If you find yourself competing with the Internet, find a way out. | Hacker News Reader

If you find yourself competing with the Internet, find a way out.

scripting.com

77 pointsolefoo23 comments

If Dave Winer's writing ability was half the size of his ego, he'd be the next Shakespeare. I still get a kick out of the sheer arrogance of putting permalinks on every paragraph.

This is a typical piece of his. Not very well thought out, kind of rambles for a few paragraphs, ans basically says that so-and-so is lame because they're not internetty enough. (Now, if Twitter could do something really awesome like inventing RSS, then maybe they'd be worth talking about.)

" I still get a kick out of the sheer arrogance of putting permalinks on every paragraph."

Arrogance? It's a great idea. Makes it simple to link to a particular part of an article of interest, and probably simple enough to build into a publishing tool so you don't have to think about it.

Paragraph based permalinks go the whole way back to Engelbart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Numbers

To his credit, though, unlike many other Web celebs Winer at least has some code to back his ego. Twitter has ways to before its impact is comparable to RSS.

It's worth noting that the TechCrunch article goes so far as to call out RSS (again), as seen through the eyes of Twitter.

"Don't just connect RSS feed," the notes read. "What if all feeds went through twitter: would be expensive."

But Winer's also probably alluding to the "we're creating a new Internet" vibe that's so palpable in Twitter's notes.

The Twitter meeting notes: http://cache0.techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/tw-s...

Sure, but Dave Winer didn't invent RSS, and the code he wrote (Userland Frontier) was never very widely used, and is now used by almost nobody. It was visionary — it kind of defined what we now call the CMS — but it wasn't well executed.

I read this twice - and I'm still not sure what he's trying to say.

I think he's predicting that the current resurgence of proprietary communications channels (Twitter, Facebook, et al) will inevitably be replaced by public protocols (Wave perhaps?). I hope he's right.

For the tone of the original Techcruch's article about Twitter, he must be referring to the 'world domination' flavor that those published documents have. Although in my opinion they are more brainstorm like. Lists of possibilities, ideas, etc.

He also names Schmidt & Zuckerberg as heavy players that are trying to 'fight' internet.

Google, with its resources and the data they have about all of us, certainly has the best position today to try to control/conquer the internet (as MS was in 1995). Dave is sure they'll fail (I hope he is right)

My thought exactly. I came back here to check the comments in case someone explained it more clearly...

He's trying to say that Microsoft refused to embrace the internet because it was something that they had no control over (instead, Microsoft planned to launch their own closed online service in 1995 called Marvel), and as a result they fell far behind in the internet space.

He goes on to make a comparison to Twitter, and how they are concerned that if they make the service too open, then developers might create something that competes with the service or renders it obsolete. And he's saying that reluctance to embrace the openness of the internet will result in failure in the same manner that it did for Microsoft.

(not that I agree with this piece; this is just my interpretation)

Thanks. Maybe it was building up on other posts that I haven't read...

This isn't exactly what he was going for, but I'd reduce his point to "No player on the internet is more powerful than the internet itself, and therefore no player is immune to upset."

I think it's a walled garden argument. Twitter wants to control the firehose, which is like the wall?

I think he is saying we can no longer make money out of customer's ignorance.

He's noting the arrogance of Microsoft in thinking it can out-maneuver and out-think the Internet, and to a certain extent FOSS. He then compares how Twitter's concerns of wanting to both introduce a new message platform but still be able to control/profit from it to Microsoft's fate, which is losing out to this all encompassing and continuously innovative Internet platform.

So he thinks that no one can really has control over anything once the Pandora's box has been opened.

Or, actually, he's saying that no one can beat nature. Because, you know, it just goes on and on.

I'd be interested to hear his proposed solutions. If controlling a platform on the internet is impossible, what is twitter to do?

Is their only chance at longevity to publish a protocol spec and allow twitter to become a decentralized messaging system like email, for which anyone can write and run their own server?

That might actually be the case. Internet services rarely last long, but protocols often do (relatively speaking), for better or for worse.

He's been calling for a decentralized Twitter-like service since about late last year, and seems to have recently begun work on his own out of frustration.

I like this observation:

[The Internet] doesn't employ any engineers, and when they leave one company to work for another they still work for the Internet.

This perspective also makes work histories much more straightforward. For example, mine becomes:

  WORK HISTORY

  2003-2009 Internet, San Francisco, CA
  2000-2003 Internet, San Francisco, CA
  1999-2000 Internet, Austin, TX/Sunnyvale, CA
  1996-1999 Internet, Austin, TX
  1995-1996 Internet, Austin, TX
  1993-1995 Internet, Sunnyvale, CA

I may have to get business cards made up.

It seems to me though that the best Companies (and Eras) focus the Internet through a vector set. Were you working on Infrastructure or Retail in 1997? Search or Marketing in 2001? Cloud or Advertising in 2008?

We may work for the Internet. But it only becomes what we choose to work on.

Perhaps you can give away fiber optic cable with your name printed on it.

I'm not completely sure that Evan Williams is trying to exert control in the same way Microsoft has. Much of the great stuff that happens online is due to a "benevolent dictator" approach. Someone (or a team) needs to shepherd the "big new idea" through many phases, in an environment where a lot of people are trying to muck it up (trolls, spammers, you name it).

Giving anyone the firehose could cause all sorts of problems in the short-term. It seems reasonable for Twitter execs to think carefully about the right way to do that.

The firehose is pretty revolutionary really. Being able to get every public feed in one feed is pretty easy compared to having to index the whole web like Google do with blogs and news.

I can see one of the reasons they shut it down is that bandwidth cost is going to be very high. I expect if they could charge for it they could open it up - but I expect many of the companies who would like it don't have business models or can't afford it.

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