Category: Technology

Ok, so I’m holed up at Lance Arthur‘s pad for a couple of hours and I’m taking the opportunity to plough through some of the stuff that I can’t get written in London. First up, a post about FeedBurner and Blogger and specifically about a post called Ciao, Feedburner over on the official FeedBurner weblog.

For those of you who don’t know, FeedBurner is a profoundly useful service for webloggers that grabs your RSS/Atom feeds and enhances them in various ways. The assumption of the service is that these feeds are generally machine-produced and that the vast majority of people are not super-alpha-geek users capable of hacking them around. So instead of learning Atom’s intricacies, you tell FeedBurner where your current feed is, FeedBurner then chews it all up, splices in stuff from del.icio.us or Flickr or whatever, makes the whole thing compatible with more standards than you were aware existed, puts a shiny style-sheeted face on the whole thing and then spits it out at a new location. The Feedburner feed for plasticbag.org (for example) is here: FeedBurner feed for plasticbag.org.

Of course FeedBurner does many more things that I’ve just mentioned. It also tracks your user stats more effectively than anything else I’ve seen. It can replace embedded Amazon links with ones that include your money-making Amazon Associates ID. And most impressively of all, FeedBurner can turn absolutely normal posts in them into fully working Podcasts. So, if you’re currently overwhelmed with the complexity of Podcasting, there’s an easy way of getting yourself started.

So generally, it’s a pretty impressive service and one which you might want to use. But when I came to it originally, I was quite sceptical. Why? Because it seemed like a one-way path – once I’d got people using my FeedBurner feed, how could I ever make them transition to a new service? What happened if I changed my mind? If I had previously changed the location of my feeds on my personal site, I could use some weird .htaccess rewrite rule to send people to the new place. It was geeky, but it was possible. But I can’t do that on someone else’s service. The whole situation looked like a weird kind of lock-in where if I was to swap to a new service I’d lose half of my subscribers. And that kind of lock-in can only make you sceptical of joining a service in the first place, and make you resent it in time.

But not any more! As of a few days ago FeedBurner added a new service that completely fixed this problem. If you decide to leave them now, you can tell the service the address of your new feed and it will reorganise itself accordingly:

Day 1-10: Any requests for the FeedBurner feed are sent an HTTP 301 “Permanent Redirect” response back to your source feed. This will cause most feed readers to forget the FeedBurner URL and use the new URL from that point on. Your subscribers don’t feel a thing.

Day 11-20: If your FeedBurner feed is still getting requests at this point, it probably means that your feed reader is treating that “Permanent Redirect” as a “Temporary Redirect”. That’s actually pretty common, so now we enter “Phase 2”. Now, any requests for your FeedBurner feed will receive a “redirect document”. What is a redirect document? Dave Winer displayed foresight by anticipating this need back in 2002 and provided this specification so that a publisher could keep control of their feed location. We strongly encourage more feed readers to support this specification, and we are going to be widely campaigning for this capability.

Day 21-30: You’re still here? Well, at this point we return a valid feed that contains a single item that says “This feed has moved to (feed URL here)”. So even though all of the transparent mechanisms to redirect the subscription have failed, there’s still a trail for your subscribers to follow.

The consequence? I now feel much less likely to leave! This simple exit path has made me feel enormously more comfortable with their service and much more comfortable recommending it to friends. As an organisation they’re stating publically that they respect their users and their opinions. Moreover, they’re stating that they’re not interested exploiting people’s inertia or in trapping them. These are all powerful and positive messages – messages that make the organisation enormously more trustworthy.

The guys behind Flickr have a similar philosophy, which I have always loved. They want people to feel that they can trust Ludicorp with incredibly personal pictures of their loved ones and their life. As such they’ve made it relatively easy for people to pull their photos out of Flickr at whatever point they want. There’s no attempt to hold the users to ransom. These are good things. They’re good enough to almost constitute a rule: Give people clear and easy ways to transition out from your service with no loss of data. They will like you for it, and will be less likely to leave you.

