the problem.

If this does not address your issue completely, please press "Reply" and provide any additional information you feel is relevant. Please do not alter the subject as it will be considered a new inquiry. For the most up to date messages about MySpace, subscribe to the MySpace Help blog! You get updates almost every day! Go here to subscribe. www.myspace.com/myspacehelp

Thank you for contacting MySpace.com.

My comment to AARP.org:

Any links I click to your site get redirected to your homepage. So it's impossible for me to link to a specific article on your site.
E.g. I want to link to this article:
http://www.aarp.org/bulletin/yourlife/older_wise_bloggers
but it redirects me to the home page at
http://bulletin.aarp.org/yourworld/.

How can I link to a specific article on your site?

-Stan

AARP's answer:

Thank you for your interest in the new AARP.org web site. We apologize for the ssues you experienced during registration on our Online Community Page.

In order to verify your registration, please call our toll-free number 1-866-839-0463 between the hours of 9 a.m. and 7 p.m. EST, Monday through Friday.

We appreciate your patience with this matter and look forward to hearing from you. We hope to see you online very soon.

Sincerely,

Jessica
Member Communications
Member@aarp.org

The laptop I want

stan — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:47:07 -0500

Laptops are the way to go. It's work, play, communication, and entertainment in one little package I carry under my arm. Unfortunately, today's laptops are an ergonomic nightmare. You have to choose between making your arms happy or your eyes happy: if it's low enough that your arms are at a non-carpal-pain angle, then your head has cramp down to view the screen. If the screen is high enough that your eyes are at a good level, then your arms have to reach up to the keyboard.

But these days I see more and more people using wireless keyboards when they're at their desk. The Mac keyboards are especially slim--which got me thinking: why not have the wireless keyboard built in to the laptop which you can pull out anywhere?

The random thoughts you get on an airplane flight...

In The Valley

stan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:54:14 -0500

I've spent the last two days in Silicon Valley. It evokes a strange mix of emotions in me every time. My first visit was in high school, supposedly to look at Stanford but mostly to hang out with my cool older cousin. Not only did he let me see an R-rated movie, but he had his own startup with office space and some really smart co-founders. They all talked with a confidence, intelligence, and zeal that was every bit as powerful as missionary.

Today, many years later, it is awe-inspiring to realize how much cultural change has come out of these nondescript buildings. Legendary names appear fastened to normal brick buildings: Apple, Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Facebook. And that's also what is so strange: the overall ordinariness of it all. Anywhere else in the country it would be indistinguishable from strip mall suburbia. Except maybe a little cleaner, and with more sports cars. The people don't look extraordinary at all, but the buzz I felt in a Palo Alto ice cream shop today was palpable.

I was an Apple Fanboy

stan — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:27:33 -0500

On Tuesday I had lunch with Pete Warden who besides sharing my frustrations with Outlook, has actually built some cool stuff working towards a better way.

We also talked about the resurgence of Apple since he started working there, and I confessed that in my youth I had been the biggest Apple fanboy.

Here is photographic proof of one manifestation: A Members Only™ Jacket that I had the Apple logo embroidered on. Tara did a full post about it last year.

Apparently I have grown a little bit since then! And good thing that my Mom sewed my name and phone number inside.

I take a lot of flack for not switching back to Macs now, but that's a subject for a longer post. For now, the Ferrari keeps puttering along.

My Start Menu is Full

stan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:10:17 -0500

Launchy has become the search engine of my programs folder.

Terms of Service are Today's Lock-In

stan — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:24:55 -0500

Every company would love to have customer lock-in; customers who can't leave, and who continue to create revenue for you. The money just rolls in. Over the last decade, lock-in has evolved from shrinkwrap software to the online advertising world. Back then, customers were locked into Microsoft (and a few others) by file formats. Today we are instead locked into web services--especially social networks--by restrictive Terms of Service agreements. The battleground for customer freedom has changed from engineering to legal. Here's my first-take assment of how things got started with file formats, and the strategy shift to the online world.

You could email your spreadsheet to a colleage in India, but they couldn't read it without buying Excel. You were locked in to Microsoft by the engineering difficulty of reading their data format. Today you could authorize Facebook to scrape your friendlist and personal info from your MySpace profile, but they are legally disallowed from doing this. You are locked in to MySpace by the legal provisions of MySpace's terms of service.

1990's and Microsoft

I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmund the summer after graduating from college. They treated me like royalty, even giving me a rental car. I protested to the recruiter on the phone, "But I'm not yet 25!" Bemusedly she explained, "Listen, we're Microsoft. There won't be a problem."

