Saturday, March 3, 2007
Steam bowl session to clear congestion from my lungs. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Worked a little on Corinna's website: form building. Grocery shopping and errands. Patrick and I made black forest cupcakes for Brian and Kelly. Lunch: leftovers from So. Patrick and I visited BriKel for the first time in a long time today. On the way there we happened upon Mom Ryan while we were parking and we stopped to chat with her a few minutes. I was unable to attend BriKel's 10th anniversary celebration last Saturday due to my being sick with a cold, so today we brought them black forest cupcakes and a bottle of champagne and talked for an hour or so. The champagne we brought wasn't chilled completely, so they opened and shared with us the bottle that Jenn had given them—it was very good, but I don't recall what kind—something French. We talked about City CarShare, the new business, BK's new office, Apple keyboard shortcuts, why BK feels he could never write a compiler, Puerto Vallarta, BK's mayonnaise and hot sauce fantasy, New Orleans, the Flickr group called Signs of Life, the OS X time server synchronization bug, iTerm, Chris and Nate. Kel and a carpenter had built a great little workbench in the nook off the dining room. They have a pot rack above the sink I hadn't seen before. It was very good to see BriKel again; we connect on the same wavelengths in a lot of ways, and I've missed their company a lot. Patrick went home to eat dinner and go to bed early for martial arts practice in the morning. I met Phil, Drew, Dave, and Quyen at 16th and Mission BART. We took BART to Powell Street Station. My MUNI pass had somehow become demagnetized, so I traded it in at the ticket hut next to the cable car turnaround. Turns out every month they get about 30 that become demagnetized somehow—Drew says that putting them in your wallet next to credit cards can do it. The Chinese New Year Parade was a big bust. We arrived shortly after the parade had started, and consequently we were unable to get a good view at all. I got a few poor photos. After a while, in desperation, I tried taking photos of the camera preview displays of people who were closer to the front, but these turned out even more miserably as you might expect. The sidewalks were jammed with people all along the parade route. If you need to get through quickly, it really is worth it to walk one block away from the route, skip a couple of blocks, and then come back toward the route, but essentially, if you didn't get there early you won't get a good view and it will just be really frustrating. On the way there, we ran in to Antuan, whom we all hadn't seen in a while. He was just getting off from work and heading home, didn't join us. The parade was also frustrating because there were really long gaps between things in the parade. When we tried leaving the parade, the sidewalk was so crowded people started pushing. The worst of these was some very well-to-do-looking older woman who was repeatedly pushing me into a baby carriage which could not move, so I gently pushed her back and gave her a few polite words which put her in her place. Other people made it seem as though they needed to cross across the direction I and the immediate pedestrian traffic were headed to get to a hotel entrance, so I let them cut across only to see them several minutes later right next to me clearly not entering the hotel they had claimed they were trying to reach. Fortunately we made it out before anything worse had happened. This Chinese New Year Parade was a very unpleasant experience. If I go again, I'll make sure to stake out a place several hours in advance, but it looked as though you couldn't really sit to watch—everyone was standing. The best area from which to watch is the block in front of Macy's since it's all lit up. Maybe that's where the grandstand seating is—I don't know. Mayor Newsom rode by—I barely saw the top of his head. A woman was seated next to him, but no one knew who she was. The store windows of Macy's and Borders were filled with people watching from the upper floors. Afterwards we got separated, but I found a payphone and called Drew and met them at the ticket hut next to the cable car turnaround. We took BART back to the Mission. We had planned to eat at Thanh Tam II but it was full, so we ate at Yum Yum House (415-861-8698, 581 Valencia Street at 17th) instead. The service was very attentive. The food was slightly above average. Seems to be reliable Chinese food, but not worth going out of your way for a special meal. Four main dishes was just the right amount for the six of us. We got out for about $55 after an $8 tip—about $9 each. My fortune: You will make many changes before settling satisfactorily. Phil and Danny went home. Drew, Dave, Quyen, and I got ice cream at Bombay Creamery. Just before arriving at Bombay, a furniture store had carved wooden ducks, and when I saw them I immediately thought of Chris/psychobauble and snapped some photos for him. Home. Processed photos. A night or two ago I chatted on the phone with Nate and one of the things we talked about was the longevity of blogs, or rather, my perception that blogs will most likely outlive their owners. For