But sometimes, it’s not enough just to give people an easy exit from your service. Sometimes you can still hold people to ransom by not giving them an easy enough way to come back. I often think of Blogger when I think around this stuff – I was with Blogger for years as a user. I loved their service enormously. And when Movable Type came along I considered moving but decided against it. It was a long time later that I started to consider that it might be a better fit for my needs. And so I looked into how you could transition across between the services concerned and discovered that it was relatively easy. You simply provided Blogger with a different kind of template that MT could read as data and then clicked an ‘import’ button. Nice and simple – well done Blogger for giving me an escape route.

But where MT had a facility to import entries, Blogger did not. If I decided to try a different platform, then there would be no easy going back. If I left Blogger I would be leaving forever. After much trepidation, I made the leap to MT and for a while I ran the two sites in parallel. MT had its problems running on Pair servers, but I stuck with it and in the end I left Blogger behind. But it was a wrench and a leap of faith, and in the process I’d come to resent Blogger for putting me in such an awkward position – for acting like the parent who says, ‘if you get in that car, don’t bother coming back’. Because of course I never could go back…

What I learned from the situation with Blogger – and which I’m delighted to see that FeedBurner knew as well – is that it’s as important to give people the ability to rejoin your service as it is to help them leave. But really, there’s a higher level lesson here as well: it pays to be honourable when you’re building software and services. It pays – as Google says – to do no evil. It pays a financial reward, it pays a reward of user respect and loyalty, and – I think most importantly – it pays a personal creative reward of knowing that you’ve made a service that people actively want to stay with.

It seems obvious, but users seem to want to try things without risk, without a hard sell, and then settle on the platform or service that makes most sense to them. You should want that too. You should want your users to be happy, to be content, to not be railing against your control, to not resent your service. To restrict that freedom (to leave and to come back) seems to me to be a profound statement that you have no faith in what you’ve created, that you’re not sure that it can stand on its own merits, and that you’re prepared to screw over your customers to meet your immediate needs. No company can sustain such a relationship forever. All it can do is alienate. So well done Flickr and FeedBurner and – to an extent – Blogger. And may (many) other companies learn from your examples…

A new operating system and a Bank Holiday on the same weekend. It’s like fate. And it means that all around the country there are geeks fiddling and installing and reinstalling and losing serial numbers and going “oooh” pretty much in synchrony. I’ve been playing my role too! Exploring all the little nooks and crannies of my brand new shiny computer.

Some first impressions – Spotlight is pretty awesome and a positive move in desktop search. The fact that it usurps most of the functionality of Launchbar without being quite as focused on launching apps is a bit annoying, but not unpredictable. There’s a lot of the Flickr aesthetic (steal from the best!) in this release.

It took me a while to get my head around the new version of Mail, but I’m getting more and more quietly impressed. The smart folders angle (and the spotlight searching) makes the whole thing much more useful – I love the idea that I can keep all my mail in the same big dustbin and have query-focused folders to find my way through it. My long-standing problem with the app remains though – why the crap isn’t there an option to reply to an e-mail with the e-mail address it was originally sent to? I would have thought that was bloody obvious functionality to have, and yet almost no bloody mail app I’ve used in years has had it. The behaviour of this version appears to be closer to my ideal than the previous version, but not by much… If you’re outside the Inbox, then things start getting screwy…

Elsewhere, there are all kinds of neat things lying around in Quartz Composer, but I’ve not had much time to play with that yet. I have had time to play with Dashboard though and I’ve got a few thoughts. Firstly, it’s obviously kind of fluff, but I don’t care. It’s neat and it’s pretty and I like it. Secondly, there may be lots of little widgets available, but most of them are pretty useless so far. I’ve only found two fun ones (other than the weather and clock things it comes with): a Transmit drop-file widget and the Delicious Library shelf. And they’re kind of bunk. Fun though. Thirdly – and most importantly – building widgets is fun! I’ve been playing around with Mr Biddulph and it’s all been highly enjoyable. I’m fully expecting to be involved in making several of these little things over the next few weeks.

