chanson

Twitter is a way to post a short message to a wide group of subscribers, and to receive messages posted by a wide group of subscribers.

That's instant messaging. There's already a standard protocol for it: Jabber (XMPP).

Why not just use it? Why invent a new protocol?!

Actually, Twitter already does have experimental XMPP access to the full timeline — rather than to individual timelines, or to your friends' timelines — and you can use it to build things like TweetMaps and TweetClouds and Quotably and…

But Twitter should really be built entirely around XMPP. It shouldn't be a web app at all, though it could certainly have a web front-end. In case you doubt me, here's an example Twitter-like service implemented by Process One atop the ejabberd XMPP application server.

I'm not sure when it happened, but OpenCroquet.org is now a fancy MediaWiki for the Croquet Consortium.

In case you haven't seen it, Croquet is a bit like Second Life, but instead of being a client that connects to a server, it's a node that can talk to other nodes and that provides an immersive 3D environment for building Interesting Stuff. The difference is that, unlike Second Life, it's tools for building Interesting Stuff aren't stone knives and bearskins primitive. Why? Because it's built on top of Squeak Smalltalk!

Don't worry, though — it's plenty fast, too, though certainly rougher around the edges at the moment than Second Life. The Croquet environment leverages native platform technologies for things like 3D and audio, and Squeak Smalltalk is also getting some extensive performance work done lately — check out the Exupery dynamic optimizing compiler for an example of the kind of work Croquet will be able to leverage.

Really, Croquet seems likely to be the first step in bringing about some of the good parts of Snow Crash like the distributed, immersive Metaverse. After all, we're already well along in bringing about the bad parts of Snow Crash — see the classic essay Grim Meathook Future by Joshua Ellis for some details.

Reading through the current Croquet FAQ, one thing Croquet definitely needs soon is NAT traversal. Otherwise, how are people going to be able to collaborate on improving Croquet from their home wireless networks? I bet someone who knows their way around the common traversal protocols could put together some classes for handling it fairly easily...

asperityq got me reading The Comics Curmudgeon last weekend, which in turn started me reading For Better Or For Worse again.

Especially after reading all of the FBOFW material on The Comics Curmudgeon last weekend, I'm really enjoying it. I haven't read it since I went off to college in 1994, though I was a regular reader (though not a devoted fan) before then.

Now, though, I'm reading it with a more critical eye. Of course asperityq and TCC have a bit to do with that, but there's also the fact that I read a lot of online comics these days. And, uh, wow. Most of the comics in the newspaper suck. Hard. I hadn't really thought in much depth about just how badly they sucked, but wow. Compared to even the more obscure stuff I've been reading — like, say, Girls with Slingshots, Applegeeks, Wapsi Square, Flipside, or Falcon Twin — many of the "newspaper comics" discussed on TCC are just awful. Story, art, pacing, planning — it's just bad. The Internet most definitely is the future of the medium.

For Better Or For Worse holds up pretty well. It's made it into my daily reading, along with a host of other comics. But if it weren't available online, I wouldn't seek it out in print. Some of the other comics I read, though — like Something Positive and MegaTokyo — I would in a heartbeat.

I may be covering Scott McCloud's territory with this, but does anyone else feel that online comics represent a sort of media sea change?

There are thousands of online comics out there. They're all over, covering every topic and genre imaginable. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are great. Some will spark a little and fizzle out quickly. Others will last a long, long time. Some will be amateur efforts. Some will be as close to professional as any comics are. Some will support their creators well. Some will be labors of love.

But to a first-order approximation, virtually none of them would have been able to get in front of an audience of any significance in all of their deeply-flawed, deeply-human glory prior to 1994.

Online comics I read regularly:

• Something Positive
• MegaTokyo
• Girl Genius
• AppleGeeks
• Penny Arcade
• Goats
• Mac Hall
• Penny and Aggie
• Chugworth Academy
• Questionable Content
• Queen of Wands

One of things that the medium is just starting to enable is search. It's not integrated well with the rest of the Internet yet — after all, Google doesn't yet index text within images — but a new service, OhNoRobot is providing searches of comic transcriptions. Not only that, but it's enabling both the authors and the community of readers to participate in a meaningful fashion, by enabling properly-targeted advertising and by providing transcription services.

In other words, online comics are a grand experiment in win-win media.

BEEP, the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol, is an IETF standards-track protocol intended to serve as a framework for application protocol developers. It's pretty cool, it implements message multiplexing between "channel" endpoints over a single connection. You can layer it over TCP or other lower-level protcols, and you can add features (like message routing and forwarding) orthogonally from the actual application protocols. You can even run multiple application protocols on different channels over the same connection.

Xgrid is a simple clustering framework for Mac OS X developed by the Advanced Computation Group at Apple. It's based on the old Zilla application developed at NeXT, enhanced with support for Rendezvous (ZeroConf) discovery of local nodes.

One of the coolest things about Xgrid, from my perspective as an application developer, is that it's built on BEEP. If you download Xgrid and install the Xgrid SDK, you'll find two frameworks in /Library/Xgrid/Frameworks. One is for building Xgrid plug-ins to perform various distributed computations. The other is BEEP.framework, which is Apple's Objective-C implementation of BEEP for Cocoa developers! While there's no reference documentation, the header files are extensively commented. It doesn't seem like it'd be tough to put together applications using the framework to pass messages around.

