Category: Web/Tech

Is OPML a crappy format?

Published on by Nick Bradbury5 Comments

Oh good – yet another format battle brewing in the geekosphere. And now that I’m feeling better, I can’t help but jump in :)

While Scoble is right that users shouldn’t have to care about formats, the truth is that when a format is underspecified, it becomes a problem for users.

Case in point: during the first year of FeedDemon’s development, I heard countless users complain that a certain feed wouldn’t display correctly, and much of the time the problem was that the feed contained incorrectly encoded HTML tags. Developers of several other RSS readers reported the same thing. Bottom line: the imprecise RSS specification resulted in a lot of guess work, which complicated things for developers, end users and feed producers.

The solution? We clarified the RSS spec. While problems with entity-encoded HTML haven’t disappeared completely, in my experience they’re far less common than they used to be (and when they do occur, we now have examples to point to).

And that’s all that’s needed here, too. Clarify the OPML spec, and we can skip another prolonged format battle. Dave, once I’ve recuperated, I’ll gladly help polish the spec, and can assist in creating example OPML files for developers to test with.

Spanning Salesforce 2.0

Published on by Nick Bradbury6 Comments

Just wanted to congratulate Charlie Wood for the launch of Spanning Salesforce 2.0.

BTW, in his announcement, Charlie mentions a reeaalllly annoying duet between William Shatner and (no joke) Henry Rollins that he uploaded to help me resolve an issue with FeedStation. This “song,” of course, stuck in my head like spaghetti on a wall.

So, I’d like to pay Charlie back by putting this song in his head :)

AttentionTrust.org

Published on by Nick Bradbury7 Comments

Last week saw the launch of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit hatched by Seth Goldstein, Steve Gillmor and Hank Barry which is “dedicated to promoting the basic rights of attention owners.” I’m honored to be serving on the initial board of AttentionTrust.org, along with Dick Costolo and Clay Shirky.

I’ve written about attention before, but I realize it remains a nebulous concept to many folks. I think part of the problem is that those of us who write about attention tend to be talking to people who already understand the concept, so I’ll write this on the assumption that you have no idea what I’m talking about.

In a nutshell, the idea is that your attention data – that is, data that describes what you’re paying attention to – has value, and because it has value, when you give someone your attention you should expect to be given something in return. And just because you give someone your attention, it doesn’t mean that they own it. You should expect to get it back.

I know that sounds a little weird – it took me a while to grok it, too. So I’ll use an example that’s familiar to many of us: Netflix ratings and recommendations. By telling Netflix how you rate a specific movie you’re telling them what you’re paying attention to, and in return they can recommend additional DVDs to you based on how other people rated the same movie. In return for giving them your attention data – which is of great value to them – they provide you features such as recommendations that they hope will be valuable to you. In my mind, this is a fair trade.

But what if Netflix collected this information without your knowledge, and rather than using it to give you added value they sold it to another service instead? I imagine that many people wouldn’t like that idea – chances are, you’d want to be given the opportunity to decide who this information can be shared with. This is one of the goals of AttentionTrust.org: to leave you in charge of what’s done with your attention data.

But what about this whole idea of mobility, as mentioned on the AttentionTrust.org site? What’s the benefit of making this stuff mobile? Dave Winer provides a nice example: suppose you could share your Netflix attention data with a dating site such as Match.com, so you could find possible partners who like the same movies as you? For that sort of thing to be possible, you’d need to be able to get your attention data back from any service which collects it. (As an aside, this also means you could share your Netflix queue with any new DVD rental service that comes down the pike – so my guess is that smaller, up-and-coming sites will be more willing to share attention data than the more entrenched sites will.)

This is the stage we’re at now with attention data, but my prediction is that attention will become far more important down the road. Right now we’re witnessing the growth of services who provide aggregated attention data, and statistics suggested by this data will increasingly impact those of us – journalists and techies alike – who hope to survive in the online world. And the Utopian in me would love to see this grow into a means to find out what people are paying attention to (so we decide what the top stories are) but I fear that spam and the usual assortment of garbage that comes with popularity will give rise to “safe” outlets that still end up choosing the news for us. Regardless, though, now is a good time for something like AttentionTrust.org to plant a stake in the ground and let attention-based businesses know what’s expected of them.

