[About a year ago] I was in a twitterscussion with @greywolf about twitterblacklist.com [now closed] reminded me of the oft-rehashed discussions about Real-Time Blackhole lists for email. People are making the same arguments almost verbatim about emerging anti-Twitter-spam tools now. I think, though, that the frothing indignation about the problem these tools are causing a relatively few legitimate users likely stems from a widely-shared ignorance of the emerging spam storm that’s coming on Twitter.

Many Twitter users think it is mostly immune to serious spam. They’ll frequently say things like greywolf said: “twitter has the easiest self regulating mechanism you think someone is spam stop following”.

But it’s not nearly that simple, nor is Twitter safe.

One reason is that keyword-tracking (“track oranges” and you’ll see tweets that include the word ‘oranges’ in them, even from users you don’t follow), hashtags, and tag channels (these last two closely linked), three very useful tools for Twitter-savvy users, are extremely susceptible to spam abuse.

The spam slime include keywords and hashtags to get their spam links (usually with a deceptive description) to show up in the twitstream of all the users following those terms. Since those users are tracking words, not the spammer, the fact that they aren’t following the spammer’s id is irrelevant; the spam still gets delivered.

Since Twitter has essentially no tools (more on this in a moment) to combat this, the only way to protect yourself is to not use keyword-tracking at all, which sort of throws the baby out with the bathwater. Thus, this spam is parasitic on its host (keyword tracking), and very difficult to extract without killing the host.

At least one spammer uses the term ‘Destin’ and sends out multiple links daily under automated usernames (vick33728d or the like) purporting to offer a headline about beach news and a headline to a local beach newspaper. Each of these links forwarded (last I checked) to some “learn at home” scam site. Pretty normal stuff. But they’re obviously just testing the waters: there were several a day for a week or so, then it went quiet again. As much as I respect the Twitter team’s work, I don’t think it’s because they found a way to keep spammers from signing up.

You see this same pattern from email spammers. They try out new modes of eluding spam filters in small numbers at first, and once they find something effective, then cometh the deluge.

The insidious spammer has another attack vector. Since twitter accounts are free and easy to create, the spammer can create as many as he likes. Then with each account he can follow 20,000, or 40,000, or however many user ids he can identify, using an automated tool. The cost to the spammer of doing this approaches zero.

Twitter made this harder by placing limits on the rate at which you can follow people, and placing some flags on the ratio of followed to followers. Still, this only means the spammer has to create more Twitter accounts, not that the practice will change. And just as spammers using temporary email accounts for sending, it matters not at all if the account is blocked or deleted within hours. There are no practical limits on the creation of these. They’re an inexhaustable supply.

But how does it work for the spammer? Well, when one user follows another, the second user receives an email notice that someone has followed them. That provides two possible benefit paths for the spammer, and 2 costs for the victim.

The first benefit path for the spammer is that the victim will just follow anyone who follows them, “until they have some reason not to”. Many people, especially new Twitter users, are so glad to have a follower that they’ll just click the link and follow them back. (Note that phishing attacks are coming, too, though I haven’t yet seen any here). Once the victim has followed the spammer, the spammer gets at least one free shot where their spam tweets will be seen by the victim before being un-followed. More likely, they’ll get several before the user manages to find the time to block them (or figures out how, because Twitter doesn’t make it real obvious for n00bs how this is done).

The second benefit path for the spammer is that the victim, seeing the “follow” notice, will at the very least visit the spammer’s Twitter page, and with any luck, click on the spammer’s web link. Voila! A visit to a web trap, there to do whatever it is spammers always do when they can lure a visitor onto one of their landing pages.

In each individual case, the victim will un-follow the spammer, limiting the amount of spam that can be inflicted. But in the aggregate – among all Twitter users – this is not a negligible effect. The fact that it might not cost me very much doesn’t mean that the total cost of it isn’t large. It’s essentially without bound, because the cost to do it is roughly zero.

The problem that concerns me more is that each follow by a spammer creates a small, but non-zero, burden of action on the recipient.

If a spammer creates an account and follows 20,000 users, each of those 20,000 users will receive an email message, and will have to stop for a moment and make a decision: visit the link, ignore the follow, follow blindly, etc. Even if they just delete the email, they have to take action.

