Amyloo › Comments

I think Matthews knows what's going on with the Network, it's just his way of razzing the rookie on the block. It's a good schtick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Cliff Gerrish

It is, whether it's deliberate or not. But I think I still think he's blinded. ;-) Also fascinated with the fringes of both parties bending the spectrum around to form a circle that connects at some point in populist outrage. Isn't there a Three Stooges bit where they're sneaking around, walking slowly backwards and bump into and scare each other? - Amyloo

To be clear, Twitter has made available a realtime replacement for the firehose (the replacement is called "birddog"). We have not yet started consuming that new API because we're waiting for the lawyers to come to agreement on the terms of use, which I hope will happen soon. I think Twitter's legal team is simply overbooked at the moment. Edit: To reiterate, Twitter is not blocking us. The reason we are not consuming the new API is because the fb lawyers want to review the updated terms first. - Paul Buchheit

thanks for the update, Paul. Perhaps the open community can donate some lawyers to help Twitter out. - Steve Gillmor

Paul - very interesting... saga continues :) - Susan Beebe

lord knows we've got lots of lawyers...and I'm sure more than a few are unemployed right now. Perhaps one will step up. - Karoli

Paul, do you know if any 3rd party has BirdDog implemented? - Cliff Gerrish

wonder who will get BD up and running 1st... - Susan Beebe

Cliff, "birddog" is just a category of statuses/filter, which is available publicly (see http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streami...). I don't know if anyone is using the birddog role or not. It's available to us and ready to go, but fb lawyers want the tou resolved before we activate it. - Paul Buchheit

Paul - "tou" typo for "TOS" (terms of service) right? - Susan Beebe

Terms Of Use, Susan, but the two are about the same I think. - Paul Buchheit

gotcha, thanks :) - Susan Beebe

Thanks, Paul. And thanks for the pointer. The "available publicly" part is particularly interesting. - Cliff Gerrish

Cliff - agreed - Susan Beebe

Cliff, it's possible that it has been added to TwitTornado: http://news.ycombinator.com/item... - Paul Buchheit

Maybe I'm mis-parsing things, but it sounds like Twitter's just offering the updates of FriendFeed users rather than the complete Twitter firehose. (see http://friendfeed.com/evhead...) If that's the case, I'm a little confused about what's holding things up. I can see how resolving rights to third party tweets might be problematic, but if FriendFeed's only being fed updates "owned" by FriendFeed users, what's the hold up? - Ken Sheppardson

What Twitter offers anyone who needs a lot of user updates (but they don't want to give the firehose) is a streaming feed that you send to it a list of userid's (with a max # per stream.) Then Twitter will send back all updates on that stream for any userid in the list. Not exactly the firehose but it is actually very useful for most client use-cases. - bear (aka Mike Taylor)

Ken, that's right, it's just a different api. The holdup is due to the fact that the fb lawyers want to review the updated terms before we start using the new api. - Paul Buchheit

So the 'internet' is now in the hands of lawyers, not engineers. We're doomed! - zeroinfluencer

indeed we are - Thomas Power

Is the BirdDog TOU publicly available to read? (nothing on the Tw Wiki http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Streami... ) - zeroinfluencer

The positive thing I get from this (be it wishful thinking) is that fb is dedicating resources to having this resolved. If FriendFeed is just a floundering fish out of water, waiting to die, why would they engage lawyers... Very interesting... - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

hear hear Johnny. Zucker is a serious player. - Thomas Power

Johnny: Why dedicate resources? So Facebook can have the full stream too? If not now, then down the road as bits of Friendfeed appear on FB or in the dev platform? - Amyloo

Either way, to me, dedicating resources = severs remaining on - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

Not to get all argumentative and start throwing around the D-word, Johnny, but Facebook would really need to address this independently of whether the FriendFeed servers stay on. As Amyloo mentioned, this is an issue if they ever intend to use the new Twitter API to feed Facebook proper. - Ken Sheppardson

Fair enough :) - Johnny Worthington from iPhone

a micro community as an R&D department... - Aron Michalski

Here's the Content License Agreement for the new streaming API, by the way. You have to log into Twitter to view it http://twitter.com/help... - Ken Sheppardson

@Ken - thanks. - zeroinfluencer

"5.ii.c - No Conflicting Uses. ... Except with the prior written consent of Twitter, you may not engage, directly or indirectly, in any business activity, if such business activity conflicts with, or places you in a conflicting position to that of Twitter or the Twitter Service, or is specifically intended to purposefully divert and/or drive audience traffic away from the Twitter Service..." - Ken Sheppardson