I was offered a position on the Microsoft Money team. They had just cracked the file format of Quicken; the fruits of six months' work by a team in India. That was an unusual position for Microsoft in the 90's: they usually were the one's setting the format standard. Back then it was said that 98% of the world's documents were created with Microsoft products. And saved in Microsoft's file formats.

File formats were the lock-in of the 90's. You had to keep using Microsoft products because you had to work with everyone else, and they were using them too.

Today file lock-in remains an issue, but not nearly so important. Microsoft's formats have been cracked wide open. My Mom reads attached Word documents in Gmail without realizing the format--she just clicks the "Read this" button.

Today and Social Networks

In today's internet world, file formats don't matter so much. When was the last time you bought software because it was the only way to read or write some files? The online world has different frustrations. When I sign up for a new service, why can't I point them to my MySpace page and say "Here's my info, always look here for updates"? Why can't Outlook's spam filter see who my friends are in Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn? And what happens when today's Facebookers are 70 and realize that all their life's photos and thoughts and love letters are in one serivce, and there's no way to hand these down to future generations?

This is my data. Why can't I process it like files on my computer using whatever tool I choose? If I make a picture in Photoshop, Adobe can't stop me from putting it in my Word document. If I put 2 years' minutia of my life into MySpace, why can NewsCorp's lawyers stop me from transferring it into Facebook, or downloading a backup copy for myself?

Unlike the file formats of yesteryear, there are no engineering challenges here. All the data is right there on the web pages. It doesn't take a genius to program a server to download your Facebook page and scrape out your data: friends, interests, messages, photos, and the rest. Some have tried to build applications that do this. Robet Scoble was busted for testing one such attempt by Plaxo.

As a sometimes software engineer myself, the power of legal words are amazing. All of this innovation and user choice is eliminated by these short sentences:

MySpace Terms of Service

Prohibited activity includes, but is not limited to ... (8) using the account, username, or password of another Member at any time or disclosing your password to any third party or permitting any third party to access your account [and your information];

Facebook Terms of Service

In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: ... use automated scripts to collect information [even your own] from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site;

Of course the picture isn't nearly as cut and dried as I've made it out here. In a later post I want to work through the different mechanics--both financial and engineering--that run an ad-supported web service and push them to require these restrictions. But the takeaway here is that this problem will not be solved by engineering genius. There is no developer teams India working to crack the computer code that will give you freedom to switch social networks. Who will crack the legal codes of today, or how will they be forced open?

Colombia!

stan — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:13:36 -0600

I arrived in Columbia late on Sunday night after a few too many flight delays in Miami. A taxi got me to the house of my friend Jason Bragg, who I traveled through Asia with waaaaay back in 2001.

I hadn't planned it, but the next day there was a huge march just a few blocks from the apartment. The video above was taken there. What was especially interesting to me as a non-Colombian web guy, was that the whole thing was conceived less than a month ago on a Facebook group. Several hundred thousand people showed up in Bogotá, and worldwide numbers were in the millions. Nothing til now has given me such a visceral understanding of the power of social networks.

So yes, I'm in Colombia, which means blogging will be light. If you want to follow my travels, I'll be posting more frequently to my new wandering-specific page. (also via RSS )

Command Line : GUI :: Web Applications : Facebook ?

stan — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:58:33 -0600

I've been thinking about the parallels between the development of small web applications and old-school unix command line programs.

The philosophy of unix (linux, and all command line interfaces) is to have lots of little programs that all do one task really well. ls lists files, grep finds text within files, sort sorts lines in files, and so on. There are thousands of these programs available, each with dozens of option flags. This was fine when only programmers were using computers, but ordinary folk found all these options to be daunting.

A similar sort of philosophy existed in the early days of post-bubble "web 2.0". Photo sharing sites, bookmarking services, newsreaders, and blogging platforms all did one thing really well. And you could tie them all together using RSS and REST and other API acronymns. The ontology of files, lines, and ports gave way to posts, tags, and URLs. The people thriving here weren't all programmers, but still not "the masses".

In both cases, this chaos of anything-is-possible utilities eventually paved the way for bigger programs/services that included the most useful features and wrapped them all together in an easy-to-use package. Wordperfect and Word (and even Emacs) are much easier to use than grep and sort. MySpace and Facebook are much easier to use than coordinating your wordpress, flickr, and delicous accounts.

