Dave Winer

You know how your app reads OPML so people can import subscription lists?

It would be even more cool if your app could subscribe to OPML lists! ;-)

That way, when a new feed appears in the list you would include news from that feed. And when one is removed, you would unsub the user from that feed, automatically.

This would allow new products to be developed that are collections of feeds.

I've wanted this feature widely supported for a long time. We had it in Radio UserLand, the reader that started all this michegas. It would be great if Feedly or Digg or one of the others picked up this idea and ran with it.

• BTW, the Wikipedia page for Radio UserLand could use an update to reflect that it was more than a blogging tool.

I happen to have a great tool for editing those lists, btw. ;-)

Today's a big day in FargoLand...

A few minutes ago we flipped the switch on smallpict.com and now all the sites there are being managed by a new content management system Kyle and I have been working on for most of this year.

What this means is this: you can publish from Fargo to a blogging system that understands outlines at its core.

That's a big deal because outlines are great not just for documents and presentations, but for whole websites.

And that's what your smallpict.com outline is now -- a website. ;-)

But we start off real simple and easy, with brief outline that shows you step-by-step how to write and publish an article on your site, and how to publish a presenation. All that's in the worknote, below..

http://worknotes.smallpicture.com/june2013/fargo080

We'll have more goodies for you now, at a much-accelerated pace, if everything's working, and Murphy smiles on us etc etc. ;-)

If you have questions or comments, you can post them here, or in comments on the notes linked to above.

Fargo 0.80 gives writers the tools they need to be heard.

So here we go, act 2 commences. ;-)

Dave

It's good that the NYT is introspecting on why they didn't get the Snowden story.

Of course, I don't know -- I'm not Snowden. But neither are they. I am a lifetime reader of the NYT and very interested in the information that was leaked by Snowden, and WikiLeaks before that.

The Times introspection should include a review of their performance with WikiLeaks. Being so public with their personal dislike of Julian Assange raised questions about how the Times was managing the story.

It also raised doubts about their integrity, imho. Why be so vocal about Assange? Has there never before been a newsmaker that they didn't like personally, is that why this is news? Or is it possible they wanted to draw a distinction between what they do and what he does for selfish reasons, like staying out of jail? They could see clearly that Assange was in legal trouble, and might have been trying to avoid that for themselves, by joining the demeaning (for all of us) personal smear campaign against him.

No matter what, it was insulting to readers of the Times to assume we care what the top editorial guy at the Times thought of Assange personally. If he wants to vent his feelings, he should have quit his job and written a blog. The Times itself has no business having an opinion about someone's socks, unless somehow they are presenting themselves as an authority on socks, which as far as I know Assange never has.

PS: This was going to be a longer post, but I just heard about Snowden's live video Q&A at 11AM today (a little less than 2 hours). I have to get my other work done before that. This is going to be great.

The war is over what information you and I get, and what information they get.

As we get less, they get more. As we lose control, they gain it.

In this war, the governments have more in common than they have differences. The Chinese probably could destroy our banking system, and we could probably destroy theirs, but they don't want that, and our government doesn't either. They're really on the same side.

What they want is to keep order, I really believe that. The order that keeps the rich rich, and more or less ignores the challenges we all face in keeping our species alive on this planet. I understand the sentiment. There's so much to comprehend, if you want to have any kind of quality of life, you have to compartmentalize. If you look at preserving order, you can't pay attention to climate change.

I think though we all know the precarious system of banking and computer networks isn't going to keep running forever. There's going to be a meltdown. We had one in 2008, and it looks like we just re-inflated the bubble temporarily, bought a little time, it's just going to get us back to where we were, only this time the pop will be bigger.

If you were President of the United States, and you saw a certain probability of this happening, you'd re-up on the side of preserving order. That means you have to be prepared for the day when people go to the ATM and find their bank account is inaccessible. When it happens to everyone even. How are the rich people going to enjoy their lifestyles when that kind of chaos is going on? It seems quite possible we'll live to see this happen.