This isn’t a big deal if one or two spammers do it; but just like with email spam, it doesn’t scale. People used to make the same argument about email spam: “Oh, spam’s not a big deal, quit fussing about it. If you get a message and you don’t want it, just hit the delete button.”

But most people have learned, too late and to their chagrin, that this only works when the spammer cloud is nascent. When an infinite number of people can at zero cost send me an infinite number of such messages, I don’t have time to hit the delete button that many times.

The cognitive burden placed on the aggregate group of users or victims grows larger and larger, which is the inherent threat of the spam problem. If spam growth were contained where it could grow no faster than linearly with the number of spammers, it would not be such an issue.

The reason spam is such a terrible problem is that the power of automation lies almost entirely on the side of the offenders, not the victims. Gmail and other email spam systems have helped to reverse that with hybrid systems that include content filtering, which is the most accurate way.

But for instant messaging-based systems like Twitter, there is no point in the system at which it is cost-effective or time-effective to inject content filtering prior to the user seeing it.

Thus the architecture of Twitter itself (and any similar system), lends itself to abuse by making it difficult to produce automated tools that could tip the balance of power back in favor of the victims.

This is exacerbated by the fact that many Twitter users don’t yet see this problem emerging. This may be because most people have no in-depth knowledge of spam fighting, and don’t recognize the parameters and characteristics of the problem. It’s somewhat analogous to a beginning programmer who doesn’t know anything about big-O notation complaining that other people keep writing confusing code, and why don’t they just bubble-sort everything.

When people lack the tools or the knowledge or the experience to estimate the danger of the emerging spam threat on Twitter, they will react badly — sometimes overlaying an inappropriate ideological model on the problem — to the emergence of the first crude tools and attempts to deal with the problem by those who do recognize it.

Not to become too political, but it’s also analogous to the way people who don’t believe “terrorism” is a legitimate threat react to governmental measures intended catch terrorists. To be fair, if you don’t believe terrorists are really after you, then certainly measures that inconvenience or threaten your ideals are half-assed at best, and openly dangerous at worst. So your perception of the problem affects your perceptions of potential solutions.

All that being said, just as with real-time black hole lists and other anti-spam mechanisms (like the odious “fill-out-this-form-I’m-blocking-unknown-email-addresses”), there are good and bad solutions. Good solutions, like greylisting, do some good without imposing an undue burden on legitimate users. They are effective while limiting collateral damage. Other “solutions” more or less indiscriminately destroy everything in sight that matches some limited set of criteria.

Real time black hole lists that lack a timely and usable mechanism to get an address removed are part of the spam problem and for the same reason: the ability to automate damage-dealing outstrips the ability of humans to manually undo it.

If http://twitterblacklist.com does not provide a mechanism either to periodically refresh its listing (if it’s done automatically), or if its only criteria is one that does not correspond strongly to spamming (solely a follower/following ratio), then it is itself part of the problem and I think I would share part of greywolf’s frustration. Likewise if there is no easy way for a user to notify them and say, “I’m a real human, check my content, remove me from this list,” then it’s a bad attempt at a good service.

Unfortunately, bad tools don’t usually help, and the process of figuring out which are bad and good can be long and painful. On the spam front, Twitter’s got a lot of nasty work ahead.

I drove up Thursday morning and got to @vinbarnes‘ house around 10. From there it was a whirlwind of new info for me til around 5 (with a lunch break for excellent burritos).

I think we were working on some kind of Doomsday web app with which they will soon take over the world. While I don’t get to be part of the New Ruling Order, I do get a pretty low MindlessPeon number thanks for my pre-alpha invite. So that should at least give me some additional social standing among the other Mindless Peons. So that rocks.

And I got to meet Abby, who appears to me the real heart and soul of the OG operation.

Seriously, there was so much to learn it was amazing. The glimmer has begun glimming in my head about how this BDD stuff works. And I’m very taken with RSpec, whereas before I had no clue what the big deal was, and I couldn’t even figure out where the spec files went.

The most important things were unexpected little things, though. I paired with Yossef in the morning, and Rick after lunch. (When I say “paired”, what I mean is really “huffed along trying to keep up as best I could while they tried to go slow on my account”.)

And I learned so much stuff.

