demachina

As an aside there is one tactic Scoble uses to deal with critics on Twitter and elsewhere. He actually retweets posts from people who are criticizing, filleting him and trolling him. It shows he has a thick skin.

Trolls WANT you to get angry. Since you do get angry nearly 100% of the time, it makes you ideal troll fodder. If you retweet criticism like Scoble does, and laugh it off, it completely neutralizes a lot of trolls.

Exactly, unless people start off being nice, complimenting you, agreeing with you and telling you how great you are you shut them off, instantly. For as long as I've read your blog and twitter feed you simply will not have a conversation with anyone if they start out by disagreeing with you.

Your feed swings between wonderfully interesting and insightful and arrogant and galling. On a daily basis I debate whether your insights are worth having to wade through all the angst. So far I keep finding in favor of your wisdom and insight but its always close.

If you toned down the arrogant and galling parts you would be a much greater leader in the tech community, more people would listen to you, and you would probably be advancing your goal of an open web far faster than you are which would be a win win for everone. You seem to want to be a leader, but you don't want to adapt to the limitations that come with being a great leader, one that people want and like to follow.

You didn't say "anonymity correlates with cowardice". You said anonymity correlates with untruth. Those are too completely different things. Anonymity does correlate with "cowardice" thats why /. has called them anonymous cowards since the dawn of web time.

There can be a LOT of truth said under the cloak of anonymity. Do you think Bradley Manning was a "coward" and a liar for using Wikileaks to give him a shroud of anonymity when he was speaking truth to power in his way?

When dealing with a personality like yourself anyone who who criticizes you under their real name knows they are going to regret it. You are the one compelling people to speak to you anonymously because you don't accept criticism, you instantly block people rather than engage in dialog and you broadcast your grudges on your blog like you did with Marissa Mayer.

You have the luxury of being self employed, so am I. You can say whatever you want under your real name, as long as you are OK with the reputational damage yourself. People who work for other people can't if its going to explode in to a reputation damaging, and employment endangering, flame fest which is what happens to a lot of people who engage with you. Some people operate under different constraints in this world than you and you don't seem to recognize that.

Not sure why I'm still trying to engage in a dialog here. Chances are you stopped listing right after your last post. That is most definitely your style.

His anonymity and the truth of his statement have absolutely no correlation, not sure why you even think there would be a correlation.

You have a tendency of making people regret they ever get in to it with you so its not suprising a lot of people would prefer anonymity when getting sucked in to these little flame fests, lest they star in your next blog post.

Marissa Mayer for example made the mistake of meeting with you and you apparently made her angry or frustrated enough she walked out. Your response, years later, is to write a one sided account of it on your blog to try to make her look bad. It was one sided because you neglected to really describe what you said or how you said it, or accept that you might have been at least partially at fault for making her want to leave.

She may have done some calculus and deduced it was a no win for her. She stays in the meeting, listens to you, keeps her mouth shut and just gets angry. Or she gets in an argument with you which would have been even worse. By walking out she probably took the option with the fewest bad consequences. The way I see it you pretty much have two noble roads you can take in life:

- You can be abrasive, stick to your guns, and deal with the fact a lot of people aren't going to like you for it. You take this road you need to grow a skin thick enough to deal with it instead of whining and demanding everyone who is mean to you back be blocked. You might not be popular but there is honor in this tack.

- You can try to be nicer to people, especially people you dont agree with, and then its OK to expect people to be nicer to you in return. Its really easy to be nice to sycophants who agree with you all the time. That's what you do on your blog and Twitter all the time. It takes character to be nice to people who disagree with you and are willing to stick to their guns.

Or you can take the ignoble road you seem to take time after time. You go out of your way to abrasive, insulting and dismissive and slag people who disagree with you. Then when people slag you back, or walk out of the room rather than get in to it with you, or don't invite you to SXSW to speak, you whine about the fact people aren't being nice to you and expect everyone whose not being nice to you to be muzzled and ostracized.

Just some constructive criticism, please think about it. You have a lot of wisdom and technical brilliance. You would go much farther if you weren't hacking everyone off all the time. Its OK to hack people off once in a while when they really deserve it, but you do it all the time often for no reason.