example, services such as the Internet Archive harvest public data and will keep it essentially forever. I am confident that hundreds or thousands of years from now people will find my journal a worthwhile resource to understanding how people lived in our era. A similar theme came up today while chatting with BriKel—Brian was wishing there were a way to give your Social Security number (!), or some other unique identifier, only once and various services would permit you to harvest your own data in a migratable format for safekeeping or migrate it to whatever other service you wanted. The idea being that you already have your social network built on Orkut, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo! 360, Facebook, LiveJournal, Plaxo, Flickr, Dodgeball, or whatever, but many of these services never seem to remain popular for long. I suggested OpenID, but I don't really know enough about it or even whether it's the solution he's seeking. But this has been my hesitancy to join these kinds of services because I think I've known all along that services like these won't continue to grow unless the value continues to grow, too. Currently MySpace shows no signs of stopping, but there was a point you could have said the same for Friendster, too. Personally, I see the greatest value in owning and controlling my own content. I recall that the ah ha moment for me was some blog entry on Andrei Herasimchuk's Design by Fire in which he essentially said (paraphrasing here), in response to some comments, ha ha ha it doesn't matter whether I agree with what you say because whatever you post becomes my content. And I realized he was right! His readers were building the value of his site for him; he was simply providing a structured way to handle discussion and a brief essay to encourage it. I didn't participate in the conversation, but after reading that I began realizing that I don't need to post reviews of books and other items on Amazon, I don't need to post restaurant reviews on Citysearch, I don't need to post comments in other people's blogs, and I don't need some website service in order to share answers to technical computer problems to which I have found answers. I have my own website, and Google brings people to it—they simply have to search, and I simply have to give good web page code to Google. Yes, I lose out on certain important things, but in most cases I'd rather lose out on that and completely own and control my content than the other way around. Flickr has been an exception because the features provided by Flickr far outweigh those in what I could build on my own web server from scratch or with FOSS or even for the same cost as Flickr. I suggested to Brian that if he didn't find what he was seeking that he should just write his own DTD or spec, publish it, and see if it will grow. Essentially, the idea is that there be some standard format for a person to provide data which uniquely identifies him or her and which they can host on any web host independently or any web service providing hosting services specifically for such a format and then any new web service which comes along can hook into it. I guess OpenID is part of what Brian is seeking—but he's also wanting content exportability, like API goodness, so that when a similar but competing service comes along it's easy to migrate to it. Of course most companies won't want to provide this because from their old world perception it simply makes it easier for customers to leave. But they don't realize that an API means growth, not death. For example, if the now-floundering Friendster were to create an API, within weeks a handful of high school and college computer geeks all across the world would probably have written tools so that you could, say, add a friend in Friendster and it would somehow automatically or semiautomatically add or suggest to add the same friend in Flickr or add their address to your Google Saved Maps list. This brings people back to Friendster over MySpace because the openness permits others to increase the value of the web service, typically faster than the company could on its own. Or someone could write a web page that, say, lets you provide all your various logins to various sites and it creates a grid of your friends' names and their IDs on each service with an API. Web services has long stopped being about how much value the company can own and control and has started being about how much control the company can give up so that others can increase the value at no cost to the company. Like Andrei, the company simply has to provide the right and reliable structure and infrastructure for the valuebuilding to succeed. Before recently, companies thought this valuebuilding came in the form of community, but today the successful shift is an API centered around community activities. People will eventually realize that web services without an API have far less value than those that do—right now that's not something that's very obvious to laypersons. You could say the web right now is at a crossroads (just like Indonesia), but I'd rather you didn't. I really enjoyed Sean Hetherington's entry for today: [http://realsean.livejournal.com/150522.html][The YOU KNOW SOMETHINGS?][now defunct].