I have made the mistake of seeing competing tools and strategies for testing or development as more or less complete solutions. And if I looked at one, and couldn’t see how it made some edge case easier, that made me think I was missing something. But as Yossef pointed out, there are things about RSpec, or BDD, that can be frustrating or limiting once in a while. That doesn’t make them bad, it just means they’re not perfect. But neither are any of the alternatives. The key is finding methods — and tools — that offer the right mix for you, and your current projects, at your current stage of development.

When prominent people in a community advocate this or that methodology, it’s easy to assume their personal practices sprang from their heads like Athena from Zeus, full-grown and already armed. While it never worked like that with me, I thought perhaps it was so for some people. But the craft of programming is an ongoing thing: Yossef mentioned more than once how he used to do this or that, but that “right now” he did it this way. It seemed clear to me that none of these guys had settled on the One True Way, but had found “the Best Way We Know Right Now”. A small thing, perhaps, but still helpful in reminding me there are no permanent “always do it this way” solutions to everything.

There was much more, though. A couple of times during the day, somebody would ask, “What’s the incantation to make X do Y?” The first time it happened, I thought, “Why not just Google it?” But for several things, just asking was faster than Google would have found it. But here’s the much more important thing: by not stopping to go Google it, nobody lost context — not the asker, not the answerer, not the hearer. I hadn’t expected that, but it’s true: it was a better way to find it out without losing context.

This whole “not losing context” thing leads me to the single most amazing part of the experience: I didn’t want to go check my email all the time. I can’t tell you how profound a difference this is for me, personally. I have the attention span of a hyperactive fruit fly. On crack. Normally it’s pretty much impossible for me to sit in front of a single project, working on one thing, for more than a few minutes at a time. But yesterday, it wasn’t even a problem. It’s not that I felt embarrassed, so I just resisted the urge. No, it’s that it was easy to keep focused, because we were doing it together. I didn’t want to miss anything, and I was enjoying it, so why would I want to do something else?

There was so much more: Yossef does an enormous amount without having very much code on-screen at any given time; Rick seems to group his stories differently than Yossef; a good team leapfrogs through the process by borrowing code almost in real-time, giving them a great multiplier on their efforts; after using emacs for almost 20 years, I learned new emacs tricks just by watching; the flaming bird of failure; the 80s-rock < => coding velocity equation; hack and ship; tool-building for speed. It just goes on an on.

While I hope this doesn’t come across as flattery, I’m willing to take the chance. Yossef, Kevin, and Rick were unfailingly gracious and patient and friendly hosts. I’m telling you, these guys are not only extremely smart, they’re really nice guys. It was great just getting a chance to hang out and get to know them.

And man, do they know their stuff. It’s a testament to how good they are at what they do that even with my vigorous and frequent application of the Dumb Question Stick, I was unable to prevent them from getting work done. I did all I could, but they still made it happen.

I’ll stop for now; the #nashdl meetup was great, too, and I met some “old” Twitter friends (hi, @levicole!) and made some new ones.

p.s. – I was kidding about the Doomsday app. I think. Though they did open Pandora’s box and just leave the lid off most of the day.

I’d like to do some pair programming. The problem is, you can’t exactly do that by yourself. At least, not if you’re reasonably healthy of mind, as I understand it.

I’m looking for someone willing to let me come to your place and “pair up” with you for at least a day. I can’t promise how useful I’ll be, but I’m a reasonably pleasant guy, I bathe every month whether I need it or not, and I’ll buy you lunch.

My only requirements are:

1. Gotta be within an hour or so of Huntsville, Alabama. I need to be able to drive there and back on the same day. That basically means anywhere from Nashville, TN to Birmingham, AL, and from Florence, AL to maybe Scottsboro, AL.
2. Gotta be Ruby. Rails is even better, but I’d go hang out with a pure Ruby hacker. This isn’t because other languages and contexts sux0r. It’s just that Ruby (and Rails) is what I’m doing right now, and where I’m hoping to ramp up my level of mastery quickly.
3. You have to have done Pair Programming before, and can show me at least your way that works best. How do we set up our work space? Do we use two computers, linked up? One? Where do we sit? I don’t want to spend the day figuring it out with another Pair noob.

That’s it. I have a few preferences, but they’re not essential: I’d like to work with someone who does BDD/TDD so I can see it in action. I’d strongly prefer if whatever project we worked on was git-based (even better if it’s on github) for the same reason: I’d like to see how real work gets done in this mode. But honestly, any experienced Pair Programmer doing Ruby that will have me will work fine.