In both cases, the users of the old system decry the loss of power that comes with the new all-in-one package, but ultimately it means that millions more people can benefit. Just as the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows opened computers to the masses, are Facebook and MySpace opening social media to the masses?

And more importantly, what will be the consequence if one emerges 'victorious' as Microsoft did with Windows? On the one hand this led to anticompetitive behavior and crushing of many little guys, but it also let to interface unification. (As I've said before)

Back in the 90's Niel Stephenson extended this idea out to popular culture, arguing that Disney (and other bits of our visual western culture) performed the same function (with the same dangers) in the world of human culture. "In the Beginning was the Command Line" is a classic essay.

We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft [or Facebook] to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.

Has technology always followed this pattern of chaotic empowering innovation followed by dumbed-down mass-market consolidation?

Google opens Social Graph API

stan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:59:10 -0600

It's long overdue.

Almost 4 years ago I started to get excited about what could be done with a social graph (or network, as we called 'em back then). My head swam with possibilities of a real trust network: get product and company reviews , prevent spyware and check validity of files, control process execution, and of course use your network for trusted searching. That last one let to the development of Lijit, which was been my life for the last 3 years.

I never imagined how hard it would be to actually get a graph. The "big guys" of MySpace and Facebook sealed their users' graphs in TOS-protected Silos, and users grew wary of re-friending on every new web service. Open standards like FOAF and XFN were there, but no one really used them. It was beginning to look like social graph innovation would be limited to whatever the big guys wanted to allow.

So I'm excited about Google's new Social Graph API. There's a still a long way to go, but maybe with Google's weight other services will allow users to publish their graphs and be available to this API.

Google went big by using the information in the Web's link-graph. What exciting new tools will be possible when we have real access to the social graph?

67 Reasons that Outlook Sucks

stan — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:21:55 -0600

Outlook frustrated the hell out of me when I began using it a year ago, so I started keeping a list. Here is that list.

Sections: Composing Email - Reading Email - Search - Slowness - Usability - Misc - Aesthetics

Composing Email

1. No real-time spellcheck (like every other email program on the planet.)
- Underlining misspelled words is a worldwide software standard. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and a host of other free software packages have figured out how to do this. But apparently this exotic technology is beyond the grasp of Outlook developers. (Sure you can use MS Word as your editor to get this effect, but I for one am not going to buy a 100MB $500 program just to get a feature that is now a commodity.)
2. Doesn't suggest people from your Contacts
3. Why do I need to be told that I haven't sent a mail while I'm in the middle of writing it?
- After a minute or so of working on a message, Outlook will freeze for a few seconds, shift your message down, and show an alert saying "The message has not been sent." No shit, Sherlock!
- (Further investigation shows that this happens whenever Outlook decides to check the server while you're composing. I'm still confused why I should want this.)
4. Unclear when mails are actually sent
- This is especially true for emails with large attachments. E.g. You're in a hurry to catch a flight but need to send off those screen shots first. You fire off an email and hit "send", do one last check of your calendar, put the computer to sleep and rush off for your flight. Not until the next morning do you wake up and realize that the folks in Europe have been waiting 8 hours for your mail and aren't happy. Unlike Thunderbird or other apps that give you a progress bar for big emails, in Outlook you have just the tiny status text at the bottom and no warning if the computer sleeps/hibernates before the message is sent.
5. Doesn't learn which addresses I actually use. (Outlook 2007)
- E.g. I have to manually scroll down and select "Dan Jones" every time I mail him (daily), because "Dan McClellan" (an acquaintance I email maybe once a year) is always the first choice.
6. Doesn't learn which addresses I actually use. (Outlook 2003)
- Doesn't automatically find email addresses that you've written to before, or have emailed you. Even free email clients like Thunderbird can do this. In Outlook you must create a contact in order for it to recognize any address. I don't want to make a "contact" for everyone I might email more than once.
- No easy way to choose which of multiple addresses you want to write to. You have to wait for it to guess (How long of a wait? you never know) and then correct it if it's wrong.
7. Mysterious selection of address for recipient (Outlook 2003)
- Once a name is recognized (God knows when that magically happens), and the person has multiple addresses, you don't know which one it picked. (Because it never shows email addresses) You have to double-click the name to find out what it picked.
8. Broken auto-guessing of names (Outlook 2003)
- You type in a name, and it doesn't do any auto complete. In fact, sometimes you don't know who it's going to pick until you hit send (or proactively hit the "Find Names" button) if the person you want isn't yet in your contacts, but someone of a similar name is, you've just emailed the wrong person!
9. Outlook 2007 has removed keyboard shortcuts from the email editor.
- Because you wouldn't want people to be able to work any faster...
- See this thread on Lockergnome.
10. No concept of nicknames (like every other email program on the planet.)
- Why can't I email my friend Daniel Newman with just "Danny", as I refer to him, without losing the fact in my contact info that his legal name is Daniel?
11. It's always copying formatting I don't want.
- It takes four clicks and a dialog box to do paste text without the original formatting. Horribly frustrating when you're trying to copy text from the browser as a quotation in an email. (Without your email looking like shit.)
- Further, it is impossible to add keyboard shortcut for pasting unformatted text. (See below) And just to make damn sure it remains impossible, there is no command for this in built in macro language, so even a determined nerd like myself can't create a keyboard macro.
- In Outlook 2003 there is no way to paste unformatted text. Pasting in a line from anywhere else (like the browser) will leave you with that line looking different than the rest (and you looking like an idiot). Even worse, after pasting there is no way remove all the formatting on a text so that it matches a normal message composition. Only solution is to first paste into notepad, then copy-n-paste again into message.
12. Impossible to remove formatting from a reply
- If you are composing a reply to an email and want to remove formatting (bold, italic, etc..) the ctrl-space command doesn't work. It should reset you to the normal format (blue Calibri font), but instead it gives you a totally different format (black Times New Roman). This is especially bad since it is so damn hard to paste text without formatting. (See above)
13. Embedded images mysteriously enlarged or resized.
- When you paste in a screenshot (or any image, really), Outlook magically decides that it should scale the image up by about 130%. Is it so hard to leave pixels as pixels?
- E.g. See how this screenshot in a mail has been enlarged.
- Still worse, there is no "Properties" dialog box where you could enter a numeric scaling factor (e.g. '100%'). Instead, the only way to resize the image is grab the corners and use use your eyeballs to guess as to what is "actual size".
- [Update: Someone suggested this may be because my computer came with a higher DPI setting in windows. In that case, it's just bad programming in Outlook where it's trying to be smart about things it should just ignore.]
14. Mysterious errors from programs I don't own
- If I paste an image from Photoshop into an Outlook message, I get this error message.
  