Pretty sure Dave blocks most people who disagree with him for the space of more than one tweet. People he already holds in high esteem before they disagreed with him might last slightly longer.

On the other hand Dave has a notoriously thin skin. He is very good at criticizing everyone else but he absolutely doesn't take criticism himself. Only time you are going to strike up a conversation with him is if you agree with him on everything. He generally expects everyone to bow to him as the inventor of blogging and RSS and podcasting and whatever, and that means you are supposed to listen to his opinions on everything, agree with him, and see his wisdom and if you dont, YOUR BLOCKED, cut off, dismissed and ignored.

Who knows how that meeting with Marissa Mayer actually went down but there are plenty of people who have been lectured, scolded and demeaned by Dave who have probably wanted to walk out on him so its entirely beleivable that she did and he probably provoked at least some of it.

You would think Dave would, after all these years, realize that if you post stuff on the Internets people are going to flame you for it because A. They disagree B. They troll for fun C. Dave has ticked off so many people over the years they flame him because they are perma-tired of his holier than thou attitude.

No people shouldn't be rude, ever, but they are. Dave is rude all of the time too. Yea you can just like, you know, block the entire Internet and that will stop it, but at what price. I think Dave is mostly pushing for the latter, or at least he wants anyone who doesn't agree with Dave on everything to be blocked permenently from everything.

Dave, if you want, to block everyone on the Internet who disagrees with you, fine, go for it, write your own tools to do it, but don't expect everyone else to do it for you.

I'd have to agree, training on the Twitter API is just a bad idea. Its just weird to see a company do everything imaginable to drive people off their API to turn around and want to train people on it.

Most companies turn kind of hostile with their API when money is at stake but Twitter has been particularly bad, especially considering a lot of the innovation on their platform happened on third party clients. They haven't mustered any kind of innovation of their own either.

The Chinese weibo's like Sina are actually quite a bit more interesting if you can deal with the language and the governmental interference.

If you want a ground floor learning experience app.net is probably a better choice though I doubt its ever going to gain critical mass.

What category of smartphone apps and web apps isn't a crowded category at this point?

I pity startups doing pitches in this space any more. There are simply too many of them doing the same things so it must be murder to speak to what you are doing and claim your are, in fact, "different". Most of the obvious and doable apps have been flogged past the dead horse stage at this point. Silicon valley kind of needs a new rule, until you come up with an innovative and original idea maybe you shouldn't do a startup.

Doing a hundred permutations on the same ideas and hoping that either superior execution, a competitor buyout to get rid of you or a lucky streak of virility leads you to the promised land doesn't seem like the greatest strategy any more.

I guess its still OK for the VC's like Y Combinator, as long as they have the patience to sift through them all, because the more pitches there are the more chances there are to find the ones that are unique, interesting or promise exceptional execution.

The problem with web and smart phone apps is the barrier to entry is too low so everyone is doing them.

Focusing on your blog post more than your pitch, do you think it really adds value to your message to use gratuitous language like "shit the bed" and "f*cking". Dave McClure and Brad Feld have made it in to an art form but they've already made it. It doesn't add any value to your message but does distract from it. Your blog post suggests you haven't learned to carefully focus the words you use in your message for maximum positive impact.

Wadhwa keeps putting out immigration studies, like this one, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1348616 "Americas Loss is the World's Gain: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs" on why immigrant entrepreneurs and skilled tech workers are leaving the U.S. to return home, decrying the brain drain, and that it is devestating the U.S. economy.

The studies consistently show visa issues are almost never the primary reason they are returning to their home countries. Many are going back to India and China because their economies are or at least were booming offering more opportunities, they are more comfortable in their homeland, nearer family and friends, less culture shock, etc.

He will then immediately whipsaw around and insist its urgent the U.S. pass Startup Visa and increase H1-B quotas to somehow solve the pressing visa problem… which isn't actually the problem per his own studies.

So if the guy is willing to ignore the results from his own study because its inconvenient to the agenda he is pushing, this latest episode surprises me not at all. Once he latches on to something he seems to stick to it, regardless of what the data says. His long running primary agenda seems to be he wants the U.S. to throw the doors open to all Indian engineers and entrepeneurs who want to come. This also happens to be a popular agenda with a lot of big tech companies and VC's which contributes to his popularity among certain circles.

