janequigley's shared items

Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 interview with Playboy:

The most terrifying fact of the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

I woke up this morning and my Twitter stream looked like a Facebook Wall on a teenager’s birthday. “Happy birthday, Twitter!” “Twitter, you’re the best, happy bday!” “Can’t believe you’re five Twitter!” These messages came in fast and furious from folks in the tech sphere, folks not in the tech sphere, celebrities, Twitter employees. On and on and on.

And that’s great. Twitter is awesome. Even if you’re unwilling to admit that it has changed the world, there’s no denying that it has drastically changed the tech landscape and the way information is created and consumed. And it continues to do so. So yes, happy birthday, Twitter.

And now it’s time to get back to work.

A couple self-congratulatory posts on Twitter’s main blog and the engineering blog today made it very clear that Twitter is now at the point architecturally where it’s full-steam ahead time.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone writes:

There are now more than 400 full time employees working at Twitter. In the last year alone we have made huge progress towards stability and performance. This work sets us up to continue innovating but it also allows us to build a profitable business on a strong foundation. We are in a position now which allows us to continue serving and delighting everyone who relies on Twitter to connect them to that which is meaningful for another five years and beyond.

Head of engineering Michael Abbott writes:

Last September, we began executing on this plan and undertook the most significant engineering challenge in the history of Twitter. We hope it will have a significant impact the service’s success for many years to come. During this time, the engineers and operations teams moved Twitter’s infrastructure to a new home while making changes to our infrastructure and our organization that will ensure that we can constantly stay abreast of our capacity needs; give users and developers greater reliability; and, allow for new product offerings.

Abbott goes on to detail how they executed their plan, including the need to move all of Twitter — 20 terabytes of tweets — two different times. He promises that they’re now in their “final nesting grounds”.

That’s great news, because it’s time now once again to focus on a couple core assets of the product that have long been neglected: search and the tweet archives.

It may be hard to believe now, but back in they day, Twitter had no search capabilities. Instead, a startup named Summize rose out of Betaworks and was quickly scooped up by Twitter in the summer of 2008 and turned into Twitter Search. As a 1.0 product, it was great.

But the problem is that Twitter Search hasn’t changed all that much since then. It’s still basically just a keyword search that lists items in reverse chronological order. Sure, they’ve added top retweeted items to the top of results. But as Twitter has grown, searching for anything beyond the most topical level is basically worthless.

In fact, FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook in 2009 and basically hasn’t been touched since, is still a much better Twitter search tool. At least it lets you search your own tweets and/or limit search to groups.

Twitter does have advanced search tools, but they’re buried on the stand-alone Twitter Search site that basically no one uses any more. And even those aren’t really any more powerful than they were a couple years ago.

Worse, results only go back five days. Let me repeat that: you can only search for tweets as far back as five days ago. That’s ridiculous.

Twitter’s stated reason for that is because they’re focusing on “real-time relevant” tweets. That reasoning makes some sense given Twitter’s nature, but it was also undoubtedly an engineering decision. Now that things seem good on that end, it’s time to expand.

We’ve been writing about the dream of Twitter as a serious search engine since 2009. But things have been rocky on that side of the product ever since. We’ve had teases that things were on the mend. But so far, not much to show for it. It’s time.

Another untapped treasure trove is tweet archives. Face it, a part of Twitter is about vanity. And that’s why it’s kind of insane that you can’t see what you’ve tweeted or what others have tweeted at you beyond a few days in the past. Just imagine if you had full access to your tweet archives.

Better: imagine if Twitter organized your tweet archives in a way that was useful. What if you could see what you talked about most often during a set period of time? Or if you could see your tweets in a calendar view as a ready-made diary of sorts? Sure, some third-party services do some of this, but Twitter, with full access to all of the data, could presumably do it better.

One of my favorite features of Foursquare is the History page. And the latest version of the service is finally taking advantage of it, telling you things such as the last time you checked-in to a particular venue. Imagine if Twitter could tell you the same types of things about your tweets?

Twitter has saved all of the tweets ever sent (again, some 20 terabytes worth), but the vast majority are just sitting there, dormant. There are a number of ways to make them useful again. If nothing else, for nostalgia purposes and pure vanity.

Whether or not Twitter will start focusing on either of those elements is anyone’s guess. Certainly, the drive to start generating revenue is well underway, and you’d think that search is a natural expansion area for that. So far, it has already been a key area with Promoted Trends and Tweets. But again, it could go deeper.

Tweet archives area a less obvious monetizable area. But search monetization might work there as well. Or I’d gladly pay something like $20 a year to be able to access my entire archive of tweets in an interesting way.

There are other things to focus on as well. One is geo. What on Earth is happening there? It entered in 2009 with much fanfare, now there’s talk that the team has been disbanded and assigned to other projects.

And what about annotations? Few Twitter products have generated as much buzz and hype, only to see nothing come of it. Last we heard, they were officially put on hold indefinitely. Is now the right time to bring that project back as well?

Again, happy birthday Twitter. It has been a great five years, and I’m really happy for all your success. It sounds like you’re now in a good place — time to finish up the cake and get back to work.

My book: Using Your iPad as a Business Productivity Tool – 52 Tiger:

Aimed at small business owners and independent professionals interested using the iPad as a business tool, Using Your iPad as a Business Productivity Tool describes how to incorporate the iPad into your workflow and your business successfully.

My friend Dave has a new book out and it looks like a great resource for anyone looking to use the iPad for business. I also find this part interesting:

The book will be available on the iPad iBookstore for two weeks of exclusivity starting on February 28th.

An iPad book exclusive on iBooks. Smart.