  The thing is: There is no copy of Microsoft Word installed on my machine. What's going on?
15. No way to edit HTML code of email (and strange mucking with HTML you paste in)
- Impossible to compose an email that links to images rather than embedding them.
- E.g. I composed a message in Nvu specifically because I wanted the message to link to images (not embed them in the email). But when I pasted the message into Outlook, it automatically re-wrote all the links, downloaded the large images, and sent off a 8 megabyte email without asking me if that's what I wanted.
16. Interrupts your email writing while it checks for new messages
- If Outlook decides to download messages from exchange while you're in the middle of writing an email, your composition window will freeze without warning and all keystrokes will be lost. I often type without looking at the screen and won't notice for several sentences that Outlook has decided to ignore my typing.
17. Can't re-format your message dynamically as you resize the compose email window.
- If you re-size a message while in the middle of composing it, your next is not re-flowed dynamically--only after you've let go of the mouse button.
- (Note that Internet Explorer and Firefox--both free programs--figured out how to do this 6 years ago.)
18. Web client looses messages with no possibility to recover
- If you hit send after having been unknowingly logged out, your message is not saved. E.g. you start a mail, are then interrupted for a phone call, then later resume your mail and hit send. (And because the client does weird stuff with the form, the browser can't recover your message when you go back to the compose page after logging in.)
- There is no way to change the (very short) time after which you are logged out.
- (Strangely, if you were replying to a message when this happens, Outlook will erroneously indicate that you actually did send a reply.)
19. While an externally-launched "Compose Email" window is open, the rest of Outlook is unusable.
- E.g. Without Outlook open, I select the "Send to mail Recipient" option of an external program (like my text editor). But the recipient's name isn't in Outlook (Even tho I've emailed him a million times, but that's another issue) So I try to bring up the address book. Impossible. Can't even launch another instance of Outlook.