I don’t want money or credit or co-copyright or anything. I don’t care what the project you’re working on is. Anything is fine. I just want to learn, and hopefully contribute a little. If it works out, I’d like to do it some more, though no one should feel the slightest compunction against telling me, “Get lost, you bum!” after the first day.

I was inspired by Corey Haines’ Pair Programming Tour 2008. While I can’t travel around the country pairing up with awesome programmers, I’m free to travel around a little bit, and I know there are some good Ruby+Rails folks not too far away.

I’ve been programming more or less steadily for almost 30 years. I’ve been working with Rails for over 3 years, but only for private projects (one large one for one of my companies). In my career I’ve worked in a lot of different platforms, quite a few languages, and at various levels of OS, from a tiny bit of device drivers all the way out to user interfaces. I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things.

But the discipline of writing software moves very fast, and I’ve not been as deeply involved in programming as I’d like in the past few years, and frankly, there’s a lot of cool stuff I feel like I’ve missed. And one of those is the emergence of pair programming, and the BDD/TDD paradigm.

So…anyone willing to take me in and show me the ropes? Email me at rew@erebor.com, find me on Twitter, or call or text me at 256-777-7650.

Back already? OK, good.

The guide is very thorough, and I love the idea. It’s just so refreshing to think of “let’s create an entire Ubuntu machine just to temporarily mount a drive long enough to rsync to it, then we’ll get rid of it.” And what’s more, you can automate the whole process via a shell script. It’s a great example of how things change with easily-accessible virtualization.

So I like the FreeWisdom piece, but here are a couple of changes there were helpful for me.

First, when I ran the script from anywhere other than the directory where the id_rsa-gsg-keypair live (~/ec2/ or wherever you have it), ssh couldn’t find it. And if I specified the path as -i ~/ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair, then the ssh command passed to rsync failed (I presume because the shell environment under which rsync runs it doesn’t have ‘~/’ setup; I once knew off-hand which part of the shell startup did this, but I’ve flushed it to disk somewhere). You could pass the full path name of your id_rsa-gsg-keypair, but I prefer to just cd there to start with. Keep in mind this means that the output of the rsync command, redirected to ‘out.txt’ in the script, will actually go in this same directory. If that’s not what you want, redirect the output of rsync with a more suitable filename.

The second thing I did was a little more complicated. I have StrictHostKeyChecking turned on, which means that every time I run this against a new instance, ssh asks whether to accept the remote hosts keys as valid. This means I can’t schedule this script to run unattended.

ssh allows some configuration options to be set on the command line. So I’ve added two ssh options to get around this problem.

The first option only has to be added on the first call to ssh. By passing -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” to the first ssh call, I tell it to automatically accept the remote host key, adding it to the known_hosts file without asking.

This gets rid of the prompting problem, but introduces another: each time this script is run, it’s going to drop another IP/key pair into our known_hosts file, and eventually that will have to be cleaned up. Besides, we only want to accept the key during the time that it’s our instance.

So I add this second option to every ssh call in the script. First, get a reasonably likely unique temporary name (yes, I know there are more rigorous ways to do this; feel free to expand as you have time and interest):

KNOWN_HOSTS=”/tmp/known_hosts.$$”

Then tell ssh to use this temporary file to store the key file from the temporary instance by using the -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” option.

So the initial ssh call in the FreeWisdom script (line 16 or thereabouts in the original) becomes:

ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” root@$EC2_HOST “mkdir /mnt/samba && mount /dev/sdh /mnt/samba”

Once we’ve connected to the instance once with StrictHostKeyChecking turned off, its key will be in our temporary known_hosts file. Thus, we don’t need the -o “StrictHostKeyChecking no” option in any future ssh commands.

The rsync command then becomes:

rsync -e “ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o ‘UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS’” -avz /Users/rew/Documents root@$EC2_HOST:/mnt/samba/ > out.txt

And the ssh command to umount the volume:

ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair -o “UserKnownHostsFile $KNOWN_HOSTS” root@$EC2_HOST “umount /mnt/samba”

Remove the temporary known_hosts file at the end:

rm $KNOWN_HOSTS

and it’s all cleaned up.

Give it a try, and let me know of any clever extensions you make.

I took him up on the issue, and said I didn’t believe their reporting (as opposed to their opinion shows) is any more biased than the other networks, but since it leans the other way than the other networks, by comparison they seem more biased than they are.