(A quick sideline – the more I’ve been playing with Dashboard the more I’ve started to think of it as an interesting prototyping area for simple network enabled real-world appliances and ambient computing stuff. That may sound over the top, but think about it – each widget is supposed to support simple interactions only, they’re often designed to look and feel like real-world objects and they’re also mostly designed to be useful when you’re online – pulling in information in the background. Those simple ambient pieces of technology – like the orb that reflects the state of the stock market – would feel right at home in this environment. I’ve not been paying much attention to the Konfabulator widget market, but I imagine they’ve been pushing along quite nicely in these directions already.)

Another fun area for me has been Automator. I’ve not got very far with it yet, but it only took me two minutes to knock up a little workflow that downloaded every MP3 linked to from a page, saved it to my desktop and slapped it into my iTunes library. It’s the perfect way to quickly grab fun previews of tracks from the Marseille Figs album.

What else is there? I’ve not really played too much with Safari RSS because I still like NetNewsWire more. The new iChat has a sweet / disturbing little feature that picks up on what iChatStatus did and incorporates it (again) into the OS. So now you can choose to have your latest iTunes track displayed as your status line. But that’s not the good/creepy bit – what’s cool is that other people can not only see what you’re looking at, but can click on the song to look it up on iTunes Music Store. If that was more open – if you could choose where to look up the song – then I’d probably like it more. I’m not thrilled by the idea of my operating system trying to sell me things all the time.

Other than that, everything’s pretty smooth and classy. A few irritants get in the way of a pure fun experience of course – Quicktime 7 no longer remembers that I went pro – apparently the money I spent on that isn’t good enough any more. Thank god for VLC. And there are the things that I’ve done that are dumb – like neglect to note down my serial numbers for Acquisition and BBEdit 8.2. But they’re my own fault, I guess. Otherwise, a pretty entertaining and solid release! Big hugs all round…

For much of last year I worked on a project in the BBC called Programme Information Pages. Gavin Bell, Matt Biddulph and I recently gave a talk on the subject at ETech. The project was/is about creating coherent data structures and data stores for information about television and radio programming (and creating web pages from them). It sounds a bit dull when I say it like that, but it was an enormously complex and intricate piece of work. More importantly I think it’s one of the most important projects I’ve ever worked on in terms of its implications. I’m not going to go into much detail about it here, but I’ll put up the presentation at some point for those of you who are interested.

Anyway, one of the core parts of the work was to decide what we were modelling and what we wanted to represent with a web page online. Your normal EPG schedule or whatever represents what we came to term “Broadcast Instances” – an individual broadcast of an episode of a programme – the thing you need to navigate to when dealing with non-time-shifted broadcast media. But on the web such a approach makes no sense – we’re aspiring to create a permanent and navigable archive of programme information online. It wouldn’t make much sense to have to navigate through five hundred pages about the same episode of Only Fools and Horses, just because it’s popular enough to be repeated a lot.

The same applies to how you’d want to handle and enhance the data. There’s only a certain amount of information that you can usefully attach to a particular broadcast – because by its very nature this information cannot be reused for any subsequent broadcast. So fundamentally the core of the enterprise has to be larger than the broadcast – so we decided that the core cocept for both data and its representation online was the unique “programme episode” that could be broadcast any number of times.

Of course (as we say in the ETech paper), it’s not always particularly easy to say what constitutes an episode. Many programmes have different versions. At one level there are all the small variations like whether they have subtitles or closed captioning or whether they have minor edits for time. Above that are more complex variations like major edits to make programming child-friendly or that recontextualise it. And then you’ve got things like ‘Director’s Cuts’ – distinct versions of the programme that have been marketed as such to the general public. And then you’ve got other problems – what about programmes within programmes – small dramas inside magazine programmes, or cartoons cut into chunks within Saturday morning kids TV? And then you have questions of scale – is a news bulletin a programme? What about a weather forecast? There’s a lot of complexity here.