Reading Email

20. Horrible display of HTML emails (Sets email design back 5 years)
- For Outlook 2007 they switched the rendering engine to Microsoft Word from Internet Explorer, making formatted emails even uglier and less functional. That's right, they ditched their own web browser, the de-facto internet HTML standard, for a word processor. WTF? See this excellent article
- Notice that they took the worst part of MS Word (the rendering engine), but can't figure out how to take the in-line spellcheck part! (Being sarcastic here, of course they just want you to pay them the money for MS Word.)
21. Preview pane painfully slow, leading to confusion about what message you're reading.
- When you click on a message in the inbox, it highlights immediately, but the message doesn't load into the preview pane for many seconds (even up to minutes with a slow connection). During this lag time there is no indication that the computer is busy, like the spinner in a browser or the windows hourglass. So you get these confusing situations where inbox list says you're reading a message from Jane but what is displayed is a message from Joe.
22. Can't view messages as conversation
- Your sent mails are kept in a seperate folder. So to reconstruct a conversation you have to switch back and forth between your inbox and the sent folder, a task made are the more enjoyable by Outlooks *awsome* search capability.
23. Poor handling of attached messages
- If an email has a large number of attached messages, they are displayed in a tiny scrolling pane at the top of the email. This pane is not resizeable, so it becomes a huge pain to find a specific image.
- Images can only be viewed one at a time. When you switch between the "preview mode" and the actual email message, it doesn't remember which message you were on. So if you're going through a long list of images and trying to match them to descriptions in the message, you have to hunt through the tiny list of image names for each image.
24. The Junk Email folder always stays bold.
- In Outlook, like most other email programs, a folder is shown in bold when it has unread items. This is good because it draws your attention to stuff that needs your attention. However, the "Junk Email" folder in Outlook remains bold even when everything in it is read, so a quick glance always fools me into thinking I have new mail. Argh!
25. Stupid handling of Junk Email
- You're looking through your junk email folder and find one from a friend, so you select "Add Sender to Safe Senders List." This is a pretty clear sign that you don't think this was junk mail, right? The right thing for Outlook to do would be to move the message into whatever folder it would have normally gone to. But no! You have to do this yourself.
- Even worse, if you try to click on links in the mail, Outlook will bitch at you that they've been disabled and telling you to move it to the Inbox.
- But when you do move it to the inbox, you'll have to do a search to find it again--because Outlook won't keep the focus on that message once it's moved. Thus, you have to use Outlooks horrible horrible search functionality, and hope that you remember something unique about the message (and have some minutes to kill) so you can find it again.
26. Mysterious unread Sent Messages
- Some messages in the "Sent Items" folder will mysteriously be marked as unread, making the folder bold. Again, I get fooled into thinking I have new mail.
- To fix this, you have to "read" these messages that you wrote. However, there is no way to sort this folder by the "Read" attribute, so if you have a lot of sent items, you have to search for these "unread" ones by scrolling through the list one page at a time.
27. No way to force Outlook to retrieve messages, even when you know they are on the server.
- I'll often get a message on my Blackberry, yet nothing shows up in Outlook, even after hitting the "Send-Receive" button. You just have to wait until Outlook, in its infinite knowledge, decides that now is the appointed time to download messages. (Non-exchange email, like my private POP3 account, is always retrieved immediately when I hit "Send-Receive".)
- Correction: I just found out that this is possible by hitting CTRL-F9. Don't know why I didn't think of that on my own, it's so intuitive! (However, this forces a complete re-syncing, which takes much longer that a normal update cycle.)
28. How to get to a saved attachment?
- After you save an attachment to your local box, there is no way to quickly open the Windows Explorer to where the file was saved. E.g. Someone sends you an image that you want to open in Photoshop, you save it, then have to manually open an Explorer window and navigate to where Outlook saved it. (Hope you remembered!)
29. Dumb-as-a-brick Spam Filter
- Outlook will flag mail as spam even if I've emailed the person many times before, or read (and replied to) lots of email from them in the past. How dumb can a filter be?
30. Can't view inlined pictures at actual size
- If a picture is inline in a message (i.e. not an attachment), then it is impossible to view it at 'actual size'. Outlook always scales it to fit the window or pane you are reading in. Double-clicking does not open it in the image viewer as you might expect, nor is there an option in the right-click context window. Only chance is to copy-and-paste it into some other image viewing program.
31. False alerts
- When starting Outlook, it throws up those bottom-right alerts windows even for messages that have already been read on another device such as a Blackberry.
- Once downloaded, they are correctly displayed as unread. So if Outlook knows the message has already been read, why does it interrupt me (and freeze my machine) to tell me about it?
32. Impossible to find messages by Sender (Web client)
- If you're in a long list of messages sorted by Sender, Outlook doesn't even show you who the sender is.
- No way to jump to a name, just have to type in page numbers. (Again, I spent 20 minutes going through old message listings one page at a time trying to find an old email.)