I was inspired to think about the problem of impersonation on the web, when I read Caterina Fake’s comment on Twitter, bemoaning the fact that somebody was able to impersonate her in a comment on GigaOm. Because they used an email associated with her by Gravatar, the comment gained an element of authenticity because her avatar picture appeared by it.

My initial reaction, like Caterina’s, was to assume there is something wrong in the Gravatar model. Why should somebody be able to masquerade as me simply by guessing the email address I associated with Gravatar? But Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, which owns Gravatar, explained concisely that the fundamental problem of impersonation cannot be prevented by their service. An impersonator could just as easily have associated a new email, “fakecaterina@example.com” with Gravatar, and uploaded a copy of her avatar.

A Hopeless Situation?

I am convinced by Matt’s claim that Gravatar is not in a position to prevent impersonation. However, it’s possible to imagine ways in which Gravatar could promote authenticity. Gravatar already allows me to create an account through which I claim email addresses and can control which avatars should appear for these addresses. In addition, it allows me to confirm that account’s association with certain services such as Blogger.com, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This, combined with the fact that use of Gravatar is already widespread on the web, makes it a great candidate for serving as an arbiter of trust in arbitrary contexts on the web.

Web sites that make use of Gravatar’s services are currently able to fetch an image associated with a particular email address, by manipulating (hashing) the user’s email address in such a way that the email address is no longer discernable, but Gravatar can easily look up the associated avatar image.

There are steps that Gravatar could take to make possible the “authentication” of specific Gravatar appearances on the web. It would be exhausting to elaborate on the variety of ways this might be done, and many of the options that spring to mind also bring to mind many pitfalls and annoyances, not to mention significant service demands on Gravatar. Maybe the authentication would require hosting sites to present authentication keys, or maybe users would just whitelist particular comment URLs. Let’s not get bogged down in details: the details are for companies like Gravatar to take on if they choose to meet the challenge.

In a world where Gravatar offered some form of per-use authentication, a site like GigaOm could show a trust icon next to commenters’ avatars, or maybe it would be integrated into the avatar as a form check-mark badge or something. Click on the trust icon and it might take you to a Gravatar page where a curious reader could gauge authenticity with Gravatar’s help:

The Gravatar being shown at <link to e.g. a comment url> was verified by Daniel Jalkut, a registered Gravatar user. Daniel is known to be associated with Twitter ID “danielpunkass”, and controls the web site domain http://www.red-sweater.com. For more information, view his profile here.

The current Gravatar user profiles already lean strongly towards identity confirmation. Some clever techniques for authenticating comments would not eliminate impersonation, but would allow identity-concerned users such as Caterina a means of participating in web conversations while proactively confirming their own identities.

 

Michael Wolfe, on Quora:

Well, let’s take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

• There would be a folder.
• You’d put your stuff in it.
• It would sync.

They built that.

Yup.

30-minute film by Errol Morris, commissioned by IBM to celebrate the company’s centennial. Music by Philip Glass. I’ve only watched the first minute and I’m hooked. (Thanks to DF reader Scott Ivers.)

Podcast: Patrick Rhone on Minimalist GTD | Macgasm:

My friends at Macgasm were kind enough to ask me to be a guest on their podcast series. It was a lot of fun and gave me a chance to get a bit deeper on a variety of topics.

In this first one, we talk about the various GTD/Task apps, my thoughts on them, and what I use (Spoiler: It does not run on a Mac). Each one is pretty short and I would be honored (and feel you will be rewarded) if you take a few minutes to give it a listen. 

Ryan Singel:

Twitter introduced a new feature last month without telling anyone about it, and the rest of the tech world should take note and come up with its own version of it.

Twitter beta-tested a spine.

Indeed. Bravo.

——–
Note: NO, we didn’t have too much eggnog and accidentally re-publish a post from just before the holidays… We did, however, get a TON of reader requests from a lot of y’all who are using less and less Photoshop, and asked Scott if he could get similar results in Aperture or Lightroom. Short answer is YES. To that end, Scotty re-worked this image using Aperture and wanted to share his process with you here. Take it away Scott!
——-
Update: I just heard that this black & white work from Seattle 100 was just featured today in Communication Arts! I’m a huge fan of Comm Arts… very humbled and very stoked. Please check it out here. [thx Lou Maxon!]
—-
The above file on the left was processed entirely in Aperture. The above file on the right is the Photoshop version that we discussed before the holidays. One can certainly nitpick to find details that are different between the two, I know I did, but that would be missing the point.

Speaking of the point, let me get to it. These two images were processed with different RAW algorithms, retouched, adjusted, smooth, and sharpened with different tools with different abilities and nuances. People will rant and rave ad nauseum online about the differences between software offerings. Yet despite all of the obvious discrepancies between the Aperture and Photoshop methods, the net result is very much the same. The vision is important, the method is not. Join me after the jump to learn more.

Lest I come off ungrateful, let me make clear that I love the tools. Photoshop is a brilliant program that has literally set the bar. Aperture has more features packed in than ever though possible even a couple of years ago, and continues to encroach on ground that has historically been squarely in Adobe’s court while providing usability and integration that is absolutely groundbreaking. These two, and a number of other programs offer the photographer and retoucher a set of tools that provide almost limitless possibilities. These are fun times.

In the spirit of sharing and transparency, I’d like to run through the process that I went through in Aperture in order to create the final image, as long as y’all promise not to get too caught up in the details.

That’s it. Cool, eh? Let’s all go forth and play. Any software, any hardware. Just bring your creativity, it’s all you need.

BTW, if you haven’t seen the snazzy Seattle 100 site developed by our friends at TheSuperformula, there are about 900 more B&W images, plus a whole lot more. Check it out here and click around a little–it’s not to be missed. Happy New Year! -Scott