Abstractioneer by John Panzer

2009/12/03

"RE": Open alternative to ReTweet

Just discovered a useful alternative microsyntax to Twitter's RT: "RE" (via Stowe Boyd). It's been available in Tweetdeck's menu since this summer but I hadn't noticed. It's effectively an equivalent to email's In-Reply-To that creates mail threads, and it uses links rather than copying tweets, so the 140 character problem is solved.

I love RE's potential because it can solve all the problems with newRT and oldRT, and opens up some new possibilities as well:

gregarious I really like when the clocks change

about 2 hours ago from Twitter
Retweeted by 3
stoweboyd: I disagree with @gregarious about daylight savings time
themaria: he sleeps all day anyway
brianthatcher: I never come out in the light of day

Note that the target of an RE doesn't have to be a tweet; it can be any URL. So RE can also reach outside the Twitterverse and unify all sorts of threaded conversations. In particular, if the target of an RE were Salmon-enabled, a tool could trivially send a salmon representing the RE back to the source -- allowing for truly distributed conversations that retain threading, authorship, and provenance.

The only problem with RE at the moment is that it turns the target into an opaque URL, which looks ugly in today's clients. This can be solved, as shown above, with smarter RE-aware clients. It's not a huge amount of work either -- and the payoff is that you can have your newRT collapsed/summarized view and still have conversations. And even better, they can be open and distributed beyond just Twitter.

2009/12/01

OpenID delegation for Google's OP

Following up on Brad's announcement of last week, I wanted to test out OpenID delegation. I just set up http://www.johnpanzer.com/ to delegate to Google's OP, which lets me use my own domain as my identifier. Earlier I was using AOL's OP; you can pick any OP you like without changing your identity. Doing this for a static web page like this is fairly simple:

Make sure you know your Google Profile URL; it's useful to pick a nice readable one (which will be taken from the GMail namespace). Mine is jpanzer.at.acm.
Add the following two links to the <head> section of your page HTML, substituting your own Google Profile link for jpanzer.at.acm:

Note that the Google OP supports only OpenID 2.0. This is a Good Thing.

2009/11/23

"Algorithmic Authority" (via Clay Shirky)

Clay Shirky recently wrote up some thoughts on algorithmic authority, well worth reading: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/11/a-speculative-post-on-the-idea-of-algorithmic-authority/. When you merge "publishers" and "readers" the People Formerly Known as the Audience are no longer a statistical mass of consumers, but are themselves producers of content with their own authority. This long tail of content production makes the ability to do personalized rankings and authoritativeness far more important. Back when there were three networks, you could rely on hearsay or statistical aggregation of authority to figure out which one had the 'best' news coverage. With a million or a billion, you need something much more fine-grained and low-overhead. Thus "algorithmic authority", though it also depends on user actions -- such as linking to and recommending someone else or their content.

2009/11/12

Twitter's NewRetweet and Darwinian Selection

A couple of days ago, I tweeted "I like Twitter's new Like feature. Just not sure why they called it Retweet." Which is a bit snarky; @ev and the crew deserve more than 140 characters, because they've clearly put a lot of time and thought into this feature and it solves a lot of real problems. People have critiqued some of the superficial problems; I'd like to focus on just one core issue, which @ev also touches on, namely the inability to add commentary. Which turns this into (as one re-tweeter remarked) a streamlined "propagate" feature. This does let a meme propagate at the speed of Twitter and yet be coalesced for display purposes, and that's exactly the right thing for some memes. In some ways it's a very democratic, Darwinian process; the tweets that are most likely to be NewRetweeted will undoubtedly get propagated more efficiently.

But there's another piece to Darwinian selection: It's not just reproduction of the fittest, but reproduction with variations. Sometimes, that's where the real value lies. If you look at biological ecosystems, ultimately, it's where all the value lies. That's where you get new ideas, by riffing off of other ideas, modifying them, and mashing them up. Making this harder is, well, bad.

It's not like they haven't thought of this. @ev does give some hints of future possibilities:

What about those cases where you really want to add a comment when RTing something? Keep in mind, there's nothing stopping you from simply quoting another tweet if that's what you want to do. Also, old-school retweets are still allowed, as well. We had to prioritize some use cases over others in this release. But just as Twitter didn't have this functionality at all before, people can still work around and do whatever they want. This just gives another option.

This ignores the change in affordances with NewRetweet. Tools support ClassicRetweet today; I fear they're gearing up to switch over to the shiny NewRetweet, putting a barrier in front of users who want to propagate-with-comments. It'd going to be even more confusing because they're keeping the name Retweet but taking a way an important piece of functionality. We can't even talk about the differences without inventing new vocabulary — thus NewRetweet vs. ClassicRetweet. I hope that reproduction-with-variations will not go the way of the dodo, but I fear that it will if the ecosystem continues on its current path.

2009/11/04

One XRD To Rule Them All

Discussing The Hammer Stack most of the day today. Resolving several issues. Will keep going until coffee runs out. XRD will bind all services together and rule them all. Notes here.

Addendum Nov 5:

One Protocol to rule them all, One Protocol to find them,

One Protocol to bring them all and in the DNS bind them

In the Land of Standards where the Shadows lie.

2009/10/27

The Salmon Protocol: Introducing the Salmon Project

A few days ago, at the Real Time Web Summit, we had a session about Salmon, a protocol for re-aggregated distributed conversations around web content. I was hoping for some feedback and to generate some interest, and I was overwhelmed by the positive reactions, especially after Louis Gray's post "Proposed Salmon Protocol aims to unify Conversations on the Web". Adina Levin's "Salmon - Re-assembling distributed conversations" is a good, insightful review as well. There's clearly a great deal of interest in this, and so I've gone ahead and expanded Salmon's home at salmon-protocol.org with an open source project, salmon-protocol.googlecode.com, and a mailing list, groups.google.com/group/salmon-protocol.

The project is a home for all types of open source code related to Salmon, but particularly reference implementations and validators. At the moment, it contains the Python/Google AppEngine source code for the demo at salmon-playground.appspot.com. I also intend to host the actual spec text there for the moment, along with the reference implementation code, and develop both in parallel based on discussions on the mailing list. The list is for discussions about the Salmon Protocol and its implementations.

This is also a call to action. If you are interested in helping to define this new protocol, or work on a reference implementation or validator, please join the mailing list and introduce yourself.

2009/10/21

Use your email address as an OpenID

We're not quite there yet, but soon you'll be able to use any reasonable user identifier as an OpenID. Most importantly, email addresses. Dirk just wrote a great blog post explaining "Email Addresses as OpenIDs" which goes into the nitty gritty. Basically, this all just needs a finalized XRD spec to rely on, and adoption of same (and ability to use acct: URIs) in the next rev of the OpenID specification. The upcoming IIW will be an great opportunity to make some progress on these.