HTML is machine readable it just has problems with the machine understanding it part. I think you are asking more for a semantic web which hasn't been particularly successful so far. People mostly struggle to just put together a web page that people can understand. Getting them to build diverse information to standards machines can reliably understand is hard. XML has mostly proved this.

I'm not necessarily opposed to their being attachments sitting on Twitter's servers that I can access if I'm interested. I just totally dont want them bombing me with it and sending with the message by default. Their messages are already too bloated. And as I said the fatter the data is the more problems you are going to have with copyright, legality, offensiveness and security risks both for the service and end users.

Are you asking how could they have made money or what cool things would they have done? I dont care about the making money part, the cool things they could have done being the Internet's message bus:

- Really good search, and access to the entire message archive, instead of hiding their archives in order to monetize it - Better lists/circles with more granular control over private/public messaging and groups - Better conversation ability, for example ability to make a list of users you want to have discussion with and have an easy way for everyone to follow the threads, ability to make it read only to the general public, so everyone can read but spammers can't ruin it, or take it private to everyone on the list. - Video/audio chat/hangouts might be on some people's list, I'm not sure it belongs in the core message service - Creative ways to make the message service the definitive breaking news medium. It already is but you kind of need ways to rein in the bogus news - Curation & moderation, methods to elevate interesting messages, though this moderation should be an option and easily disabled to avoid groupthink - Karma, though again it should be optional - Better support for real-time streams for topical hash tags like conferences, spam killing being the main issue. Clients can do a lot of this but spam killing benefits from support from the message service. - Openly embracing and facilitating academic research on their firehose, archives and social networks

This list could go on all night, buts just a few of my favorites.

How do you explain Wikipedia then?

Trends on Twitter just aren't important enough for everyone to constantly cite as to why Twitter sucks or why our species is doomed. Its just a source of brief entertainment to see what large numbers of people you probably don't have much in common with are obsessing over at the moment.

Effective Twitter usage is to follow large numbers of interesting people and news sources and then look at the trending topics among the people you care about, you have things in common with and whose opinions you value. Unfortunately Twitter doesn't do trends for just your stream which is one of the many reasons third party clients can rock and Twitter, the company, tends to not rock.

I'm of the school that one of the worst things Twitter could do is add support for data/attachments, long messages or message bloat in general. The essence of Twitter and its beauty is the messages are short, low overhead and you can skim them very quickly. It compels people to be brief and to not ramble and that is its value and its a good fit for capacity limited mobile. Animated GIF's in Google+ are mostly just annoying.

If you need heavy data then you put a link in the mesage and once people establish they are interested in the subject, then they can go to some server to get the heavy content and all the heavy content isn't centralized at the message service provider.

Also storing and transmitting pictures, video and audio on the message bus dramatically increases overhead, cost and risks of running the service. The second you support it you will have people using it to violate copyrights and laws, you land in a quagmire of shifting standard on what is indecent or illegal in every country in the world. You end up needing a big staff just to deal with take down requests, subpoena requests and to sift though your fire hose to try to eliminate stuff that is going to offend people.

The beauty of short messages is they have very limited capacity to violate laws and copyrights and the message service provider shouldn't be responsile for what is on the web sites the messages link to.

Having integrated image, audio and video support is nice but its actually better if its hosted away from the message bus and decentralized like Twitpic was.

Telehash is radically decentralized. How do you get a firehose out of that? It would be more like a point to point garden hose wouldnt it? I would like to be proved wrong, but I think Twitter/centralized and Telehash/decentralized will end up looking and acting like two very different services.

If the Twitter as an API group had won out the two best outcomes I can think of are either a buy out from Google, or a move to a foundation like Wikipedia. Google could afford to carry it, like it does Youtube, just so they could own a huge firehose of information and use it elsewhere in search ads, without trashing the stream with ads.

Needless to say founders looking to get rich wouldn't go for the low returns of the foundation model but it would have been the best possible outcome for the well being of the future Internet having and open, censorship resistant message bus and API, assuming you could get enough donors to support it.