Search

33. Search sucks
- In many cases it simply does not find messages, even when I've typed in exact text or names from those mails. Here's a screencast demonstration.
34. Search is slow as hell
- Searches done from the 'Inbox search' sometimes take over 60 seconds. By comparison, Google Desktop Search finds the same messages in under a second.
- I couldn't get such an extreme bad example on camera, but this video shows that Outlook is at least twice as slow as Google.
35. Can't tell when a search is finished
- When searching, the "I'm searching indicator" gets pushed off the bottom of the screen as results are found. So you don't know when it is done searching unless you manually keep scrolling to the bottom of the window.
- This is doubly bad since it scans in no particular order. So it might find 100 mails from last year in the first 10 seconds, and then when you scroll to the bottom, it suddenly finds a mail from yesterday and adds it near the top of the list--off the screen where you won't see it! You have to continuously scan up and down the list.
36. Contact search sucks too
- When you search for a contact, the possible matches are shown only by name and in a separate little window. So if you have 5 John Smith's in your contacts but want to find the John from Acme Corp, you go through one by one and open each name. Why can't it just filter the normal list of contacts like you would expect?
- Update: Note this was fixed in an update in November. Results now filter like you'd expect.
37. Web client has no search functionality at all.
- No joke, I spent 20 minutes going through old message listings one page at a time trying to find an old email. Ridiculous.
- Update: Learned later that search only works in Internet Explorer.
38. Hard to search within a message
- No way at all to search the text within the preview pain.
- When message is opened in a separate window, the "Find" feature is hard to find and has no keyboard shortcut.
- Idea: Someone needs to tell the Outlook programmers about that fancy newfangled 'CTRL-F' feature.

Slowness

39. Freezes the entire machine while retrieving mail
- Every few minutes my machine freezes for 10-15 seconds, or longer if you're receiving a mail with large attachments. It's true that I have the slowest hosted exchange server in the world. But still, Mr. Outlook, do you really need to freeze the entire machine while waiting to connect to the server? What kind of miraculous technology does Firefox have that enables it to load a page while still allowing you to do other things on your computer?? I hear it's open source, so maybe the Outlook programmers could take a look at how they do this amazing trick.
40. Freezes for 3-10 seconds if you do anything too fast
- This might be due to the slowness of my exchange server, but then Microsoft shouldn't code the client to freeze just because the server is slow. Especially when you're not doing server related tasks.
- E.g. This always happens if you try to switch back and forth quickly between the Mail and Calendar views.

Usability Nightmares

41. No menu bars
- WTF?
- Did we ask for this?
- I had to do a Google search to figure out how print an email. It was not intuitive to me to click the maimed-butterfly-impaled-on-chrome icon in the corner.
42. No UI indication of when Outlook is frozen/busy/sucking.
- All the times when Outlook is busy connecting to the exchange server (see the 'Slowness' section above), the cursor remains as an arrow instead of changing to an hourglass. So Outlook appears to be working normally, except that all buttons and windows simply don't react to your clicks or typing.
- The natural reaction when it freezes like this is to try and click on stuff, which won't work. Except when Outlook finally does finish talking to the server, all those clicks happen at once leading to utter chaos.
43. An open dialog box disables every other function in Outlook.
- E.g. While I was editing my signature, I needed to copy-and-paste the fax number from an old email. No luck: The rest of Outlook is frozen and unusable while you have a dialog box open.
44. When you enter a task in the To-Do pane and hit enter, the text you enters just disappears.
- You have no feedback that a task was actually created, or where you might find it.
45. No concept of a "history", no back button like in a browser.
- E.g. I'm reading an old mail, then read a related mail, then search for a super old related mail, and then try to get back to the original one I was reading. No way to locate it except by searching, then hope and pray I remember some unique text/sender information to find it. (Then hope pray that Outlook search will actually work, and within this decade!)
46. Horrible unintuitive rendering of multiple calendars.
- Can anyone make sense of these?
47. Interface is completely modal
- You never really know when you click the "New" button what you will get. E.g. if you last clicked in the "To Do" box, you'll get a task. If you last clicked in the preview pane, you get an email. (More about modelessness.)
48. State information not remembered
- When you switch between modes, the current scrolling location is not preserved. For example, I scroll down a few pages in a long email to find the date of an event, then switch to calendar to see if I'm free, then switch back to the mail...arg! It has scrolled me back to the top of the email.
- And if you navigate to a future date in the calendar, then switch back to cross-check a mail, then go back to the calendar....you get reset back to the default view and today's date.
49. List windows don't scroll as you move the scroll bars (E.g. Inbox folder or Contacts)
- In big folders (like my inbox) it's a guessing affair to scroll to the right email or contact.
- Dynamic scrolling was introduced by the NeXT computer in 1990 -- 17 years ago!
50. No quick way to flip between different components of the program (e.g. quickly switch from the mail to calendar and back.)
- In a browser, or MS word, you can switch between documents with Ctrl-Tab or Alt-Tab. Nothing like this in Outlook.