Related reading:

Gnomedex 5.0 Looks Great

Published on by Nick Bradbury4 Comments

Wow – has anyone else been watching the list of attendees at this year’s Gnomedex? It’s like a “who’s who” of the blogging world. Here are just a few of the people who are planning to be there:

Gnomedex is at the top of my list of favorite conferences, not just because of the people attending, but because I always learn something new there. For example, last year’s Gnomedex is where I learned about podcasting, which resulted in me adding podcast downloading and synching to FeedDemon.

And it looks like there will be a lot of RSS aggregator developers there, too – including Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire), Greg Reinacker (NewsGator), Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Tim Catlin (Rojo), J.J. Allaire (Onfolio) and (of course) myself (FeedDemon).

If you’re thinking of attending, you might want to register now – I wouldn’t be surprised if this fills up soon.

RSS, Spam and Spyware

Published on by Nick Bradbury21 Comments

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m a firm believer in using blogs and RSS for distributed conversation. So, I’d like to start a conversation about the threat that spam and spyware pose to our little syndicated world. I brought this topic up with several companies who were at the Syndicate Conference, and I was disturbed to discover how few of them are even thinking about this pending problem.

Most of them replied, “Spam problem? But there isn’t one – if someone’s feed contains spam, everyone will just unsubscribe!” Well, yeah – but only if we subscribe to individual feeds, which I believe will take a backseat to aggregated feeds. I’ll use my own experience with the NewsGator acquisition as an example: hundreds of blogs contained news of the acquisition, but I was subscribed to very few of their feeds. Instead, I subscribed to dynamic search feeds – that is, keyword-based feeds powered by RSS search engines – which enabled me to listen in on the conversation. Very powerful indeed – but unfortunately, very spammable.

There are already fake spam blogs, many of which have RSS feeds. Most of the ones I’ve seen were created to influence search engine rankings, but it’s only a matter of time before they use their feeds for delivering spam (I’ll wager that some of them already do). These fake blogs are easy to set up, so as soon as one is taken down, it will re-appear somewhere else (much like their spyware-filled brethren, the warez sites), making it tricky to simply filter them out by their subdomain name. My guess is that the main reason we don’t see more RSS spam is simply because spammers are waiting for it to be profitable. Now that conferences such as Syndicate are attended not just by geeks and developers but also by investors, they’ve got to be thinking that the time is almost here. Create a bunch of fake blogs littered with popular keywords, and let their feeds be picked up by the RSS search engines (to their credit, some of the RSS search engine companies I talked with are already tackling this problem).

Even if I’m way off base about how spam will come to RSS, we all know that spammers will find a way to jump on the RSS bandwagon. Given past history, every new social technology needs to think about spam right from the start, or else risk being crippled by it (side note: many implementations of tagging also strike me as being spammable).

Related to this is the fact that RSS enclosures (a.k.a. “podcasts”) must look attractive to spyware creators. Before I added podcast features to FeedDemon, I took a look at how a few of the existing tools were handling them. To my surprise, security didn’t seem to be a big concern – they’d even download EXE enclosures, perhaps assuming that the user’s anti-virus software would stop them from being executed if they were malware. Couple automatic enclosure downloading with dynamic search feeds which contain enclosures, and you’ve got a great spyware delivery system. This is why I made sure that FeedDemon used a safe list for downloading enclosures.

If you make a living from RSS, I hope you’ll join in this conversation – either here or in your own blog – and let everyone know whether you’re thinking about this problem (or, just let me know I’m full of it if you disagree that it’s a threat).

Google Web Accelerator

Published on by Nick Bradbury14 Comments

Given that not too long ago I posted about the auto-link feature in Google’s toolbar, it seems like I should at least speak up about the new Google Web Accelerator as well.

Before I do, though, I want to make it clear that right now I trust Google. I haven’t seen them do anything that would cause me to not trust them, and I can see from their excellent work on things like Google Maps that they really do wish to make the internet useful for everyone. Some people don’t trust them simply because Google makes a lot of money, but I don’t subscribe to that belief system at all. I prefer living in a world where people can earn money from what they’re good at, so I have no qualms about Google getting rich from their innovations.