If someone is following thousands of people in their stream, and they are scattered across a hundred servers, how do you go about assembling their stream for them in real-time. Is the host server going to have to send user id's for everyone every user based on that server is following, to every server where the people being followed are based, and have every one of those server send all the messages of interest so the host server can build streams for all its users?

Twitter didn't stop sucking reliability wise until they switched to a single persistent user stream connection and abandoned REST most of the time. You really want to have that one persistent connection for a user's stream.

Not sure about Facebook since I never use it but Twitter's search feature is crippled because Twitter wants it that way. I think they are planning to monetize access to full history, though I dont remember exactly what was being said on this a week or two ago. When it comes to your posts and your stream I think you should be able to search it any way you want and cache it any where you want.

I cite Wikipedia only for the foundation model, funded by contributions, to free us from corporate control, being bombed with ads, and having our personal information harvested for profit.

With a message bus foundation you wouldn't have most of the politics associated with group editing of articles which is where Wikipedia has its worst problems. The only places there would be a risk of politics at the Message Bus Foundation is in terms of use, abuse mitigation, spam filtering, censorship issues and interacting with intrusive government requests. When it comes to privacy and freedom of speech it should be designed to be as private and free as possible.

I think you either missed or are glossing over Michael Sippey's blog post today where he said "in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used". People aren't upset about the old "stricter guidelines" you are quoting, they are upset about the new ones.

It was poor judgement and poor PR to lob that out there before they were ready to actually spell out what these new "stricter guidelines" are. It creates fear, uncertainty and doubt among Twitter API developers and they are getting sick of fear, uncertainty and doubt, its been going on for a long time now.

Twitter's message bus, API and identity system have become valuable Internet resources. But Twitter has never been particularly great at thinking of innovative uses for it or developing great clients. There are a lot of really interesting and different ways to use those, regrettably they are trying to kill most of them and inflict a homogonized, boring, monoculture on their user base they can monotize, which will make the experience progressively worse.

At this point I imagine most API developers are wishing there was a new message bus they could move to but its a daunting challenge to field one, even more daunting to get a critical mass of messages moved over to it to make it interesting, and really daunting to fund it without resorting to all the lameness Twitter is now knee deep in.

I really can't see decentralized social networks being successful. If all hosts are going to be synced the traffic would be huge. If they aren't synced search for both messages and users would be painful. Patching together a stream when the people you follow are scattered across a hundred different servers painful. Account creation for average tech illiterate users painful. If they have to rely on some third party to provide a host, how is that any better than relying on Twitter or Facebook, as soon as the hoster decides it isn't worth the expense or to boot you for some random reason what happens?

Wouldn't it be better to build a centralized message bus and identity system under some kind of foundation like Wikipedia. You would have to get benefactors to fund it is the big problem. Twitter has proved itself to be a priceless service for communication and news streams, its like the real-time Wikipedia.

Its just major regrettable the people who are running it are completely trashing it in the predictable pursuit of the beloved buck and a fat IPO.

I'd love nothing more than foundation based centralized message bus and identity service offering API services to any and all responsible developers and apps, short text only messages and links to avoid all the issues with attachments little or no censorship, private communications between users encrypted so even the foundation can't read them or offer them up to prying governments, some mechanism to control and kill spam.

Yea, they want developers to develop content for them, and they want developers to develop traffic for them. They absolutely dont want developers to develop interesting clients and apps using for their message bus. Their guidelines on displaying tweets are getting so restrictive its pointless to develop anything resembling a client. Twitter has also proved to be spectacularly bad at building clients themselves. I haven't been able to stand any of the many iterations of their web site and their best client efforts were just bought from the 3rd party developer community and then mangled.

Twitter should seriously consider just shutting down their API to third party developers and restrict it entirely to their clients and widgets.

It would be a lot more intellectually honest thing to do versus just slowly and continuously stangling their developer community in their quest for revenue. If they just shut off the API then everyone would get the kick in the pants they need to move on to something new.

The Internet community desperately needs to figure out a way to build an open message bus + identity system + open API + server farm + spam killers using a foundation along the lines of Wikipedia.

Letting one for profit company control the Internet's message bus has proven to be a truly horrible idea. Going back to RSS and a totally decentralized system not good either.

