Hello World

I’ve had an interesting conversation earlier this week with a VC guy. He’s looking at a company that is basing its business on Twitter. My immediate reaction was – there is no way I’d consider building a long-term business on top of Twitter.

That’s because I don’t think there is a long term future for Twitter.

I love Twitter. I really do. Not in the Mel Brooks sense, mind you. I use Twitter a lot (not as much as Jeff, but still :), and I value the way Twitter changed our world.

However, I believe that in 2 years the Twitter brand will be in the same position as the Netscape brand is in now: Twitter will be credited with starting the revolution, and paving the road for followers (pun intended). But at the same time, it will be pushed into a minor position in the market with other players taking the lead (or, as is the case with Netscape, will no longer exist).

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I love the Beatles. I grew up listening to their amazing melodies, appreciating the lyrics and the rich and visual compositions. I love the Beatles and what they stood for.

Over the years I’ve replaced some of the vinyl Beatles records I had with CDs, but there were several Beatles albums that I never got around to purchasing. I kept thinking I should buy them already, but never did.

Until The Beatles Remastered was released. Clearly, this was the opportunity to fill in the blanks and reacquire the entire collection in the best available quality, and to rediscover their genius music.

Last Friday I went to Tower Records (yes, an actual physical store!), handed over the counter 999 NIS (which is about $250), and received in exchange a beautiful black box containing the entire collection. On the way home I opened the box with excitement, took out "Revolver", put it into the car CD player, and enjoyed the familiar tunes.

When I got home, I did what I always do when I buy a new music discs. I inserted the disc into my Windows 7 Media Center machine, planning to rip the music into my Media Library so that I can listen to it like I listen to the rest of my music. After I am done ripping, I usually put the original disc away in storage, because I have no real use for these plastic pieces anymore.

Not this time though. Windows recognizes the disc as a multimedia disc with videos and all, but does not see the music tracks.

I tried another disc from the box. Same result.

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GeekCon 2009 took place last weekend, and was – as usual – tons of fun. There were so many cool projects this year – from the personal Kong-fu sound effects generator, to the amazing physical Tron game, the 3D Lunar Lander, the low-cost Matrix-like bullet-time studio,  the wheelchair arcade game, and so many others. (Get the never-up-to-date not-even-nearly-full list on the never-up-to-date GeekCon projects page).

I love taking photos in unconferences like this, there are always so many interesting things happening. But the thing is that being behind the lens has the effect of somewhat disconnecting you from the actual happening.

So this year,  I thought I’ll build a replacement for myself as my GeekCon project. Initially I called it the *ConAutoDoc, but shortly after we activated it for the first time I came to the conclusion that "The Rabid Digital Junk Photos Generator" would be a much better name.

Rabid?

Yes. Rabid:

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I am leaving soon for Seedcamp week 2009 at London, where I will be mentoring as well as participating in a panel on Scaling and Performance (with Blaine Cook, Vijay Pandurangan, James Aylett, and Matt Biddulph). And this got me thinking.

I remember my first job interview. It was back at 1991, and I was interviewed by Ron Loewy for a developer job.

Ron asked me to tell him about things I’ve done before. Having done 3 commercial projects already as a freelancer self-taught developer, I described them. They all involved long term storage / query mechanisms of some sort, and Ron asked me to describe what I used for storage.

Now, the only data structure I knew at that point was Linked List. I also knew a bit of OO that I picked up from the Object Oriented Programming Guide booklet that shipped with Turbo Pascal 5.5. So I came up with FileLinkedList (TFileLinkedList in TP-speak), which descendant from my LinkedList class. And that is what I used for storage and query in these 3 projects.

Ron listened patiently while I described my incredibly versatile FileLinkedList, waited for me to finish, and then asked – so, ever heard of a database?

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Esther Loewy from Bootcamp Ventures sent me a note telling me that they will be holding another Bootcamp in Tel Aviv on October 11, 2009.

The format is the usual (and effective) Bootcamp format:

• 30 Second Elevator Pitch
• 8 Minute Investor Presentation
• Network with targeted c-level investors in an intimate & interactive environment
• Receive on-the-spot feedback from leading angels, under-the radar-funds and venture capitalists from the US, Israel and Europe

On the "Drill Sergeant" Panel this time:

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It’s a good thing that Satan is so behind the times.

All these eons spent crafting complex traps to get people to sign that infamous contract where they sell their soul to the devil. All that human suffering that led to the creation of Faust and of the category AT 756B.

So much wasted effort, when today all it really takes is a reasonably popular (preferably viral) web app, a well crafted TOS, and a "Yes, I agree to the terms of service" checkbox.

Do you read these terms of service? I usually scan them quickly, which is probably more than most people do. But this quick scan will probably not be enough to reveal clause 666b, which says "Furthermore, by using the Service you agree to provide the Devil with an eternal non-revocable complete ownership license for your soul".

Back when Facebook did that controversial change to its terms of service I’ve discussed with some friends a way to avoid this finely crafted trap. My suggestion consisted of the following components:

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Flickr just told me I need to extend my Pro account because it will expire soon.