Put another way, if you’re standing at a 15-degree angle to the left of vertical, and you think you’re standing up straight, then people who aren’t leaning at all will seem to you to be leaning to the right.

If you encounter someone who’s leaning 15 degrees to the right of vertical, then to your perspective they’re practically falling over. But it’s not the magnitude of their bias that you’re seeing; it’s the magnitude of the difference between yours and theirs.

So it is (I posit) between Fox and pretty much the entirety of the other other televised news outlets. (MSNBC is an outlier which actually HAS fallen over after leaning too far left, and it can’t get up and wouldn’t want to if it could, so let’s just quietly move on and let it lie there peacefully.)

Now, “Fred” is a smart guy, and a compelling writer. He’s also quite liberal in his politics (from all the indications I’ve ever seen from him). He may, in fact, be considerably more liberal than he realizes, simply because of his peer group.

I’m a techie, and I’ve been roaming around the Interwebs since before Al Gore invented them, and I’ve noticed something over the 20 years or so I’ve been soaking up the culture: people in the major tech centers (the sort of places Paul Graham says you can’t just create) are overwhelmingly, breathtakingly liberal as a group. That doesn’t mean you won’t find there individuals of tremendously varying political positions. But the median tech-head from Silicon Valley, SF, Portland, Redmond, MIT, Caltech, or Stanford is so far to the left of the country-wide median, they may not even know anyone as far right as what passes for “the middle” in modern American politics.

That’s a long way around to saying this: I know people whom I consider friends in the tech world who will (I think) be both shocked and a little ashamed for me to know I voted for George W. Bush not once, but twice, and would again over either of the two clowns currently running. They’d be shocked because I had not previously given them indications of being either brain-damaged or an evil minion of Dick Cheney’s Halliburton Cabal. And they’d be a little ashamed for me (and probably of me) because they’d know that all right-thinking people were appalled at my lack of clue and lack of class. It would be like my vomiting in the punchbowl at a wedding and then passing out and falling on the wedding cake. It’s a faux pas, unheard-of in any polite circle they can imagine.

And it’s the “circle that they can imagine” part that’s oddly childlike. Their political spectrum has a left and a right, and they argue with great passion against those on the “other side”. It’s just that their entire spectrum, if translated to the color spectrum, would fit between Angry, Pulsating All-War-Is-Wrong Violet and Indigo-tinted CO2-Covered Global-Warming-Death Blue. The very existence of an all-out Green is but a rumor, and no one — except the insane and those in tune with the Dark Arts — even speaks of Yellow. Red and Orange are simply inconceivable to them. If there were a Yellow, surely there could be nothing beyond it but utter madness.

I’m overdrawing it a tad. But the fact is, someone sitting comfortably in the middle of the spectrum would see them all as about as purple as they could be, with no difference worth commenting on among the lot of them.

In the same way, someone sitting deep in the Red area wouldn’t be able to see much past the “left-wing nutjob” sitting at Green, and would dismiss anything insufficiently red as a “bunch of hippies anyway” and not think more about it.

Now, in this maelstrom of provincial cluelessness, what would an ‘unbiased’ news network look like if we had one? What would they say? And if they said it, who would like it? Is the middle of the political spectrum even very populated? Is that even a fair question? Many people have pointed out that most of our politics don’t line up in a linear fashion at all. There are at least two dimensions in the political grid, as our Libertarian friends are fond of pointing out. I think there are many more than that.

This brings me back (at long last) to Fox. I don’t think that Fox is conservative, though they lean to the right compared to the other networks. However, compared to a legitimately conservative outfit like National Review, Fox is hardly conservative. (Keep in mind, I’m only talking about the “news”, not the various opinion-tainment shows on Fox).

What they are is populist, and wildly so. There are political issues where populists graze freely among the fields of conservative ideas (but without ever knowing whose land they’re on). On others, they wander happily among the poppies of liberalism (again, blissfully ignorant of the fact). But Fox, I think, doesn’t care, as long as their audience is engaged and growing.

The funny thing is that, for both Left and Right, typically populism is seen as a sort of “politics for stupid people”. It’s a different beast than Conservatism, which is “politics for evil, greedy people” and Liberalism, which is “politics for narcissists and commies” (depending on who you ask). Everybody hates everybody, and everybody thinks everybody else is evil, stupid, ignorant, or all three.