"I still don't really grok what it's for or why I should use it, and that's why"

Uh, its for pretty much the same thing Facebook is for, except you can do lists and make them public or private, you seriously didn't get that?

Or did you just not use it because the people in your network weren't using it. If your friends are already on Facebook there is almost no reason for you to migrate to a new social network where your friends, or chosen thought leaders, aren't active. Maybe you will tack it on as a 3rd, 4th or 5th social network where it will mostly just consume more of your time.

As I said, yes network do rise and fall but it is enormously difficult to get that ball rolling and keep it rolling. FriendFeed was an awesome social network, with all star founders, but it never gained that critical mass, the founders gave up believing they could displace Facebook so they sold it down the river... to Facebook.

Network effects are still horrible barriers to overcome on social networks or phone platforms. Once a company has large numbers of active users they tend to win, and once they start winning they have little incentive to care about the well being of individual third party developers. Once they have the eyeballs the third party developers want access to, they can treat most of them like dirt, and they can still count on more lining up to use their API.

If a company like Google struggles to launch a new social network with their existing huge user base, you know its hard. Yes social networks and platforms do die, like MySpace and RIMM, and new ones burst in to prominence like Pinterest or Android, but for every new network or platform that succeeds, hundreds or more probably thousands fail.

Small third party developers have strong incentives to put up with the risks involved in using API's provided by dangerous companies like Twitter, Facebook and Apple because they have to if they want to get access to all the users those companies own.

I was kind of hoping Dorsey coming back to Twitter would have put an end to or at least subdued their hostility to their developer community, but it doesn't appear to be the case. Their new proprietary attachments are even more concerning than this.

Costolo and Ev are dickish enough you expect crap from them, but Dorsey used to have some hacker cool. I wonder if either Dorsey doesn't have enough power to swing Twitter back to being open and cool again, or if he's drunk the rich and famous Koolaid to the point he just wants to cash out in a big IPO and doesn't care about the things he used to care about.

Regrettably companies trying to squeeze enough revenue out of "free" Internet services to have a successful IPO are pretty much compelled to be complete dicks, so its probably gonna happen.

It just kind of sucks that Twitter is the absolute coolest news stream there is, there aren't any good replacements and you KNOW they are going to totally wreck it by the time they IPO or within a year of going public and we are going to all have to start over on some new "never heard of" clone. Then repeat cycle endlessly every few years. Dave Winer will keep shouting to use RSS but RSS completely sucks by comparison.

As an aside a few days ago I read New Yorker and some other mags were getting weary of letting Flipbook scrape their content and were going to just put a lead in and link users to their main web site through flipbook instead. I'm thinking, wow that's what Twitter was already doing. I totally never understood what Flipbook offered to justify the hype. A good Twitter stream in a good client is infinitely better.

You are incorrect. Casino gambling is entirely state regulated, there is no Federal law controlling it. More and more of them are allowing it because its an easy way to boost their tax revenues without raising income and property taxes.

The Mississippi gulf coast has had casino gambling since the 1990's when it was authorized by the state, http://www.worldcasinodirectory.com/mississippi.

Colorado voters legalized casino gambling in BlackHawk in the 1990's as well, http://www.blackhawkcolorado.com.

Detroit legalized gambling in the 1990's, and a number of state legalized it on riverboats on the Mississipi in the 90's as well.

The Federal laws on the subjects mostly apply to interstate gambling enterprises which is where they do have jurisdiction, in particular sports betting and the 2006 law which outlawed online gambling primarily by preventing banks from transferring funds to and from online gambling sites.

Uh, gambling is legal all over the U.S. now. There are casino's and off track betting all over the place, keno in bars, lotto tickets and scratchers in every convenience store and supermarket. Do you actually live in the U.S.?

The issue with online gambling is that in its previous form, when it was finally and fully outlawed in 2006, the Federal and state governments weren't getting their cut of the take and many people weren't reporting winnings to the IRS.

Its not especially a moral or religious issue now, its more a taxation and revenue issue. The House Financial Services Committee approved a bill to legalize online poker and some other forms of online gambling in 2009, it just hasn't made it all the way through Congress yet. I imagine there will be some Republicans opposed to it on religious grounds but once Congress figures out how to tax and regulate it and how much revenue they can rake in off it, it will be back.