Misc

51. Who wants Archiving?
- Outlook wants to "Archive" my old messages, making them un-searchable and out of my normal flow. I just bought a 1 Terabyte disk for $200 and Outlook wants to erase or specially compress my email? What century are they in? Are disks so expensive in Redmond that MS Employees need to pay careful attention to how much space their email takes? Last I checked, GMail and even Hotmail give 5 gigabytes for free. Making old messages un-searchable is unforgivable.
52. Deletes files from Server without asking, no way to put them back.
- I keep my personal mail on my own server. I always set programs to not delete emails from the server so that I can see them from my web client, and to have a backup of the images. When I connected Outlook to my POP3 server, it immediatly downloadedand deleted almost 2 years of emails. Of course, this is a one-way process--no way to put them back.
53. Outlook is a memory hog
- If you leave it open for a workday, it will really start to grind your system to a halt. (Note that in this screenshot, Gmail was loaded in one of the many tabs in Firefox!)
54. Outlook 2007 deletes your categories
- If you have categories from an old version of outlook, and you click on that category in Outlook 2007, the category is deleted without warning. See it in destructive action in the screencast below.
55. Impossible* to have first names displayed first
- No way to to switch display of all names from "Last, First" to "First Last"
- *Okay, not totally impossible, just requires programming skill and writing and installing custom VB code and pulling your hair out for a few hours. Here's my post about that magical experience.
56. Almost impossible to get at an actual email address. (Outlook 2007)
- E.g. I'm trying to email a list of addresses for an invite. As a shortcut, I type "paul" in the send field, wait for it do be auto-corrected to his Contact entry, then try to copy and paste the address out. But impossible to copy and paste it into message, it only copies his name part.
57. Always takes extra clicks to see an actual email address (Outlook 2003).
- Only names are ever shown in the normal interface. You must click and open a properties dialog to see the actual email address. Makes it a pain to see what company someone is with, or what email they sent from (company or private?), or to tell spammers from similar named contacts. (Users were begging for this for years, see here and here.)
58. No way to view message source HTML (Outlook 2007).
- They actually removed this feature--it was in previous versions up to Outlook 2003. WTF?
59. Just plain fucking slow and bloated.
- Even on an Acer Ferrari with 2 gigs of RAM the entire machine grinds to a halt when email is fetched. Switching between mail and calendars takes up to 5 seconds. Always consumes around 100 megs of memory.
60. No way to view contacts sorted by the date that the entries were created.
- That information is not stored at all. Consider the situation when I'm looking for the guy that I just entered last night but I forgot his name. With over a thousand contacts, I'll surely never find him again!
61. No way to split interface into multiple windows
- For example, you can't view your calendar while you navigate through your mail messages.
62. Calendar warning with no context
- When making an appointment Outlook may warn that "This appointment is adjacent to another in your calendar." That's nice, but there is no way to find out what that adjacent appointment IS without opening the calendar mode and looking yourself. Why can't it tell me, or at least give me a link to click?
63. Can't remember credentials
- Every time I start Outlook I have to select a profile and type in my password.
- This is also true for the web client, even when I select the "This is a private computer" option. (Why do they even make that an option if it does nothing, I wonder?)
- Even Hotmail figured out 10 years ago how to have an option for "Remember me on this computer". Maybe the Outlook people should talk to them? I firmly believe that it is possible, with some cleverness, to have a computer store data that the user would like to be retrieved later.
- [Someone suggested that this is 'Outlook taking security seriously'. That may be, but the choice should be up to me the user, not Microsoft.]
64. Messages saved in weird place
- A few years ago a roommate re-formatted my hard disk while I was away. He thought he had saved all my data by backing up the "My Documents" folder. But all my email, three years of it, were stored by Outlook in an obscure hidden folder nowhere near the My Documents foler. Sure, he was an idiot to do this without asking, but you can see the logic to his backup choice. [Yes, many other programs to this too. But I'm still pissed about losing those mails!]
65. Doesn't really quit when you ask it to
- After you close all open Outlook windows you would think that it would stop running. (And stop taking up memory and processor cycleas.) But no, Outlook will continue to run even after you've quit. Only way is to open the process manager and kill the hidden Outlook process still running. No warning is given that a process is still running in the background, but when you next start Outlook it will bitch that you "didn't shut it down correctly last time".
66. Impossible to back up all important folders at once
- You may only export one folder at a time to a PST file, so you can't export your inbox folder and sent folders at the same time. (You might think to put them both in one folder and export that one, but Outlook won't let you move the Inbox or Sent folders because they are "special".)