Fox, I think, noticed that nobody was serving the populist herd in the news game. The liberal wing had pretty much locked down control of major media, and the conservatives had gone a different route, with think tanks, foundations, magazines and so on. Fox jumped in and fed the masses the sort of news the masses like.

To conservatives (and I know whereof I speak), Fox is an occasionally welcome relief from the relentless agenda of liberally slanted major news networks. But it’s hardly conservative, and is sometimes maddeningly obtuse about issues that (conservatives think) shouldn’t even be debatable.

To liberals (and I have observed this as an almost unanimous reaction), Fox is a hideous conservative menace, an aberration that does not deserve to exist and is corrupting and destroying All That Is Good in the Universe (sort of Dick Cheney if he were a news network instead of a Sith Lord).

But it’s ironic that so many people, particularly people from my professional herd, genuinely believe that Fox is pretty much the house organ of the Republican Party, and can’t conceive of the notion that it could be anything else.

[I actually drafted this post about a week ago, when Mama Fu's was still open; I just found out this week that they've closed down. I don't think that this post would have made much difference for them by itself; it was likely too late. But still, I shouldn't have waited. I'm telling you, "too late" can sneak up on you in a hurry. If there's a place you like, don't wait around.]

The other day at Mama Fu’s, I talked to one of the owners for a few minutes while she folded napkins and I ate Honey Glazed Chicken.

She said things were rough, though they had picked up a little in the last few days. The Bridge Street opening has hurt them badly. She said it has always been brutal, but now it’s “doubly brutal.” I feel really bad for her, because I know what it’s like. I’ve been there, but I didn’t know what to say.

The truth is I hadn’t eaten at Mama Fu’s in a couple of months. I like the place; no, I love the place. I talk to people about how I like Mama Fu’s, and take people there. I can’t think of anywhere else in Huntsville that I enjoy as much for the price as Mama Fu’s. There are places I prefer to eat, but they all cost more. It’s convenient for me; I drive by it all the time. But for various reasons I just hadn’t made it there.

I wanted to tell her, “Hang in there, it will get better,” but I don’t know if it will or not. I wanted to say something to encourage her, but it occurred to me that it won’t help. What she needs, as the owner, is not encouragement; she needs customers.

Unless you’ve owned a retail establishment, you may not understand that the way to express appreciation for it is to go there and spend money as often as possible, and encourage your friends to do the same. Everything else – compliments, encouragement, smiles – is just a packet of sweetener for whatever the owner is having to drink.

My wife and I had a lovely bookstore and coffee shop a few years ago. It was a fantastic place – I still miss it to this day – but it was never profitable, not for a month, hardly ever for even a week. We stuck it out for 3 years before finally shutting it down.

When we closed the store, we had people come by in tears. They were so upset, but yet they were often people we hadn’t seen in weeks. We had people going on about how much they missed us, how much they’d loved us, who came in once a month and hardly spent anything. They couldn’t imagine why we would close: “It was such a lovely place, and it was always so busy!” Well, it wasn’t busy enough, and too many people just came there to mill around and talk, and didn’t buy anything. If half the people that said they loved it had supported it the way they say they loved it, we wouldn’t have had to close.

I don’t say this to whine, because by now I know it’s probably good that we did close. But I learned this then, and had forgotten it. Mama Fu’s has reminded me, and I’m sharing it with you: it won’t do you much good to be standing outside the shuttered front door saying, “I loved this place! Oh, my goodness! Why did they go out of business?” Usually, the store went out of business because I, and people like me, didn’t spend enough money there. We got bored, we got distracted, we didn’t think about it, and we didn’t patronize them enough.

It’s hard to be in business, and it’s especially hard to be in a food business. It’s a lot like the music business, but without the glamour and riches. it’s vicious and cut-throat, expensive and difficult, capricious and terrible, and almost everyone fails at it sooner or later.

So here is a warning to you: if there is a place that you like to eat and it’s not a big successful money-printing chain like McDonald’s (they’re like roaches, you can’t kill them) – if it’s an independent place that you like, go there as often as you can.