It's all tech, top to bottom. The banking system is tech. The military is tech. And in that context, it's not surprising that our, the people's, information access systems are really weak compared to the ones the governments have. That's no accident. Our tools have been getting more precarious, thanks to bugs introduced by the browser vendors (if they're not deliberate, they're incredibly incompetent, your choice). And Google captured almost all the tech of RSS, only to shut it down. Just as things show some sign of coming back to life, now Facebook sounds like they'd like to have their turn at pwning the open public news flow. Please, if you make a feed, and you read this, keep making the feed as-is, no matter what Facebook asks you to do to it. By now it should be obvious that the big tech companies are not our friends. They're more like the government than they are like you and me. Maybe not their fault, maybe they didn't see it coming, but I doubt they'd deny that they're there now.

JavaScript is another item that we should be thinking about. Google is developing the same kind of power over the programming language of the Internet that they had over RSS. Over time they're likely to move their implementation of JS away from the standard. I've spent most of the last year programming in JS, and I think there's a lot to be said for making the language smaller and more efficient. But I'm a newbie, and if I had spent the last five years developing in it, the last thing I'd want to hear is that the language itself is considered a moving target. So, net-net, we have to insist that for now at least JS stay what it is. I don't trust anything about Google to do this right. They may think they know what they're doing, but they led us right into control by the government. That's a mess that needs undoing, and they shouldn't be creating any more messes.

One more note. I said a while back that if you want to understand politics you have to become deeply immersed in tech. The political reporters and bloggers have been totally too casual about that, even the smart relatively open-minded ones, and that even includes Glenn Greenwald. Is he really prepared to listen to Snowden, or can he just report an approximation of what Snowden tells him? It's the latter, because as smart as Greenwald is, he hasn't been spending the last N years schooling himself in the technology that we've built our existence around.

So think about it, how are we going to boot up the intelligence we need to make sense of this situation in time to make a difference?

Serious question, and heavy times.

We tend to use the word tech as if there was only one tech, but there's more than one.

1. These days when people say tech they usually mean the money. So the VCs are the godfathers of tech. The gatekeepers. The bloggers. When so many tech bloggers become VCs that tells you something.

2. But tech also means the product. I'm a developer. I want to know which products are interesting from a feature standpoint. I look at tech the way a movie guy looks at movies. I want new ideas. And I want my peers to study the new things I come up with. We actually used to do this at one point, sort of. Reviewing products never got that great. Nowadays what passes for tech commentary amounts to whether your icons are flat or skeumorphic. Honestly, there's a lot more to it than that. #understatement

3. And there's hippie tech, where tech is about freedom of expression and connecting people with others. Not as a business model but as people. Where the value of a person isn't how much you can get an advertiser to pay to reach them, but in the intrinsic value of a person with a mind, a heart, spririt, relationships with other people, a lifespan, a philosophy, feelings, ideas. I'm a hippie tech guy too. I really believe in the power of the technology to connect people. I think we're worth it. Maybe I'm foolish. It wouldn't surprise me. ;-)

• Most of the great mottos come from hippie tech.
• I know the rent is in arrears, the dog has not been fed in years, it's even worse than it appears!
• And don't even get me started on Big Lebowski. ;-)

4. There's spy tech, as we learned about last week from Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. Those guys, all of them, not just the whistleblowers, are a lot like us. They are us, in different circumstances. Most of my classmates graduating with Computer Science degrees in 1978 went to work for the government or quasi-government companies. My education was paid for mostly by the military. These were people I loved to talk geek with. I even know some of them because you cross paths with them in the entrepreneurial tech scene of #1, #2 and #3. (BTW, I have been part of the system of #1, long ago, before it became so concentrated on users as eyeballs and couch potatoes.) I sold software to spy tech in the 80s. Outliners and presentation software. They loved the stuff. Really.

I wouldn't mind investing in new tech, but almost everyone seems to think it's about tricking people to give something up you can sell to someone who's pretty sleazy. And we've seen where that leads us. Some asshole in government realizes there's all this great spy data in the tech companies, and gets a judge to make them turn it over. So now the VCs are selling us out to the bad guys in government too. You don't have to be much of a student of history to know where this leads.