....seems to me that would be problematic for Facebook as a legal entity to agree to. - Ken Sheppardson

So you can get a feed of Twitter, but it better not be Better then twitter. - Uncle CW™

aah, the famous "must suck" clause. - Aron Michalski

Ken, if Facebook doesn't have short-term plans to use birddog in their big product, it doesn't make a lot of sense to sic lawyers on the tou right now. Those terms can change. For them to invest resources *right now* on the issue makes me think they care about their little product. - Bruce Lewis

On the flip side, Bruce, one might argue that if they really cared about it they would have dealt with it by now. I don't recall when the old Twitter -> FriendFeed link started to lag, but it's been more than three months since FriendFeed became part of Facebook. - Ken Sheppardson

Do we agree that Facebook cares more about FriendFeed than the "FF is dead" crowd thinks, but cares less about FriendFeed than we die-hard fans would like it to? If I had my way they would start migrating their userbase over here as fast as the servers could take it. - Bruce Lewis

Best line: castration reference. Find it. - Amyloo

probably one of your best posts ever. of course, that may be because I think I got it on the first pass. ;-) - Karoli from BuddyFeed

Because we buy on the rumor and sell on the news. Slow-newsers are buying at the top. You have to understand both. - Cliff Gerrish

Cliff: agree there's room for both. Andy: disagree the fork comes after the dust has settled. It seems like there should be a provision for a user in scanning the news to say whoa, hold up, that's something worth exploring. I know, it's called a bookmark, but who ever gets back to those? Same with conferences, podcasts. I'd love to see a practice bloom in which any discussion ends with... more... - Amyloo

I see nothing wrong with "fast" as long as it's accurate. And there's the rub - fast often turns out to be wrong (balloon boy, Ft. Hood, etc.), and being wrong no longer has any consequences. Frank Reynolds was humiliated when he wrongly announced James Brady was dead in 1981 - today's stenographers just throw it out there under the guise of "we're just repeating what we heard." Stenography isn't reporting. - John Craft

One thing I'd like to know from Jennifer what the social media editor's job is, what "forces" led to its creation, and how she has defined and re-defined it in the months since she began. - Jay Rosen

Also worth discussing: the merging of tech and newsroom cultures at the New York Times with the growth of their geek squad, a topic which mirrors in some ways the editorial logic of Rebooting the News, in that the show brings together the tech world and the journalism world. - Jay Rosen

I just watched your nerdtv thing again, and the last 7 minutes of it are very relevant to the Droid discussion http://tr.im/EBXO - dai_vernon

Okay, scratch the paywall thing, you're right, and you should ask that basic question, definitely. - Dave Winer

I'm online now - Dave Winer

New York Times names first social media editor http://www.guardian.co.uk/media... Jonathan Landman says: "It's someone who concentrates full-time on expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers. Jennifer will work closely with editors, reporters, bloggers and others... more... - Jay Rosen

Lists seem important to aggregate topics, but most people talk about more than one topic despite being appropriate for a particular list. What might the next step be to mold lists into news sources. In other words, how can the we raise the signal to noise when we want to follow a specific news topic. - Matt Terenzio

Why did they pick someone that didn't know social media already to be the social media editor? - Matt Terenzio

I don't know, but I would trust your judgement - Hilary Talbot

Appreciate the support, Hil. Also getting a sore throat and it's making me cranky. Wouldn't it be nice if you could bring in an expert for 30 seconds to do the Marshall McLuhan validation thing in Annie Hall? That would be a good service to offer over the internet, wouldn't it? Get a stable of top-flight experts in a number of fields and hire them out expressly for things like this, not by the hour but by the minute so the poor worker bees like me could afford to haul them in. - Amyloo

Yes, nice idea. Hope you feel better soon. - Hilary Talbot

If they're putting a style tag on every link, then that should be in a stylesheet. Inline styles (i.e., using the style attribute within HTML markup) is generally considered sloppy. - Dan MacTough

Thank you, Dan. How've you been? - Amyloo

Seeing as how this will get cross-posted to Twitter and Facebook, I think I will respond by email. :-) - Dan MacTough

I would agree that best practice would be for this to be in a stylesheet. However, it's far from uncommon to have inline styles on every link, especially when the html's generated by script. Sad to say poor practice ≠ uncommon. - cori