But once you have decided what constitutes a programme episode then something really significant happens – you can give it a name, make it addressable, you can – for the first time point at it. Better still, you can move from pointing at something to glueing handles onto it. And once you have such a handle, then you can pick up the programme and throw it around and stick labels on it and join it together with other programmes with bits of semantic string. You’ve moved your engagement with the programme from only being able to look at it to being to manipulate it and do things with it. And there is almost no end to the things you can do once you’ve uniquely identified a television or radio programme. It’s foundational. It’s like there are two views of the world – the solid one around us and the Matrix-style flowing green lines one. In this second world, until you give a thing a name – until you can point at it in greenspace – it simply doesn’t exist.

Since working on the PIPs project I see the same problem everywhere. When I use iTunes, the interface encourages me to believe that I’m buying unique songs, but actually their database has no idea about whether “You Can Call Me Al” on Graceland is the same song as the one on Paul Simon’s Greatest Hits. (Graceland was the first album I ever bought for myself, if you’re wondering about the example.) So I can very easily buy the same song twice. The whole thing operates as a shallow attempt to copy and extend the principle of the album that we’ve got used to through vinyl, cassette and CD formats rather than to clarify the principle from scratch. You can’t buy the same track on the same album twice via iTunes, but you can buy the same track from two separate albums, even though that’s astonishingly dumb. That wouldn’t happen if the songs were uniquely identified.

Worse still – the database that iTunes uses is completely distinct from the one that lies behind MusicBrainz. It’s completely distinct from the databases used by rights managers or by record companies as well. None of these databases have the slightest idea when they’re talking about the same song or not. None of them are capable of connecting usefully to each other – except by guesswork based on audio signatures or human-entered metadata. Inevitably this will be rife with clumsiness. Things will go wrong. Probably a lot of things.

When I buy books off Amazon, I’m always frustrated that they’re never completely able to show me the various editions of the same work. And why? Because they don’t actually know what a work is, they only know what an edition of a book is. Sure there are human-created links, but fundamentally there is only a limited collection of things that you can do with ISBNs. The ISBN is like creating an identifier for a television broadcast rather than an episode – it’s kind of useful in certain circumstances, but it makes it impossible to do really really simple stuff like ask, “when will this next be broadcast?” or “show me other versions – I want one with a spanish language track”.

Geographic space, of course, has addresses – and with longitude and latitude (and the fact that the same place can’t be in two different, er, places) – it makes an enormous range of things possible. And as UpMyStreet made clear, once you’ve got a relatively precise identifier / address for a semantically useful concept with some form of data structure around it, then you can build an enormous range of things on top of it. In fact, geographic space is almost one of the most solid proofs of the power of the identifier – think how many new and old pieces of technology rely on something so obvious as to be almost not worth mentioning – that a place can be identified and pointed at and referenced in some way. Maps, postcodes, property – just a few of the concepts that rest on those principles.

Now I know that the creation of universal and world-unique identifiers for things must seem one of the most tedious concepts or projects known to man. But I believe that it’s fundamental to our technological development – and particularly our ability to take our ever-increasing computing power and increasingly interconnected appliances and merge them seemlessly with the environment around us. The greenspace of the Matrix needs to merge with the physical – they need to become indistinguishable. Until we can point at, until we can pick up, until we can handle, we will never be able to use these concepts around us effectively.

(All of which is not to deny how that there are some things to which we should be nervous about attaching data handles. The concept of universally applicable identifiers feels creepy and wrong to many many people when it’s applied to humans. The idea that our identities should be reduced to a unique string of numbers or a hash creeps people out – and with reason. It’s absolutely clear that all the things that make universal addressability and unique identifiers (and I know these are very different things) so powerful for material and conceptual objects, make them equally scary and open to abuse when applied to people. But we simply may have no choice – because governments are right when they say that the possibilities are enormous. What you can simplify and develop and build and create above, around and between people (and on top of these identifiers) could change the world for the better or the worse. And we need to get used to the idea that movement in this direction may be irresistable and may be motivated by the desires of consumers and citizens demanding the ability to do things which we’re only not building because we’re nervous that they’ll be abused, not because they’re not useful. And that might mean we may have to say goodbye to the idea of being in any way invisible or untraceable to enter the world ahead.)