So I'd never want to invest in a technology that views its users as chumps. I want to make stuff that celebrates the intellect and humanity of my users. Otherwise, I'd rather do something peaceful with small impact, like reading books and writing poetry.

I was talking with a friend the other day, he owns a tech startup, and is fairly wealthy from an earlier success. I said, regarding the mess that's been exposed around the NSA, "If we don't do something, who will?" What I meant is relative to most people we have a lot of freedom, and we also know our way around tech. He asked what would we do. On the way out of the restaurant I said we should create only products that were irrevocably open. He doubted it was possible. "Oh it's possible," I said.

My new product Fargo is most definitely irrevocably open. I don't have to give the users access to their data. It's sitting in a folder on their hard drive, in a documented XML-based file format. There is proven interop. So I can't take it back, once the files are out there, the users can leave any time they want. We don't even have copies of the files (although Dropbox does).

No this isn't a solution to all the problems, but it's a start. If a VC wanted to take us somewhere worth going they would insist that all their investments do this. But of course they won't because the only way they make money is by exercising that control. If the users of Tumblr had a say whether Yahoo would be hosting their blogs, well, they wouldn't have gotten so much money for it. It's the lock-in that creates the value. For the product designer in me (#2) this is kind of a no-op, but for the hippie it's No Sale Buddy. I could never take their money, and they would never offer it, as long as I had to deal with users this way. Because it would depend on my users being dumb, and as I said earlier, my users are anything but. They're the smartest people on the planet and I want to keep it that way. And I think anyone who makes software for dumb people in the end gets what they deserve. :-)

Radio2, the app that connects my linkblog feed to Twitter uses an old version of the Twitter API. They've been saying for a long time that this version would eventually be turned off, and yesterday seems to be the day that happened. This means that links from my feed will not appear on Twitter. I can't say when or if the app will be updated to work with the new API. I'm busy working on stuff for Small Picture, and Radio2 is no longer a priority for me. Sorry.

However, the feed is RSS, so it's possible to get the links through some other mechanism. I'm going to keep pushing links to the feed. It's a habit that's hard to break. I use it for bookmarking things I want to come back to. That's not something I plan to stop doing, anytime. And sharing the links is fun for me. I know I'm weird. ;-)

Caveat: It's a funny form of RSS because the items don't have titles. Google didn't like this kind of feed, but then it's almost gone, so that might not even be a problem. I've always felt this feed would be a good match for app.net or tent.io, and it would be great if the newly invigorated feed readers like Feedly would try to make sense of this kind of feed. It's perfectly valid RSS 2.0. Now that I'm losing my Twitter readers, it would be nice to make it up in some other way.

Things seem to be changing quite rapidly nowadays what with the NSA, and Google Reader going away, and Twitter shutting off their old API. Apple radically changing the UX of iOS, etc. It's almost as if there's this incredible disconnect between users and the government and the big tech companies.

I'm just going to keep programming, writing and linking and hope for the best! :-)

Knock wood, praise Murphy, IANAL, MMLM, etc.

Two blog posts in the last 24 hours add up to something possibly amiss?

1. Linus Ekenstam's Simplicity my ass. It's a wonderful rant, and I say that with deepest respect as someone who believes the rant is rapidly becoming a lost art. We need more strong opinion. Too many people wishing and washing. Say what you think. And what Mr Ekenstam thinks is that IOS 7 is a crock.

2. In his own way, Marco Arment agrees that IOS 7 is a crock, but one filled with opportunity for predatory developers, such as Marco. Of course he just sold Instapaper to Betaworks, and his Tumblr stock, sold to Yahoo, has made him rich -- so he has nothing to lose as Apple, apparently has pulled the rug out from all their developers. This is also a great rant, filled with testosterone. A must-read in what is becoming a lost art.

So, if all this is true, what does it mean?

I can't imagine that developers relish the choices that Apple is giving them.

But what about users? As an iPod user myself, I'm accustomed to Apple ripping up the pavement in iTunes, making things that I depend on disappear in one version, only to re-appear years later in a wholly new place in the UI. Most of my use of the iPod depends on this connection, so I've deliberately kept my dependency on this product limited. I'm accustomed to Apple playing hide-and-seek with vital features.