Aesthetics

67. It's ugly as shit.
- Especially Outlook 2007.
- Why does Microsoft make windows look one style in their OS, and then override this style in all their applications?
  - When Outlook is freezing up, (which it does constantly, see the 'Slowness Section') you will see all the windows revert to default Windows XP styling until it recovers.

If you have found other problems with Outlook, please add them to the comments. CAMStudio is free software for recording your own screencasts, which you can then upload to YouTube and then leave a link in your comment.

I hope someone at Microsoft is listening.

Outlook is the Open Email Platform (and Xobni is cool)

stan — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 22:54:14 -0600

Soon I'll post my long-awaited list of why Outlook sucks.

But before ripping into it for sucking in so many ways, I must admit that it is the only open email platform in use today.

We realized that email is the real social network, but only Outlook offers a platform where 3rd parties can innovate. I've learned to depend on Xobni for quickly seeing conversations and shared files. (See screenshot at right, or Fred's post.) The LinkedIn Outlook plugin is cool too--I hope it soon integrates photos.

Yahoo may offer a platform around their webmail, which would be a huge step in the right direction, but I'm doubtful that they could pull it off.

So as much as I really hate Outlook, it is the only place where someone with a good idea for improving email can actually do anything.

Context Free Art

stan — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:13:06 -0600

I've been playing around with Context Free Art again lately. It's a little program lets you define little context-free "programs" that produce artwork, like the cool movie above. Plus, there a ton of samples on the site that you can experiment with.

Here's the program for the tree above:

startshape PLANT

rule PLANT {
	EITHER {x -2}
	EITHER {x 2}
}

rule BOTH {
	BL {rotate 30}
	BL {rotate -30 flip 90}
}

rule EITHER {BL{}}
rule EITHER {BL{flip 90}}

rule BL {
	CIRCLE {}
	WL {size 0.95 y 1.6}
}

rule WL {BL {rotate 3}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 4}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 5}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 6}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 7}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 3}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 4}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 5}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 6}}
rule WL {BL {rotate 7}}
rule WL {BOTH {}}
rule WL {BL {rotate -10 flip 90}}

#Location in twitter and human markup

stan — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:45:21 -0600

UPDATE: Learned from @indiekid and @w1redone over dinner that (a) others were using this convention two months earlier in California (doh!) and (b) there is a site dedicated to tracking hashtags: hashtags.org. Cool that Jason and I independently hit upon the same symbol to indicate locations.

The web has a new convention for usernames, could we use one for locations? And why do these things catch on?

In Egyptian Hieroglyphics, names were always circled--an early example of semantic tagging.

Twitter users created the '@username' convention on their own almost as soon as the service started, and it has now spread beyond twitter. Usernames are prefixed with a @ symbol to indicate that you're talking about a person, and the system can turn that name into a link.

In December Jason Lange and I hatched the idea of using hash marks to indicate locations. We settled on the # symbol because (a) @ is already taken (b) it sorta looks like grid lines and (c) it is used URL's to indicate a location on a page. Of course, we twittered our new idea:

Brainstorming like crazy with @susqhanamj at
#trilogy.  - 09:15 PM December 07, 2007

At dinner last night, I heard the folks at Twitter HQ are talking about the this geo-hash convention.

But what is it good for? Imagine if each location had it's own page. So in my tweet above, you could click through to a #trilogy page for the Trilogy Wine Bar in Boulder. You could see other people who have talked about it and get a sense for the sort of people who go there.

Who creates content for these pages? Twitter could allow businesses to create their own accounts (as Facebook now does), but that wouldn't cover things like parks and geographic landmarks. So better yet: make locations into Wiki pages that anyone can edit.

No word from Egyptologists on what symbols they used for locations...