In decades to come, I think the time will live in now will be understood as the moment that the real and the map started the final stages of a merging that has been going on for hundreds of years. In this future world, all of our discrete objects (physical or conceptual) will be annotatable, or linkable to, referencable. Each ‘thing’ will be built upon in non-physical dimensions of data. And that final process of merging must start with addressability. It must start with identifiers. And it’ll need individuals and collective projects and business and government to undertake taht work, because it’s the foundation of everything that follows. The true power of our technology will not reveal itself until we know what a ‘thing’ is. We will not be able to work with concepts until we have pointed at each new thing (and like Adam in the Bible, I guess) given it a unique identity. From birthing concept into language, we’re now moving from moving concept into data. This is an age of naming, it is an of age of pointing at things.

I have enormous performance anxiety at the moment. The world’s turned to look this way for a few scant moments and everyone else is rising to the challenge and I’m just hiding. And it looks like I’m not the only one. Apparently, loads of Microsoft employees are using iPods instead of Microsoft-related products. You may not see the direct connection here, but everyone’s looking at the digital music arena at the moment, Apple are doing tremendously well in it and there’s absolutely no reason why Microsoft couldn’t just look at their competitors, pull themselves together and go out there and try and create something even greater. It’s not like they’re short of cash or bright people. But instead they’re burying their heads and pretending it isn’t happening:

An internal e-mail circular sent to several senior managers in mid-December talked about iPod shipments to Apple’s nearby store in Bellevue1. The e-mail said: “FWIW, the gal at the Bellevue Square Apple Store said that they are getting in two shipments of 200 iPods every day to keep up with this week’s demand, and are nearly constantly selling out.”

The note prompted a curt reply from Dave Fester, general manager of the Windows Digital Media division, who wrote the group: “I sure hope Microsoft employees are not buying iPods. We have great alternatives…” Fifteen minutes later, the manager responded: “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sure that Microsoft employees are not buying iPods, or Macs or PlayStations.”

I find this totally stunning and completely wrong-headed. Microsoft are trying to play the loyalty card to get their own staff to use their products even when they don’t want to? They’re making it a matter of fealty? This is no way to be creative – it’s no way to operate in a commercial marketplace today. People don’t make better products by not using the best ones that currently exist. And companies don’t spot trends and opportunities by forcing their employees to lose faith in their own preferences and choices and become forced proselytisers of another’s beliefs.

iPods everywhere is an opportunity for Microsoft. It sounds ridiculous but it’s true. That there’s a market that they haven’t conquered – a space they haven’t won it – should be the greatest reason to aspire to greatness. That there is something beautiful and functional in their midst that is worth admiring shouldn’t be ignored just because they didn’t make it. It should inhabited and ripped apart – explored and enjoyed, all with aspiration to see the cutting edge – the popular choice – and look to see how it could be surpassed.

It comes down to having respect for your craft and for the world in which you live. If you want to make great things then first you have to know what makes something great. And if you want people to make things that trigger enthusiasm in others then a good start would be to encourage that same enthusiasm in your staff. Making something that’s true to itself is much easier when you’re honest about its failings. Wise up guys, let them have their iPods. Let them learn from them, let them revel in them and then get them in a room and think of something that’ll blow it away…

Just a brief note: the iPodShuffle was one of the products released today by Steve Jobs and the Apple team. It was long-rumoured and kind of makes sense in a do people really want something that can only take that much music? kind of way. Fundamentally it’s a USB thumb-drive with a music player in it, and it’s not enormously more expensive than just the thumbdrive alone. So it’s pretty reasonable, all things considered. I won’t be buying one, but hey…

But I was talking to Gavin about it and he pointed out that Apple had been considerate enough to add a little advice to people who might have been confused by its small size if placed too close to a packet of gum. Specifically point two below:

But perhaps what’s even more peculiar is the UK version is very subtly different. I wonder what this says about our national characters:

PS. While I’ve got you here, I just want to whore you over to see what I was hoping for originally from the alleged ‘headless iMac’ and the posts I wrote about potential Apple media hubs.