My iPads are a somewhat different story. I use lots of software there. Some of it might go away. It's hard to imagine me getting too upset. Until I read these two pieces.

As a veteran developer myself, I'm so glad I do not develop for this platform.

I am still an Apple shareholder. Not necessarily happy about that! :-(

And as someone who relishes tech as entertainment, I'm grabbing a box of virtual popcorn and watching, hopefully from a safe-enough distance.

Yesterday I posted a tweet with some feedback for the NY Times marketers.

Getting a NYT Digital Subscription should open up something new and wonderful that I can kvell about. #freeadvice

I sent the link to Jay Rosen, my former colleague at NYU, and he said I had to write a blog post about this. Here it is.

After years of hearing about paywalls from the Times, I've mostly been able to read the articles I wanted. I have many avenues into the site. All the links from my river work. When I see a link on Twitter, I can click on it. It's only when I want to go from one of those articles to another that the paywall stops me.

I've long felt I should go ahead and subscribe, but I found the special offer of 99 cents for the first 90 days to be insulting. They make a product that's for smart people. Sheez, it's not as if we're going to cancel after 90 days, and btw we know that it's hard to cancel these things. When you enter your credit card info and click Submit, you more or less have signed up for life. Right??

I decided to subscribe, finally, because I would like to wander around the site unimpeded by the paywall. I wondered what that would be like.

I read a lot of books and watch movies, and I think of the Times reviewers as authoritative, and their reviews go back many decades. So I'd like to be able to wander around their Arts section. Wandering seems to be the key idea. Here's a site that has a lot of stuff I'm interested in, and it's been many years since I've been able to wander freely through it. I imagined it might be wonderful.

I can tell you, a few days later, my life has not changed. I still use the site the same way I did before I paid.

I want to kvell about how wonderful it is to have a NYT Digital Subscription, but I don't have any great ideas about how to use this vast resource of information that's now fully open to me. I want to love it more, but I don't know how.

From their point of view -- what a missed opportunity! I have 63K follower on Twitter. If I said "Hey this is great, I never knew what I was missing," that might not make anyone subscribe, but it might get a few to think about it. The wall of resistance has only so many bricks. Every time one is removed you get closer to a sale.

If you're going to have digital subscibers you have to think like digital marketers. Think of the Times as a vast palace of entertaining information for people with active minds. How can you make that more accessible in ways that will make a difference for people with the new ability to freely roam the site.

Then you'll have something.

I love it when people turn me on to excellent fun movies I haven't seen before. In that spirit here are two that are sure to delight if you like the same kinds of movies I do. They both star Robert De Niro. And both are very long, but hold your attention.

1. Once Upon a Time in America is a spaghetti mob movie written and directed by Sergio Leone. It takes place in a Jewish ghetto in lower Manhattan, in a period spanning 50 years or so starting at the beginning of the 20th century. It's a weird movie for sure, and it goes slowly, almost like poetry. But the acting is first rate, and the story is compelling. It's actually two stories interwoven.

2. Casino is like Goodfellas 2, with different characters, but many of the same actors. Directed by Martin Scorcese, the plot comes from a book by the same author who wrote Goodfellas. Stars De Niro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone. Set in Las Vegas. Same narration style as Goodfellas, though there are two protagonists.

Also James Woods is in both movies, playing a leading role in #1 and a minor one in #2.

Also interesting, De Niro plays a Jew in both movies.

It's great that there's a discussion online today about whether or not the tech companies had a way to resist the US govt, if they believed that it was wrong to share information about their users without users knowing.

There is a way around it. They could reverse the process of centralizing user information on their servers.

When they found the web, Google, Twitter and Facebook, it was a completely decentralized network from a content standpoint.

• (It's never been decentralized at a transport level. There are several main peering points, and the name system is a hierarchy.)

Google and Facebook could have, together, easily defined new standards for distributing information in ways that would make it harder for the government to tap in. At least they could have avoided being responsible for it themselves.