Now Apple just needs to ship a final release of Xgrid 1.0, so developers can start relying on its presence. It'd also be really cool if Apple transitioned Distributed Objects from its current form to use (or at least support) SOAP over BEEP.

If you're writing a specification that's primarily intended to be distributed electronically, please keep in mind the following:

• Use file formats that everyone can read easily.


• Don't make your specification a PDF, with every page a giant high-res monochrome raster; it looks pretty, but it's hell for people reading on-screen.


• Don't use a two-column layout; it looks pretty, but it's hell for people reading on-screen.


• Don't format for duplex; it looks pretty, but nobody has a duplex printer except you.


• Don't don't don't use stupid fucking Digital Restrictions Management to tell me what I can and can't do with the specification, particularly if you're a public international standards body.


• Don't don't don't use stupid fucking Digital Restrictions Management to enforce a tighter set of restrictions than the ones I agreed to when I paid for the goddamn specification; if I agreed to a license that lets me make one printed copy, let me print!

OK, feeling a little better now.

Anybody that's pushing DRM as The Future has never had to deal with any of this shit while trying to get real work done. If they had, they'd sooner kill themselves than drag civilization down with more of it, or by attempting to make it pervasive.

Dan Bricklin — yes, the Dan Bricklin, co-inventor with Bob Frankston of the electronic spreadsheet — is reporting that Massachusetts is pursuing an Open Standards, Open Source policy like I've advocated for a while now. Here's my summary of Dan's summary of his impressions.

In a nutshell, state purchasing guidelines will require all data formats and protocols used to conduct state business to be open and public. That's the Open Standards part.

The Open Source part requires the state to always consider Open Source software on a level playing field with other software, and to use it if possible. If not, they want source code escrow for long-term maintenance and interoperability reasons.

Also on the Open Source front, when the state has software developed, they'll be making it Open Source, and they'll be contributing back any enhancements they make to Open Source packages they use.

This is great news. Once governments start requiring open data formats and protocols, megacorps won't be far behind. And everyone else will follow them.

Scoble is going on about how there's no business case for allowing third-party instant messaging clients free access to MSN Messenger, and how people criticizing the move need to support their criticisms with business cases and stop asking for things for free. Evidently it hurt his feelings when Dan Shafer called them nimrods for this decision.

This is the heart of the Microsoft attitude, which I've decided to start calling Microsoft Persecution Complex. Even though they have 90% market penetration and around $50 billion in the bank, Microsoft and its employees from the top on down still behave as though they're only a week or two from bankruptcy. And they appear to honestly believe it too — that if one small company flies under their radar without being coopted and releases one killer app, it'll be Game Over for Microsoft. This paranoia drives most of their behavior towards the outside, from various lock-in attempts like the MSN Messenger gateway, to their attempts to patent everything they do no matter how trivial, to their "We have to screw everybody else before they screw us because you know they're going to try to!" business practices. It's paranoia, pure and simple.

Here's what I posted in response to Scoble in his weblog's comments area:

Instant messaging is like email. It only works - it only has sufficient network effects - when enough people interoperate. The network effect is king, and Microsoft is gambling that they have enough of one going that shutting off outside access won't derail it. Doesn't sound like a wise bet to me.

This is exactly like announcing that the next version of Outlook will only let you email other Outlook users and talk to Exchange servers. It may look good for business in the very short term ("Just think of all that potential revenue that's going to be realized!"), but you'd see people switching mail clients and servers so fast you'd barely be able to make sense of it.

Fortunately, moves like these will drive people to use Jabber or another truly open, interoperable, IETF-managed instant messaging system quickly. Eventually to keep playing in the instant messaging space Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL will have to support the Internet standard. And at that point, the end users really win because they won't be locked in the trunk by any vendor.

Oh, and Scoble? You are nimrods. The reason you're nimrods is because your first instinct was to criticize the person complaining about an attempt at lock-in for wanting something for free and not considering poor, poor Microsoft's business needs, rather than asking what was best for Microsoft's customers. That's a very Microsoft behavior, and it's one of the things that needs to change about Microsoft culture. If you'd actually asked what was best for the customers, you might have come to a different conclusion.

Believe it or not, Trillian users are Microsoft customers! (Trillian only runs on Windows.) And isn't it a free application that replaces another free application that's used to access a free service? Hmm, what's the business case again for making MSN Messenger free but locking out another free application on the same platform?

Stefanie Olsen, IM giants told to work it out (CNET News.com)

Two weeks ago, six top financial institutions met privately with AOL Time Warner, Microsoft, IBM and other leading corporate instant messaging providers and urged them to build communications networks that interoperate. For the Wall Street firms, a lack of IM interoperability has been a source of increasing frustration and a possible pinch on profits.

The meeting, which took place at Merrill Lynch's New York offices, was among the first convened by the Instant Messaging Standards Board (IMSB), a newly created consortium led by financial services firms Lehman Brothers, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, UBS and Deutsche Bank.

Formed two months ago to act as ambassador to the IM technology industry, the IMSB plans to make a public announcement about its organization and goals in coming weeks. While the board does not intend to create its own standards, it hopes to nudge IM providers to adopt standards published in the marketplace.

Uh, what?

If you want an Internet standard, the way to do it is to go through the IETF and the Internet standardization process. Another random consortium of megacorps isn't going to do squat for creating an open and interoperable standard.