But what’s more important, urge other people to go there. Sell for them. Not in an annoying-salesman way, but by telling people, “I went there, it was great, you have to go try it.” And then ask them, “Have you gone? Have you had the mushu pork? Have you had the Philly cheese-steak? Did you try that chicken sandwich I told you about?” Grab them by the collar and say, “Oh, let’s go there for lunch!” Go spend money and encourage other people to go and spend money. That’s how you support places you like, and that’s how you keep them in business.

You will be surprised how much difference a single person shopping or eating at your place regularly can make to a small store.

Update (2008-11-28): Seth Godin has the same idea.

This is, after all, how it’s usually done in cellular-land. But Apple had gotten a lot of press for their “game-changing” deal with AT&T (and AT&T had gotten a lot of criticism). So did AT&T suddenly gain the upper hand? Did they outsmart El Jobso? Did Apple stumble here?

Hardly.

According to this Marketwatch piece, the iPhone 3G subsidies are expected to cost AT&T around $1 billion this year.

The new entry price point for the 3G iPhone – $199 – is killer, and is going to move a lot of the devices to customers who’d been unable or unwilling to part with $399 or higher before. And a lot of that difference is coming out of AT&T’s pockets. AT&T, for their part, has a plan here; cellular companies have this game worked out pretty well, having subsidized cell phones nearly since their introduction in order to lock-in long-term revenue.

But back to the original question: was Apple willing to give up their monthly cut of all those locked-in customers just to move more hardware? Did they give up on trying to carve out a recurring revenue stream from their ground-breaking phone?

No, they just moved on to the next phase of their plan.

The key is the App Store. Apple has created a new market for software applications – the iPhone – and has made itself the single retail outlet for selling software into that environment. There are some exceptions – you can deploy apps within your own organization, or to a hundred or so iPhones ‘ad hoc’ – but for pretty much everyone else, if you develop an iPhone app, you’re going to sell it through Apple’s App Store or not at all. And there are going to be a lot of iPhone apps sold.

Steve Jobs spent twice as long during his keynote talking about the App Store, and applications available for the iPhone, as about the new iPhone itself. Including the enterprise elements and the SDK, it was almost 4 times as long. Clearly, this is a big deal to Apple.

Having unleashed the iPhone as a target platform for 3rd-party developers, and then set themselves up to take a cut of every application sold for it, Apple wants as many iPhones in the field as possible. So they’re letting AT&T keep all the monthly revenue in exchange for subsidizing the rollout of the new iPhones to millions of new subscribers (I predict they easily beat their 10-million-iPhone target for 2008), all of whom will be hungry for new apps for their new toys.

And Apple stands to profit from every single one.

“Skate to where the puck is going to be,” indeed.

Update:Reuters reports that “some estimates” put the impact of the lost monthly revenue from AT&T at 3c/share.

But Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster projects hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the Apple Store, which would dwarf the lost revenue from AT&T, even by his “conservative” estimates.

I saw this on a mailing list recently (paraphrased to protect the worried):

I like gmail too, but lately they’re starting to scare me lately. The amount of information they collect and how they use it is startling.

I e-mailed a friend talking about some symptoms of a medical condition, and Gmail served up a sponsored ad offering a diagnosis and selling a solution for the condition.

So this puzzles me a little.

First, GMail has done this since day 1. And people have been worried about this since before it launched.

But why is this so troubling to people? This recent email was just one example; I read lots of people who seem bothered by this. It’s often occasioned by an ad that seemed to “know” about a recent email conversation the user had.

I don’t know what nefarious things Google may be doing with my Gmail behind my back; I can’t say that they’re not doing something wrong.

But all they’re doing with the ads is keyword-matching, just like they do with Adsense on a web page.

Companies “bid” on words and phrases, and when those show up in a context where Google serves ads, by some magic algorithm (Google for “how does adsense select ads”) Google serves up matching ads from its pool of bidders.

If an ad appears on your Gmail page, it’s not because Google is matching your *identity* and then notifying some other company that “Hey, Ryan was talking to Joe about spontaneously erupting super-vision-itis” so they can jump in and prepare an ad for you personally, cackling maniacally. It’s because the magic matching key-phrase is somewhere in that web page, and that ad was automatically chosen from the pool of available ones that matched *some* text in your current page.

Keep in mind that the page loaded by Gmail is huge; there’s a lot more text transferred to your browser than what you see on your screen at any given moment.

Gmail pre-fetches a lot of stuff to make the Javascript-based navigation smoother and faster. So just because you don’t see anything about that message you just sent on your screen doesn’t mean
that message is not in the window.