Or they could have been supportive of standards that decentralize, like one that's dear to me -- RSS. Instead they undermined it. In Google's case, in a fairly horrific way. Did they ever say they'd never come back to RSS if we manage to reboot it after cleaning up their mess? A mess that they offered absolutely no help with.

Twitter had the biggest opportunity to create a free-flowing federated network of free users. They could have given us a new layer the way the web did in 1992. Instead, they sucked in all the energy created by developers and did the same thing the others did -- centralized. Goodbye freedom. Hello NSA.

They brought this on, they're the cause of the mess we're in now.

I have no sympathy for them. They could still get out of the hotseat. There would be nothing illegal about them telling the world that they made a huge mistake by centralizing everything, and now they're going to reverse the process. They don't have to say what the consequences of that mistake are, we all know, thanks to Glenn Greenwald.

What could the government do? They'd be alone.

Of course, no one in their right mind believes they would do it.

Because having the govt as a partner, as Citibank and Chase found out, is a great business plan. Too big to fail now clearly applies in tech too.

1. It's just hitting me now that in the new tech industry the person counts for nothing. It's the aggregate that matters. The human wave.

2. And that is the exact opposite of what interested me in tech. I got involved because of personal computers. The individual is everything.

I turned 58 last month, and that means we're getting within striking distance of 60. Actually I'm getting within striking distance of 60. It's a bit of a shock, actually. Inside I feel 19. Or maybe 30. But 58? 60. OMG. Ohhh.

But Monday night just before Game 7 of the Eastern Division Championship, I solved a problem that I had been thinking about for at least 20 years. It had to do with templating in content management systems. It came to me as we re-approached a problem I had approached several times before in earlier products. This time, I saw the way around the conundrum that had evaded me before. I don't think this is because I'm smarter than I was when I was 38 or 48, rather it's because I have the 20 years of experience that I didn't have then.

The next little bit is a story that is not about the people involved, Fred Wilson, John Doerr and Michael Jordan, it's illustrative. I have the greatest respect and admiration for all three of them, not just for their accomplishments in the past, but for what they are doing today. All three are very much alive. And all three are still taking chances, learning, and doing new things.

On Twitter, I saw Wilson refer to Doerr as The Michael Jordan of VC. Something bothered me about this. So I pondered it and realized the problem. How I got there was by changing some of the names, a couple of times and thinking in analogies.

1. I imagined Matt Mullenweg saying I was The Michael Jordan of Software. This wasn't hard, because Matt said something similar a few weeks ago. No doubt said with genuine admiration, it exposed something inside that's imho incorrect. He said that it's amazing that I keep writing software, many years after I no longer had to. I imagine when Matt looks at me, he hopes that he will have the drive to create when he's my age (he's about 30 years younger than me). But I'd rather if Matt ignored my age and my financial circumstances, and looked at the actual software I'm writing -- today -- not in the past. I would prefer if he said: I think Dave's new software is interesting, but I don't understand it. Or I think Dave's software is revolutionary and it will have impact on all software being developed today. Or something that reflected my status as an active player, maybe even an active superstar. But I think conventional thinking shuts off that train of thought.

• And btw, if you look to basketball as an example, the young guys always study the work of people who came before them. The young Knick Iman Schumpert is a great example and inspiration. In an interview I saw him explain in great detail the players who he was borrowing style from. In tech, we tend to throw all that away. We won't always do it, as the art matures we'll understand that we're borrowing from the past, and then become receptive to learning from prior art. But first we have to cure ourselves of the idea that people are obsolete so early. Even basketball, where the bodies can't compete after 40, manages to use the skill and experience of the veterans, as coaches, advisers, trainers.
• Also, I know that what Matt said was a compliment. But it also had meaning. It's possible for something to be both a compliment and worth examining.

2. I had an experience on Twitter with Joshua Benton, someone who I admire and think highly of, who I know hasn't used my new software. This came up in a discussion. I more or less asked him to check out my software before declaring blogging dead. It may not have sounded like that to him and it may have been said more awkwardly (140 char limit). His response was like Matt's. I was using your software in 1990 he said. Nice. So I'm The Michael Jordan of Software. But I'm not because I'm still pushing it. Inventing new ways to approach the rim. New ways to stun and amaze. But you'll never see it if you don't look.

