I gave the valedictory address at my high school graduation. Despite the tradition associated with that post, it was not assigned me because I was the head of my class, no. In my case the word was true to its etymology. I was the farewell sayer because I knew how. The head of my class wasn’t the public speaking type, but the English teachers at my high school suspected I was. So I did. I stepped up on stage, made some people laugh, made some people cry, bid farewell, and stepped down.
After graduation I had an odd compulsion to keep in touch with those friends I knew I wouldn’t be seeing around. An odd compulsion to take back my farewell and replace it with a “guess what I’ve been up to?” I wanted to stay connected somehow, to keep touching base when the base had disintegrated, so I started an SMS bulletin. 160 characters sent once a month: The Clarko Newsletter. The title alone ate up an eighth of my character budget. And somehow the number of recipients grew, rather than dwindling. People wanted to know why they weren’t on the list, even if I wasn’t reporting anything groundbreaking. So I kept going.
A few years later, with the blogging phenomenon gaining steam, I threw off the shackles of the SMS message and began this: decaffeinated dot org. Of course I didn’t call it a blog… ‘blog’ was an ugly word, a distasteful abbreviation used by the proles on hosted services. Mine was a weblog. It was my new connection. Styled text, hyperlinks, infinite length and infinite frequency at no added cost. How could you not love something that liberating?
The audience didn’t translate, of course. People are content to receive something stupid and sentimental on their phone once a month, but sitting down at a computer to catch the rambling daily updates of a former classmate is a bit much for normal humans. There was a farewell SMS, but from those few that made the jump the audience grew again. I don’t know how, but it did. And with strangers this time. I was getting email from strangers. Strangers who weren’t trying to sell me viagra. It was weird, but it worked for me. I was still touching base.
In the years that followed, the blog saw me through a dozen countries, three funerals, a university degree in Computer Science and Linguistics, and the news that I’ll soon be an uncle. It also outlasted two jobs, four houses, and two long-term relationships. It was the only constant, even if the updates were anything but. And despite a lousy track record for the finality of these ‘farewell’ things, that time has come again.
The high school and university base-touching has shuffled off to MySpace and Facebook, the photos to Flickr, the gripes and the discussions to a handful of forums and mailing lists, public and private. You might say I’m decentralizing. As for the daily updates, suffice to say I’ve regressed to the cramped reality of the SMS message. Plain text and short as hell, but not without its charm. So I’ll say farewell from here, and see you around.
Posted by Chris Clark on May 22, 2007 at 2:32 AM
It occurred to me today, recalling the Hymn project and its position as the “anti-DRM but not pro-piracy” FairPlay remover, that even though the iTunes store will soon dispense music sans DRM protection there’ll still be one anti-sharing measure built in. Your Apple ID.
There hasn’t been any official word from Apple that this is the case, far as I know, but my speculation hat says Duh! Why wouldn’t they keep embedding your credentials into every purchase? Nobody said ‘unprotected’ meant ‘anonymous,’ and it’s a pretty clever way of keeping people honest, but my concern is that people won’t be told up front or it’ll be buried in pages and pages of unread legalese.
If your Aunt Ethel downloads a song and sends it to her friend Mildred thinking there’s no harm done (it’s like loaning her a book, right?). What happens the next day, when Mildred’s son Howard is sharing it with the whole world on LimeWire and the RIAA’s death squad arrives on Ethel’s doorstep?
A passive protection scheme means infringers be found and punished later, not sooner (if at all), and anybody who’s ever trained a puppy will tell you that don’t work.
Posted by Chris Clark on April 12, 2007 at 4:02 PM
I know it’s passé to want more features out of Twitter because the added complexity would just ruin it, but this isn’t so much a feature wish list as a feature-adjustment wish list.
- Markdown
- Plaintext SMS, meet hypertext. Markdown offers the best of both worlds. Prettying up Twitter’s web/IM/RSS/JSON output with a tiny subset of Markdown’s span elements would make a world of difference. *Emphasis*, **strong emphasis**, and even [better looking links](http://example.com) would be worth the measly couple of characters spent using them. Images are obviously verboten, and block-level elements a waste of time in messages with a 140 character limit, but the inline elements fit the bill nicely. Heck, Twitter itself doesn’t even need to do this… Twitterrific & Co could already be doing this.
- Reply Targeting
- A recent Twitter addition has been the official embrace of the ‘reply’ message. That is, a message beginning with
@Username is thought to address a particular user, albeit publicly viewable where a ‘direct’ (private) message would break the flow of conversation. - This has been happening a long time. It predates the web! But Twitter’s adoption of the convention as an official feature was as simple as adding a link to announce that Message X was in reply to User Y’s latest message. Sometimes this screws up, and the mile-a-minute action-packed adventure that is Twitter means you end up ‘replying’ to a message that isn’t relevant. Your link is stale and out of context. Something needs fixing.
- A technologically-feasible solution would be to extend the
@Reply convention to allow status IDs as well as user IDs, so @#16950751 would reply specifically to that ‘tweet’, and could be made minutes, hours, days from now. The reply would never be stale. - Unfortunately it’s not a workable solution without further tweaking. The numbers are ugly, and in places where the in-reply-to links aren’t visible (SMS, IM, Twitterrific) the whole scheme would be incomprehensible. Translate the
@StatusID to an @Username in the message text, though, and the process is invisible. - It’s a power-nerd feature, true. But I don’t hesitate to say a lot of Twitter users are nerds already, and client apps like Twitterrific could easily make it accessible to Joe Blow. People who didn’t plan to exploit it would never have to work around it.
- But I’ve just damned the feature by suggesting it isn’t worth the effort of implementing, since so few would use it. Maybe something lower-impact…
- Permalinks in Context
- Addressing the same problem in a way that doesn’t impact user input at all, permalink pages (like the one I linked above) could contain more of the conversation leading up to the moment of postage. A time-slice of a user’s friends list rather than a lonely, out-of-context tweet permalink. Not even the entire friends list need be sampled, just the last half-dozen tweets from any @Replied usernames, and suddenly just-missed-it link staleness goes out the door.
- @Reply SMS Forwarding
- I’ve disabled almost all of Twitter’s mobile features on my account. Sure, I still post from my phone when I’m on the go, but I got sick of receiving 200 SMSes per day pretty quickly and set it to forward only Direct messages to my mobile.
- Direct messages are pretty rare, though. People tend only to use them for things that are actually private, in my experience, so the vast majority of inter-twitter communication is carried out with @Replies. It’d be nice if these were sent to my mobile, so I can participate in my own conversations when I’ve left my computer behind.
- They’re a funny beast, these @Replies, which is maybe why the majority of this feature-tweaking wish list has focused on them. Half direct message, half public update, they straddle the line uncomfortably. Right now they lean more to the public update side of the fence… I’d like to see them behave more like direct messages that happen to be world-readable.
Posted by Chris Clark on April 8, 2007 at 9:09 PM
I honestly did not ever expect that to happen. And to think I’d been badmouthing those music industry jerkholes all this time. It turns out they aren’t complete idiots.
Still, I’m kind of backward when it comes to buying music. I like vinyl and CDs; I’m a hoarder. I trialed eMusic for a month, downloading two perfectly good, DRM-free albums with all the legal consent the artist had to offer, and I still felt like I had to buy the CDs. Physical media, I’m stuck on you.
But the world is full of people more reasonable than I, and this is good news for all of them.
Posted by Chris Clark on April 2, 2007 at 9:41 PM