I’ve been using Flickr for over 4 years now. I’ve been paying for a pro account for 2 different accounts, and was happy to do that. Flickr made me happy.

But this time it was different. I did pull out my credit card, typed in the details and hit submit. But this time, it was with a heavy heart.

Flickr no longer makes me happy.

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I know nearly nothing about brewing beer. But I’ve been thinking lately about “how all the major brewers responded to the influx of microbrews. They simply brewed up their own small-label brands or bought existing ones, and kept their own brand in very tiny print deep in the label where most beer drinkers can’t be bothered to look”.

Obviously, while these brands may “conceal the parent’s branding”, they still “benefit from its distribution network”.

So, knowing nothing about brewing beer, I turned my thoughts to the beer distribution network. Of which I also know nothing.

But one can imagine that these beer bottles are packaged into boxes, which are then loaded into trucks, which then distribute them to big and small retailers that deliver them to the end-users consumers.

Now, for the sake of the beer industry, I am hoping that these trucks that pick up the boxes and deliver them down the chain are reliable. Knowing nothing of beer distribution networks, I imagine that these trucks are owned and operated by the beer company itself, or by another reliable company with which they have a solid business relationship.

I mean, I am guessing they wouldn’t allow just anyone with a truck to just stop by the factory entrance, pick up a few boxes of beer and drive off with a vague promise to deliver them to their destination. That wouldn’t make sense. If a beer company was to use such unreliable delivery mechanism, they might find that these truck owners went out of business, or their trucks broke down, or decided to keep the beer for themselves, or were taken over by the mafia!

I really know nothing about beer distribution. But I am guessing that if I was in the business of premium beer (or Coke?), setting up my own reliable distribution network, run by my trusted op folks, connected to my BI systems, leveraging my business relationships and assets, etc, would be high on my list.

But then, I really know nothing about brewing beer or beer distribution networks.

I received a call last night from Tanya Epstein, my former colleague and mentor-in-many-ways in SmarTeam, a company I used to work for. This brought back memories from my enterprise software days, which led me to think of iXF.

iXF was one of my favorite undertakings in SmarTeam, which at that point was a subsidiary of Dassault Systemes, and now no longer is at all. In a nutshell, iXF was a data format designed for storage and exchange of structured data.

How do you represent an object in XML? There are so many to do that. How do you represent a class in XML or XML Schema? SOAP perhaps? That’s a good start. But SOAP is slightly too flexible, resulting in potential incompatibilities when trying to map it back into relational database format. How do you represent the concept of a class interface though..? How do you represent revisions to an object, revisions of classes and interfaces, and all the other goodies needed to provide full fidelity, rich and yet interoperable data model?

While expressed in XML and XML Schema (duh!), iXF went way beyond these basics and defined formal, extendible representations for many useful concepts, like:

• Tabular data
• Structured object oriented data
• Schema versioning and forward compatibility
• Object versioning and change tracking
• Associating files with objects
• Packaging data, metadata and extended data into a single archive format
• And, most important, a formal extension mechanism for adding additional concepts without creating backward, forward and inter-systems compatibility issues.

Many of the concepts described in iXF were formalization of concepts we’ve implemented before, either in the series of applications based on the HADAR platform I’ve created before SmarTeam (together with Eran Tromer, Eitan Yaffe and many others), or in the incredibly flexible data model Tanya Epstein designed in SmarTeam.

Other concepts, like namespacing the class behaviors, the de-coupling of domain behaviors from class names, the change tracking mechanism and others were adapted from other domains (for example, interface declarations in programming languages), or invented specifically for iXF.

The result was an interesting beast. It was a format based on open, well defined standards (XML, XML Schema, SOAP, SOAP Messages with Attachments, XML Namespaces, MIME and ZLIB), which proved versatile enough to be used in multiple use cases, from data modeling to inter-vendor data exchange to database generation to inter-machine communication and more.

While there were a number of people signed on the iXF spec, much of the credit for in depth thinking, alignment with existing specs and creative ideas should go to a then-young software engineer named Noga Atsil.

SmarTeam no longer exists, and the original ixfstd.org web site is no longer available on the web. But being the sentimental fool that I am, I figured I’ll leave this little post behind, as a small tribute to the efforts that went into this work.

The original iXF 1.0 specifications (later revisions existed but are not salvageable anymore).

So, it’s been 3 months since I’ve decided to stop following Dave Winer.

It wasn’t easy to keep to my word, since given my areas of interest, it’s nearly impossible not to run into Dave’s writing. Plus his response was a classy example of how to respond to an unfollow :)

Today I am giving up. It was Dave’s post from yesterday, “Gartner’s curve”, that finally broke down my resistance. It was simply too good – the most pragmatic, down to earth, unhyped description of what happened so far, what’s happening right now, and what will have to happen next.

I am once again following Dave Winer. His thoughts and opinions are obviously too valuable to ignore.

@Twitter: Can I has a “follow unless there is a war in the middle east” button?