• My dream is that Benton would do 1/4 the analysis he did of Evan Williams' new software. I think I've earned a good look, and some thought.

3. And that led me to the final analogy that nailed it. What if LeBron James said that Tim Duncan is The Michael Jordan of Basketball. Wishful thinking! The two men are about to face off in a classic series of the ages in the NBA finals. Game 1 is tonight. It's the old sin of sport and business. Don't celebrate until you win. That's a good way to inspire the competition and undermine your fighting spirit. We saw that happen with the Knicks this season, when JR Smith, thinking the Knicks had won, celebrated by elbowing an opponent. In the face! He was suspended for a game (that the Knicks lost), and more importantly threw his energy out the window. The Knicks were embarassed by the Indiana Pacers in a short series that they never really were in. And Smith was in a funk the rest of the short Knicks run. Every Knicks fan knows this story. ;-(

I learn a lot from sports, I really do. I think it's an incredible teacher of human spirit, in a very compact form. Things that may take years or even decades to play out in tech, often happen in just a few minutes in an NBA playoff game.

If I were Matt, I would watch that attitude. Because Old Dave might still have a trick or two. Software is not like basketball in that way. I have no stake in the competition between Doerr and Wilson (I assume they still see each other as competitiors). I will root for Doerr now, because I always like an underdog, the same way I rooted for Wilson when he was coming up. And tonight I will definitely be rooting for the Spurs and Tim Duncan, even though LeBron was smart enough not to make any grandiose claims about the obsolescence of his rival. ;-)

We're getting ready to do the blogging part of our software at Small Picture. We've done a review of the evolution of my own blog, Scripting News, over the years. It was good to go over it, because it became clear that as Google Reader came to dominate in feed reading, it forced my blog, and presumably many others, to conform to its limits. Features were removed from my blog because they confused Google Reader. And when we tried to reach out to them, the answer was that they didn't have enough people on their team to listen. When that I happened I knew we were in a bad place.

But now we're seeing a rebirth of blogging software, other people have noted it, not just me. And along with it, later in the process, perhaps we can have a rebirth of feed aggregators. But we can't do it if a single company dominates the reader market. Yet some reports indicate that's where we're going.

I have a plan, if that should happen, if on July 1 we substitute one dominant feed reader for another. My products will produce full-fidelity RSS, that gives us and our users the chance to be fully creative, as we were in the early days of blogging and feed-reading. We won't try to live within the limits of a dominant feed reader. If they can't read our feeds, sorry.

Users say "oh we're just users we can do what we want." That's nice, but not true. It's like saying I'm a car driver, I don't care about climate change, so I can burn as much fuel as I want. Yeah, I suppose it's true. There is no law that limits the amount of carbon you burn. But someday you or your kids will not be able to breathe. Same with RSS and blogging. If you want to keep using this stuff, you can't just repeat the same mistake. The new dominant player may be very nice, the people may have good hearts, and mean well, but they might be holding back innovation -- or worse, as Google was, taking out innovation and forcing a kind of dull no-growth uniformity.

About ten years go, seriously, I signed up at Servermatrix and created three or four servers. The first podcasting servers were there. Podmonster1 and 2 I think were their names. A lot of the old UserLand sites are still running there.

Servermatrix was something of a breakthrough in its day. Previously, to get hosting, I had to buy a box and colocate it at some place with good net connectivity, electricity, air conditioning, etc. What they did was make renting a server almost as easy as buying something on Amazon.

I still have one server running there, with all the stuff I'm too busy lazy to port.

Then a few years ago Servermatrix got bought by a company called Softlayer.

Their emails were a little different, but I just let them charge my credit card, and tried to forget about the server still running there. Mostly I was able to do that.

Then this morning I got an email saying Softlayer was bought by IBM.

Now I have a server at IBM.

Not a big deal, just worth observing.

The NBA added rules at the beginning of the 2012-2013 season that were intended to cut down on flopping.