But the question isn’t, “Do we trust Google enough to allow something like Google Web Accelerator?” The question is really, “Fifty years from now, can we still trust them?” After fifty years of change, upheaval, etc., will they still be the “do no evil” company? Hard to say.

Which is why something like Google Web Accelerator is a little, well, unnerving. Serving as a proxy for everyone’s web activity in order to figure out what people are clicking is certainly a brilliant (and unexpected) move on their part, and in the short term I’ll enjoy seeing what they do with this information. I expect them to do much more with this data than simply use it to prioritize their search results. After all, this is attention data that they’re getting, and that’s incredibly valuable to an awful lot of people, especially advertisers and marketers.

Part of me wants to say, “Go, Google, go!” After all, they’re making the Internet OS happen, and they’re doing a hell of a job on it. But I get nervous whenever one entity gets access to so much private data, especially when I consider that no matter how trustworthy they are, they still have to submit to government requests for information access.

So, do you trust Google enough to feel comfortable about this? And how will you feel in fifty years?

Tablet PC, MD

Published on by Nick Bradbury18 Comments

I just returned from an appointment with a doctor whose office had upgraded to Tablet PCs since my last visit, and it was pretty cool to see non-techies benefit from these gadgets. The office had several docking stations which held the tablets, and my doctor undocked one as he walked in to see me. Geek that I am, we talked more about his office tech than we did about my reason for visiting (a simple clogged ear, btw), and he obviously loved his tablet. During the visit he took notes on the tablet, and he even used the stylus to draw a picture of my inner ear to show me what the problem was. When he was done, he handed his tablet to a nurse, who jotted a few notes down before re-docking it. This was a real-world display of tech “in the wild,” helping someone do their job.

I also own a Tablet PC, and it comes with me to every conference I attend. I’m often surprised by how few tablets I see in the crowd, since I love mine and everyone I’ve met who owns one feels the same way. Keyboard-centric apps like word processors aren’t that great on a tablet, but something like FeedDemon is pretty slick.

BTW, does anyone else run FeedDemon on a tablet? If so, feel free to post a comment here if there’s anything I can do to make FeedDemon even better for tablet use.

Reluctantly siding with Grokster

Published on by Nick Bradbury11 Comments

In his post about the MGM v. Grokster case, Christopher Baus asks “Where’s Nick Bradbury?” It’s a fair question given my stance on software piracy, but as I’ve written before, I believe it’s a mistake to hold developers of P2P products liable for the copyright infringement of their users.

As you can imagine, that’s not an easy position for me to take since 100% of my income comes from software sales. My work is pirated left and right on file-sharing networks, so I’d probably turn a blind eye if I thought this case would affect only the current swarm of spyware-infested P2P apps that were so obviously designed for “sharing” copyrighted material. But that’s the problem. This case doesn’t just affect these piracy tools. It could affect technologies like BitTorrent which are widely used for piracy, yet have legitimate uses as well.

And I have to be concerned about how this case could impact small developers such as myself by burdening us with legal concerns. Mark Cuban hit upon this in his blog recently:

“If Grokster loses, technological innovation might not die, but it will have such a significant price tag associated with it, it will be the domain of the big corporations only.”

Look at it this way: if people use FeedDemon to subscribe to warez feeds and download copyrighted material, should my company be held liable? The idea seems ridiculous given that I obviously didn’t design FeedDemon for this purpose, but this possibility won’t seem as far-fetched if MGM wins this case.

As an aside, I look at the current crop of file-sharing software and see an opportunity for someone. As the success of iTunes has shown, there are millions of customers who are willing to dump file-sharing tools in favor of a more legitimate solution. I’d love to see a tool which enabled purchasing software as easily as you can purchase music on iTunes (look at RealArcade for a specialized example of this). These days I buy far more music than I did before I switched to iTunes, and the primary reason for this is that it’s so easy. If instead of simply clicking “Buy Now” to purchase music I had to type in my contact information, credit card details, etc., with every purchase, I’d buy a fraction of the music I currently do. Why not sell software the same way?