Now, for all I know, Google may be wiretapping our cell phones and selling the content to the North Koreans to kill puppies with. But highly relevant contextual ads on Gmail don’t seem to me very strong evidence of anything alarming.

Or maybe I’m just insufficiently paranoid.

[...]for the past few days I’ve really tried to write at least 15 minutes every day. Once I get started, I just crank it out. [...] In the past month I’ve thought about it and opened Marsedit over and over, looked over my drafts, and not wanted to write on any particular one, so I didn’t that day. But when I have to do 15 minutes, I find that I can pick any of my drafts, and when I force the words out, suddenly I do want to write on that topic. [Emphasis mine - rew]

The idea that simply committing beforehand to write for X minutes creates the desire to write more seems counterintuitive (to me, anyway). Yet there are certainly a lot of good writers who say that’s the secret (or the main part of it). Yet it seems so hard, if you’re not doing it right then to believe that it could be so simple. I guess it’s because, while simple, it’s not easy. It’s doubly pernicious because the whole reason I can’t seem to get started is that I don’t want to right now. The fact that if I’d get started, then I’d want to is sort of beside the point.

There are other things besides writing that work that way for me. For instance, some days I really, really don’t want to work out. Yet even on those days, the moment after I start, I no longer want to quit until I’ve done every single rep of every single exercise. It’s not some great expenditure of will power at that point; finishing every step is what I want to do. The critical moments all are in the lead-up to the one where I actually begin.

Right up to very first step on the stepper or first lift, my brain is all abuzz with excellent reasons this would be a good day to skip it.

Now there’s no reason at all why the first rep of the first exercise should change my state of mind. If it was a good day to skip before, it should be a good day to skip after the first step. I’m not jacked up on endorphins, I’m not tired or sweating yet, not pumped up or let down or anything. Yet the moment I’ve started, I no longer want to quit. To get finished, sure, but not to quit.

Now, it’s possible that’s deeply-ingrained training from way back in some day when I had coaches who beat that into my head. If so, I’m grateful (again) for having had people teach me that. But I think it may be something more fundamentally human and psychological. I don’t think I’m alone in it, and I don’t think it’s purely the outcome of someone yelling at me regularly not to quit many years ago. I dunno.

The thing that seems to change is whether it’s hard to do something. Keith said that once he gets started writing, the desire to keep writing follows on its own. I find the same thing with my workout. The fact that I don’t want to right now doesn’t mean that I won’t want to once I get started.

The trick seems to be training my rational mind enough to force my emotional mind to just have a little faith that once I start, I’ll be doing what I want to do if I’ll just dive in.

It feels like things move so fast that there’s simply not time to take a week, or a month, or a year, off. We worry that we’ll get left behind if we slack off for a bit, that technology will move on and we’ll never catch up.

Even if we’re trying to keep up it can feel like things are moving ahead faster than we can move ourselves. But it’s not true; there’s always room for good work and good observations.

Pick something and start talking about it. Say something stupid: it’s okay. You’ll find out more by getting involved in the conversation (even by being clueless) than by sitting on the sidelines wondering if you know enough to contribute anything.

Talk to people, learn stuff, get on board and move. You can always catch up, you can always contribute. You just can’t sit there on your butt, paralyzed by fear of irrelevance, and let the world move away from you and leave you behind. If you want to do the work, there’s always something new that you can become an expert in that no one else has done before and so no else has known before.

There’s always a new trend, there’s always a new revolution around the corner in technology or business. There’s never one last chance.

After the bubble burst in 2000, there were a lot of gloomy voices acting like that was the end. Technology was gonna be a commodity. The land grab was over, the dot com rush was finished, blah, blah, blah. There was a great malaise for a few years for a lot of people who didn’t know what to do.

Of course, some people just kept on working. Too young or too dumb or too focused on their work or plans or dreams to be put off, they were too busy creating interesting things to bother with joining the Malaise.

So they created the current revolution, and sure enough, a lot like before, the money and buzz have returned. This one will crash too, eventually, but there will be another one after that.

So don’t sweat it. It’s OK to miss out on things, especially if you’re doing other worthwhile things with your life. There will be another exciting train along shortly to hop aboard. In fact, one’s usually at the station just waiting for another clever passenger.