• Flopping is when a player acts, convincingly, as if he's been fouled.
• It's a form of acting.
• When viewed on replay sometimes there's absolutely no contact, but it looks like there was.
• The flopping player goes down, clutching his head, rolling over repeatedly, to call attention to the "offense" by the refs.

Not sure how well it worked during the regular season, but it's not working in the playoffs. The stakes are so high, the players are willing to pay the fines if it means they can get a call to go their way. These games are often so close that a single possession can determine the outcome.

It's probably even become part of the strategy of the game, and it's easy to imagine the coaches and the players, talking about it privately of course, maybe even in coded language.

But if the coaches were penalized along with the players, it would likely curtail the flopping, maybe even stop it, esp if suspensions were added to the penalty, earlier in the process.

It would change the dynamics if the coach could get suspended. It would mean that if the coach thought the player was doing it, he wouldn't put him in the game. It would get the coach on the side of the league and the fans, in stopping the practice.

And the financial penalties would matter more to the coach, because they pay them for every player, and coaches don't make as much as the players do.

I just got a note from Ulf Gjerdingen saying that Workflowy now supports OPML.

I had to check it out.

So I went to my outline in Workflowy. Chose Export. And sure enough, there's a new radio button where you can choose OPML.

Of course I wanted to see if Fargo could read it. So here's what I did.

• 1. Opened TextEdit.
• 2. Chose File/New.
• 3. Paste.
• 4. Format as Text.
• 5. Save into my Dropbox/Apps/Fargo folder.
• 6. Switch into Fargo.
• 7. Open the file.
• 8. It worked!

A happy day is when there's more interop. :-)

Thanks Workflowy! :-)

We love that we don't have to run servers for most of what Fargo does, but that means we rely on Dropbox's and Amazon's servers.

And Dropbox appears to be down now, and that means no Fargo.

I feel the same sense of abandonment and confusion that other Fargo users feel.

Nothing to be done about it until Dropbox comes back.

Update at 11:30AM Eastern -- Dropbox is back up. :-)

Dave

I just got back from a ride on a CitiBike, one of NYC's new bikeshare deals.

Executive summary: It works. I felt like I was there on the first day the subway opened in NYC.

However it was not without glitches.

I am a founding member, having paid the $95 annual fee on the first day they were available. I am user number 1411. In theory as long as each trip is 45 minutes or less, I don't have to pay any more money to use bikes. As much as I want.

But how does it work? I looked all over the website. They had instructions for people who were buying day passes or week passes, but no instructions for people who have annual memberships. I figured I'd find out when I got to the bike station.

I went to the kiosk. No instructions for members. They did however suggest you get a membership if you're going to use it a lot. Okay I got one, so what do I do? No clue.

I wasn't going to go home without trying it so I put my credit card in and started the process of buying a daily pass. There are some real usability problems with this system. First, it's very slow. Second, the display is at about belt level for me. Granted I'm tall, but not that tall. Some of the instructions refer to buttons that aren't there. You might guess wrong, as I did. Some user testing could have avoided this.

It was so slow at responding to keystrokes, about midway through the process (I guess) after asking for my phone number and zip code, it just gave up and took me back to the main menu. By then a small crowd had gathered around to find out how it worked. A guy who had done it before showed me that I didn't need to do any of this. There's an unmarked slot where you can insert your keychain card. I did. It took a while for the light to turn from red to green. When it did, I was able to take the bike out of the rack, I adjusted the seat and off I went, south on Broadway toward Times Square.

The bike looks like a klunker, but it rides pretty smooth!

It has three gears, probably not enough, but pretty close to enough.

It's comfortable, more comfortable than my regular ride.

There are flashing red lights on the rear of the bike. (I know this because I saw them on another CitiBike.)

There's no bell. That makes it an illegal bike in NYC, as I understand it. There were many times on my little excursion that I wish I had a bell. Pedestrians in NYC think bike lanes are useful for picnics, baby carriages (with babies in them), hand-holding at arms length. Waiting for red lights. You name it. The cars like to honk when they think you're in their way. It'd be nice to have something to fight back with, even though a bell sounds a little wimpy, it's less likely to get you killed than the typical NYers salute of Fuck You Asshole. :-)

• Update: Apparently it has a bell, I just didn't spot it.

As soon as I entered Times Square proper, I took a right and headed over to Ninth Ave and rode all the way downtown to Bleecker St, where I made a left on 4th St, and dropped the bike off at the stand on 7th Ave. I got a couple of hot dogs at the Papaya Dog on 8th St, and rode the 1 train back uptown.

It was on the subway that I realized that I had just used a new form of city transport, one that's perfectly suited for NY. I encountered a few other riders on my way. There's a Zero Day kind of feel to it. People seem excited. The bikes are nice. And there are enough bike lanes to get around.

Bloomberg is a total 1 percenter, and a real dick about some things, but he got this one right. He will be remembered as a visionary mayor. I believe this is a keeper. Bikes and NY go together.

Users like changes in products that are responsive to their needs and wants.

Bugs fixed. Performance improved. A key missing feature added.

Users like a dialog with the product creators that show there's an understanding. That seems to work best if the people who decide about the product are also users of the product.

• Star Trek fans were horrified to find out that JJ Abrams was not a Star Trek fan.
• Couldn't they find a show runner who liked Star Trek-style science fiction?

That's why we watch serial shows like Mad Men. We like to see the characters we've come to know in new situations. We nod our heads, that's right, that's what Don Draper would do. If all of a sudden Don Draper started acting like Instagram, we'd wonder if we had the wrong channel.

I've been using Flickr since almost the beginning. When I started, a generous Scripting News reader gifted me with a Pro account, and I've been paying the $25 every year. Sometimes I ask myself if I reallly want to do it, but in the end I always pay the money.

All the while, Flickr hardly changed at all. I wasn't sure if this was a good thing. It meant that the management at Yahoo wasn't paying attention, I figured. At least if they aren't paying attention there's little chance they'd screw with it. For many years they stayed away. But last week all that changed. All of it.

The change in Flickr was radical. And the performance of the site, which recently has been pretty bad, got worse. I assume this is because the servers have to do a lot more work to figure out how to lay out the photos so they show up in a neat array, as if we were reading a magazine instead of browsing a website.

Other people have analyzed the deal changes, I honestly don't care much if it's $25 or $50, and I don't come close to using a terabyte. Mostly what I value from Flickr is the longevity of it. It seemed like a safe place to leave my pictures. My father's pictures are there too. He died in 2009. Up till now I wasn't too worried.

Couldn't Flickr have given us the option of not using the new features? What if we don't want them? Why force this on us.

What if I don't like the idea of ads on my pictures, the ones I pay them to store for me, btw. I can pay to get rid of the ads for myself, but as I understand it (and my understanding might be wrong) the ads will still show up for people who view my pictures.

I want my pictures to be the star on Flickr, not Flickr. I don't care if they're hip -- or if they appeal to people who like Instagram or Facebook or whatever. I kind of doubt whether the superficial changes they make will attract many new users. Their competition have been out there for quite some time. I don't think Flickr did anyting more than match them. And the changes are so superficial. It looks like a mask that says Instagram while lurking in the back is something old and ugly, as if they're embarassed about what Flickr was. The site I thought was good enough to pay $25 a year to use. Flickr which looked just fine without the mask, now looks like a New Yorker cartoon. A parody of something that was pretty good as it was, and is horribly tragically pathetic trying to be something it's not and probably never will be.

I don't know what the answer is. Yahoo had a lot of money and offered some to the founders of Flickr. I don't blame them one bit for taking it. And how could the management at Yahoo understand what they bought if they weren't themselves users?

There's a lot of irony in the fact that all this embarassing change was implemented on the same day they were promisng that they would never do to Tumblr what they were proudly and openly doing to Flickr. Didn't anyone at Yahoo speak up and say that maybe people might notice the disconnect?

I didn't want to post Fargo to Hacker News because it would seem too much like an ad, but this evening someone else did, and it's generating a lot of new users, and people seem genuinely excited about it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5772623

It's worth having a look at, and if you think it's interesting, please upvote! :-)

Thanks!